Yasujiro Ozu takes on the gangster movie, and it's just about the most Ozu gangster movie I can think of. A quite, melodramatic look at a man making a key choice without violence in the name of a woman, Walk Carefully is a wonderful little movie from Ozu's silent period that demonstrates that while he works as a contract director in the studio system, he can still make films his own. By the time the finale rolls around, there's no question that Ozu's talent was being allowed to flourish.
Kenji (Minoru Takada) is known as Ken the Knife by his fellow hoodlums, particularly Senko (Hisao Yoshitani), his main partner in crime. They work together to pickpocket or intimate anyone who gets between themselves and money while Kenji has something like a romance going with Chieko (Satoko Date), the female member of their gang. That all changes when Kenji sees Yasue (Hiroko Kawasaki) on the street one day, buying a ring on her company president's orders. Ono (Takeshi Sakamoto) is obviously trying to use his position of power to get Yasue to fall for him, a situation so bad that Yasue considers quitting, only choosing to stay at the protestations of her mother (Utako Suzuki).
Where the film doesn't work best is in the beginning. Mostly in the short nature of Kenji's infatuation of Yasue and their nascent romance (along with the coincidence that brings them together) and some details of how Chieko works in the Ono office seeming completely coincidentally. They're lingering questions and concerns that the film never really addresses. However, once the things are laid out, Ozu focuses on his characters, and things really end up meshing very well.
The story ends up being simply that Kenji decides to leave the life, and he struggles to make ends meet while refusing to meet up with Yasue, despite their warm relationship, until he has become a better man, as she insists he must be. Well, how does one become a better man when one has led a life as a thug?
There's a moment a little more than halfway through where I moved from appreciation to fully getting on the film's wavelength. It's the scene where Kenji decides to cast aside the life of a hoodlum, a decision witnessed by Senko. Kenji announces it, Senko responds by packing up, and they have this extended scene together that feels brimming with the emotion of two friends preparing to never see each other again. Ozu lets the moments linger, no one acting up, and it lands shockingly well. It implies these deep relationships, the movie having done a halfway decent job of building them up to that point, but that scene ramping it all up to a much higher degree.
The story goes on with separations, reconnections, new directions in life, and even one bout of violence. However, it's only ever going to one place: Kenji actually becoming a better man for Yasue and that question of what make him better. Just walking away from a life of criminality, is that enough, or is more required.
And I found it quite touching in the end. I bought the characters, even if the early introductions felt a bit abbreviated, and I bought the final movements of the plot, even if the middle parts relied on some connections that I honestly just didn't understand. I wave them away, point to the emotional core of the film, and say, "That's worth much more than some plot logic I don't get."
It's a small triumph of character overcoming plotting, and a lot of that has to do with Ozu's direction. He didn't need to make these scenes of characters changing last as long as they did. He could have made them brief and abbreviated to get the point across and move on. But Ozu was showing, even in this early stage of his career, that he prioritized getting a quiet moment rather than barreling through a plot. And I appreciate that a lot.
