Okinu to bantô

Ken Uehara is the head clerk at a tabi shop -- they make and sell those split-toe socks. He's a distant relative of the family who owns the shop, and they paid for him to go to business school. Now he is all about efficiency and doing things well, and pestering daughter of the house Kinuyo Tanaka, who bitterly resents it; this means, as anyone who has seen a romantic comedy knows, that they will fall in love. Besides their rocky relationship, we get to see their mercantile neighbors, who resent the low the tabi shop pays, because the contract was written a couple of hundred years earlier. Eventually, we are sure, matters will be settled, Uehara and Miss Tanaka will be wed, and all will end joyously.

Towards the end, I was mildly puzzled. First, there were the long takes showing people chatting with a teapot in the center. Then the final wedding sequence set off the bells i my head. This was an Ozu comedy, like BANSHUN, with upper middle class people dealing with family, and a scene or two in a little bar around the corner. True, a lot of the key events take place off screen, but a little poking showed that the writer of this movie was Tadao Ikeda, who wrote 16 of Ozu's movies from 1929 through 1947, plus a credit for Ozu's remake of FLOATING WEEDS; both have writing credit on a 1966 movie called, suggestively, DANSHUN. It's not as filled out as an Ozu movie would have been, but the skeleton is still there.

Not a great movie by ay means, it has some nice observation, some good understated comedy, and Uehara and Miss Tanaka. Definitely worth your time.