L'épouse de la nuit

Those of us who are both attracted to and repelled by auteur-ism are challenged by this very early work of Ozu. Japanese cinema was still silent in 1930, and here an Ozu in his mid-20s got his start making crime films clearly indebted to those of German expressionism as it manifested itself both in Germany and in the US, in the form of the silent American works of Murnau and Von Sternberg.

None of the cinematic trade-marks of Ozu's sound-films are present here, and this challenges some auteurist notions of Ozu as a mandarin-renegade who resisted all western influence. Indeed, this crime tale has a fair amount of camera movement, an action-driven plot (at least for the first half), and chiaroscuro lighting and compositions much more reminiscent of German expressionism than traditional Japanese paintings, the key influence on the mise-en-scene of the director's "mature work" (from an auteurist perspective).

About a third of the way in to this short feature, it gets really meta-. The walls of the apartment of the couple that is the story's focus is covered in Hollywood movie posters. Ozu, that "home-grown Japanese auteur" started off as just another early cinema nerd- advertising his "influences."

Turning to the narrative, you can view it as either wholly unrelated to, or as a forerunner for Ozu's famous family driven meditations. The characters are united in poverty and crime, as with so much noir, but this ultimately proves all of their humanity, rather than the negation of it, as '40s Hollywood would have it. Having said that, we should remember this was made at the end of the silent era. Griffithian sentimentality may also be an influence on this movie's narrative. This struck me as I had always interpreted those bits of Ozu's mature works viewed by most western audiences as "sad" to instead be an Asian negation of "tragedy" and the western fetishization of death. Perhaps, I acknowledge sadly, such scenes were a disguised adoption of that western fetish.

Whether one attributes it to Ozu's authorship, or to dependence on Hollywood faux-optimism, this is a powerfully humane, if sentimental, work.

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.

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.

...with this crime drama from Shochiku. A man (Tokihiko Okada) commits a daring armed robbery before escaping into the night. But this isn't your average brazen criminal, but rather a desperate father with a small, terribly ill daughter (Mitsuko Ichimura) and a despondent wife (Emiko Yagumo) at her wit's end. Will motivations even matter, though, when the police come knocking, in the form of detective Kagawa (Togo Yamamoto).

Like all of Ozu's films, the scale is intimate, and the focus is on domestic relationships. However, this adds a criminal element to the equation, and it makes for some interesting character dynamics. There's also more maturity in Ozu's technique, evident during some proto-noir street scenes, using a lot of shadow to create tension. The end result is satisfactory, if a bit too slight, and the continued use of the silent film format was quickly making Japanese cinema seem anachronistic.

"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.