Yasujiro Ozu: The Gangster Films Review

• 20th Mar 2013

The last three releases in BFI’s on-going re-releases of the films of Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu have included some of his earliest extant films. What is clear from these films is that the future master is still searching for his own style. There is little of the static camera or slow moving studies of familial problems that we see in such later films as Late Spring (1949) or Tokyo Story (1953) (both of which have been released by BFI); the previous two collections were ‘The Student Comedies’ and ‘Three Melodramas’. What is clear, however, is that the latest collection, ‘The Gangster Films’ is misnamed; a more appropriate name for this collection would be ‘The Crime Melodramas’. What is evident in all of these films, on both this collection and those released previously is that Ozu was still searching for his own style and that the influences of Hollywood and German Expressionist cinema are very apparent and in evidence and are very different to the more Japanese style of his later better known films. Tony Rayns also makes this clear in the extensive accompanying 32 page booklet included with the collection as he studies these links in Ozu’s oeuvre. In fact in all these films, and those in previous BFI collections, Hollywood and French films posters take a prominent place in private spaces and in this set and in particular the crimis and their molls are all dressed in very moderne fashionable western clothes while the good characters represent moral turpitude and respectability in more traditional garb. What is Ozu saying? Is he criticizing that world in the West that he seems so heavily influenced by? What is clear in his later works is that the conflict between East and West becomes one between the old and the young and he never has any clear defined answer to this. Influences of Josef von Sternberg are most definitely apparent in the Expressionist influenced camerawork and use of shadows with two of the films stories similar to a Warner Brothers type of story while That Night’s Wife has the look of a later RKO plot. The camera and editing also seems to move in a faster style than his more mannered later films.

The set is made up of three films made between 1929 – 1933 with one extract from the documentary Ozu: Emotion and Poetry in which Rayns puts the films in context with the director’s career and the only surviving 13 minutes from A Straightforward Boy (1929) about a young boy taken by kidnappers who makes their life hell. From the only remaining scenes from the film it is clear from young Tomio Aoki energetic performance that this was a fun and playful film by Ozu.

The main features on the disc start with Walk Cheerfully (1930) which is the lightest of the three main features about a trendy criminal and conman who sees and meets a conservative young man who lives with her mother and 12-year-old daughter. He begins dating the widower but she demands that they can only be together if he changes his career and goes straight. He takes on a window cleaning job to impress her and prove that he can go straight. This is the lightest and less serious film of the three and looks classic Hollywood with its fast, cheeky and light pace.

On the second disc the other two films are much darker and serious in tone. The first, short at only 62 minutes is perhaps one of Ozu’s most claustrophobic films, That Night’s Wife (the original title is Sono yo no tsuma although a more accurate title may have been along the lines of ‘My Wife on that Night’). Set entirely during one night (one of only two nocturnal films Ozu made in his career) the plot centres on a desperate young man who steals money from an office and is chased by the police through the night. He is picked up by a taxi (actually rather improbably an undercover policeman) that drops him off and follows him upstairs. There he sees that the man has committed a robbery to buy medicine for his very sick daughter (although he doesn’t seem to have bought any medicine). The policeman plans to make his arrest but is caught off guard by the man’s wife who holds the policeman at gunpoint. Through the course of the night the tough policeman takes pity on the family. The final film is arguably the best and the most accomplished film on the disc with the rather pulpy title of Dragnet Girl (1933). Still there is little evidence of Ozu’s later style but much evidence of the influence of Von Sternberg. The plot is also the most complex of the three about a mobster and failed boxer who learns to change his ways and his girlfriend who is a secretary by day and gangster’s moll by night. In all these films there is little in the way of Japanese realism with much of the Westernization of the mobsters, criminals and molls somewhat exaggerated with exaggerated fashions and style; in Dragnet Girl there is lots of talk of jazz (although all the films are silent) and even one scene with Nipper the dog and the HMV (RIP) logo taking a prominent place.

Taken as a whole it is interesting seeing all the Ozu films in context with the master’s entire oeuvre back to back with the other BFI collections although naturally the films themselves are of a varying degree. Also on the discs are a new score by Ed Hughes (with a supporting essay in the booklet) which can be a little intrusive in places. Although the films are far from Ozu’s best work they give an indication that there is no set style to Ozu’s early work. But I would say that the title of the collection is misleading. None of the characters are an Al Capone or Hollywood equivalents like Tom Powers, Little Caesar Rico or Scarface.

Chris Hick