A Mulher Daquela Noite

"That Night's Wife" (the English title) is actually a poor translation of the Japanese "Sono yo no tsuma". A better one might be "My Wife on That Night". Briefly, the film revolves around a desperate man who commits a crime in order to support his family, and the moral dilemma the policeman who tracks him down finds himself in. The film abounds with cultural inconsistencies like Japanese wearing their shoes in the house, etc. It seems Ozu was trying to do a Japanese film in the style of the German realist films he must have been seeing at the time. There is very little of what one associates with the later style of Ozu. Still, it is taut and entertaining.

A desperate man with a sick daughter decides to commit a robbery in order to help her. He begins to feel remorse though, which makes him question his decision.

Ozu made twenty-six movies in his first five years as a director, including this one. He made silent films after silent films began to go out of style, and he made crime films before he went on to do the things he is better known for.

Here we have a mixture of crime and love, and a bit of necessity. Is it wrong to steal bread if you or a loved one are starving? Some would say yes, some no. This story brings that question to the forefront, though it steps it up a notch when the father has to physically confront his victim.

While the characters themselves are stock figures (the good man pushed to criminal activity, the faithful wife, the dutiful but understanding cop, etc.), the execution of this one-room thriller is superb stuff. It has a noirish vibe that feels nothing like Ozu's more famous postwar work. While not a must-see, it is taut, entertaining, and enough of an anomaly in the career of one of cinema's masters to warrant a single viewing from cinephiles.

Ozu makes the best of what appears to be an uncharacteristic potboiler assignment involving a man (Tokihiko Okada) driven to crime to help his wife and ailing daughter, chased down by a cop (Fuyuki Yamamoto who looks like a Japanese Charles Bronson) who suddenly faces a moral dilemma. The characters are clearly played for genre type, but great performances make it special -- especially by Emiko Yagumo as the fiercely protective wife -- and Ozu achieves a feeling of moral resolve and atonement through personal sacrifice similar to what he did in WALK CHEERFULLY.

It's one of Ozu's gangster movies from the early 1930s... only it's really about a father whose daughter is so sick he commits a robbery to pay the bills, then gets easily tracked down at the child's bedside.

A brief survey of online discussion refers to this as one of Ozu's "early, non-typical silents." It's the same attitude I complained about in my review of DRAGNET GIRL as if John Ford got off the train from Maine in 1915 and announced "I'm ready to direct How Green Was My Valley. What do you mean this is Azusa?"

It's slow and contemplative and allows the audience to get inside the characters' heads and is a fine little movie. What it doesn't do is use the same, low perspective and simple shots that Ozu would cultivate after the Second World War.... almost certainly because it would not occur to him for fifteen or twenty years that they would work. It's too bad he didn't talk about it with the geniuses on the Internet. They know everything.