Everyone has to start somewhere, even a legendary director like Yasujiro Ozu. Days of Youth is apparently his earliest surviving film, and even if we're to include films that have been tragically lost to time, it's still a title that comes very early in his career. There isn't a huge amount here, to my eyes, that suggests what kind of filmmaker he'd become, with Days of Youth feeling a bit like a director-for-hire kind of job.
Still, as far as very old comedies go, I've seen worse, and I've seen better. The premise is pretty slim for a movie that ends up running for approximately 100 minutes, with two college students in love with the same woman, and constantly making fools of themselves in their attempts to woo her. She's not really a character at all here, and the film's first half starts dragging pretty quickly. Things picked up a little in the second half, when the characters went on an extended ski trip, and the visuals were better here... though that whole section of the film eventually became tedious, too.
And then it kind of ends without much else to say. It's a bit of an uneventful film to me where there's not much to say about it beyond commenting that it's interesting how Ozu directed it and then went on to make the kinds of films he did. Those who are interested in his early days or want to watch everything he did should obviously check it out, but it's otherwise hard to recommend. I wasn't offended or bored to tears, taking into account the film's age, but neither could I find a great deal to be impressed by.
