A Delinquente

DRAGNET GIRL is one of Yasujiro Ozu's early works, a criminal melodrama with a few proto-noir touches. Its story is pretty standard and features a love triangle between a criminal seeking to make good, a respectable young woman, and a moll with a heart of gold. However, those interested in how the gangster picture manifested outside of the United States during its original 1930s golden age will be very interested in this film, not to mention devotees of silent film and Ozu.

I've enjoyed few silent films as much as this wonderful gangster movie from none other than Yasujiro Ozu, best known for his brilliantly ponderous family dramas of the talkie era. The silent films of Ozu, whose sound films are considered so very "eastern" by western viewers, are eye-brow raisingly informed by Hollywood aesthetics. Indeed, some of his early crime films such as this one, perhaps invented important aspects of what would become known as Hollywood genre tropes. A tale of the intimate lives and feelings of seemingly hardened underworld denizens, Dragnet Girl discovers the world of Noir years before John Huston in Maltese Falcon or, for that matter, Marcel Carne in Le Jour se Leve, walked on that ground. And while Dragnet Girl precedes the films that were to be labeled Noir, it also in many ways transcends them. For Ozu has no use for the dreary fatalism that would characterize the American, German or French crime film. For these characters, these criminals, are not simplistically doomed. Their paths are shaped more by their feelings for each other than their violation of any moral code. This makes the narrative truly unpredictable and moving.

Kinuyo Tanaka works in an office, where she has caught the attention of the boss' son. She means to take him for a bundle, because after office hours, she's the moll of Joji Oka, a washed-up boxer and gangster. However, when Sumiko Mizukubo, a nice, old-fashioned shop girl, asks Joji to let her brother, Koji Mitsui out of their gang, the two lovers see a vision of a decent life. Is it beyond their reach?

This movie gives the impression that Ozu was trying to shoot a movie half in the style of Joseph von Sternberg and half in the stye of Frank Borzage -- what would happen if George Bancroft in THUNDERBOLT met a Janet Gaynor character? Visually, it's very Germanic, with lots of half-lit faces and many tracking shots, nothing at all like the style Ozu would adopt after the War. The set design is typical for Ozu in this period, with lots of American posters on the walls.

It has often been stated (which is a slovenly way to not have to cite sources) that Film Noir arose from filtering German expressionism through French Poetic Realism and American Pulp Mystery. Although it did not begin to take shape until the late 1930s, nor flower until the mid-1940s, there's an interesting early sideline in this movie, complete with a femme fatale who leads people to their doom -- who is a nice girl!

A gangster tries to find redemption with the inadvertent help of an innocent shop girl and his jealous girlfriend will do anything to keep him.

Who knew there was the Japanese jazz scene, with men hanging out, smoking cigarettes and dressing like hoodlums -- it all seems so American, much like Ozu's "Walk Cheerfully" made Japanese gangsters circa 1930 look American. Maybe the "American gangster" is not such a strictly American thing after all.

Of Ozu's silent crime films, this is the one that seems to be the most well known. At least, it is the only one that actually has a Wikipedia page (as of May 2015). This period needs more examination. There is more to world cinema in the 1930s than what most of us take for granted.

As this started I realised that it was a silent film and noted later that even though I have seen many of Ozu's films, never the silent ones of which there are at least twenty, but never even other Japanese silents. This is a wonderfully clear blu-ray from BFI and the photography splendid. I understand that Ozu loved the gangsters but I have to say that although in the gym is well shot but the boxers we never see them fighting and although all the men wear their fedoras and coats there is never any great action. We also have the girls, the gangster's moll and the good girl working in a shop, she wants her brother to leave the gang, she tries to get the gang boss to influence him and she falls in love with him. It is interesting but even though it is trying to be American, with all the posters and signage and the wisecracking and gun-toting it is really still very Japanese.