TCM this week: an Ozu silent

Coming up at midnight tonight is a chance to see Tokyo No Korasu (“Tokyo Chorus”), Ozu’s 1931 silent feature about a young rebel facing unemployment with three children to feed.

BFI’s synopsis: “Social comedy telling the story of a family man who is dismissed from his insurance company when he sides with a colleague in a dispute against the management. After an unsuccessful search for work and having been forced to pawn his wife’s kimonos he accepts an offer to work in a friend’s curry restaurant.”

In the past, movies like this were hard to see. This particular film wasn’t released in the US until 1982. But now it has a Criterion release, and you can also watch it (though not in as good a quality transfer as Criterion’s) on the Internet Archive.

It’s also showing later this week as part of the Harvard Film Archive program “Ozu 120: The Complete Ozu Yasujiro” which started on June 9 and runs through August 13.

An embarrassment of riches.

Ozu’s one of my favorite directors, though that’s hardly an outré opinion. His Tokyo Story (Tokyo monogatari) (1953) appeared in Sight & Sound’s list of the greatest films of all time in the first list after it was released and has climbed steadily in critical estimation since. In the 2022 version of the S&S lists, it was ranked #4 in both the overall list and the poll of directors. If you combine the various serious critical appraisal lists for the last 50 years, the only films that top it as contenders for “greatest film” are Citizen Kane, Vertigo, Rules of the Game (La Régle du Jeu), and 2001: A Space Odyssey.

I have yet to see an Ozu film that didn’t seem a completely achieved work to me. I adore his cheeky comedy, Ohayo (Good Morning)—it’s one of the films I use to turn younger kids on to watching subtitled foreign films. I tend to try not to see movies like this on a small screen for the first time, but I’ve never had a chance to see Tokyo No Korasu in a theatre before. But I still don’t have access to TCM, so I may just have to watch this on Criterion. But wow, I wish I could attend all the screenings at the Harvard Film Archive.

Two Ozu films are available to stream for free on Kanopy: Tokyo Story and Floating Weeds (1959). There’s also an episode on Ozu and Kurosawa as part of the “Understanding Japan: A Cultural History” course produced in conjunction with the Smithsonian.

There’s been a lot of good writing on Ozu, as you’d expect with a director with that kind of critical regard and such a large body of work:

• Ozu’s Tokyo Story – edited by David Desser, part of the Cambridge Film Handbook series
• The Cinema of Ozu Yasujiro: Histories of the Everyday – by Woojeong Joo
• Reorienting Ozu: A Master and His Influence – edited by Jinhee Choi
• Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer – by Paul Shrader
• Ozu: His Life and Films – by Donald Richie, older but the basis for much of the subsequent critical discussion and a very good read.

You can of course find plenty of Ozu on Amazon, particularly in Criterion Collection releases, including Tokyo Story and Good Morning (Ohayo). There’s also stuff to stream including Good Morning and Early Summer.

Some of the other things on TCM this week that are particularly appealing include

• Carefree (1938) – one of the best Fred Astaire / Ginger Rogers pics
• Ocean’s Eleven (1960) – the original, with Peter Lawford, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin
• Jules and Jim (1962) – Truffaut
• The Candidate (1972) – Robert Redford
• Shaft (1971)
• The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964)

Filed under: Movies, Classic Films, Film, Japan, Japanese movies, TCM

Great Films—Seven Samurai, Notorious, The Ruling Class—on Hulu

Some of my favorite movies are available online, in high quality, for free (with limited ads) on Hulu right now.  I suspect these movies will only be temporarily available, as part of ongoing efforts to lure people in to Hulu Plus, so take advantage of them while they last:

The Seven Samurai (1954). What needs to be said of this movie? One of the greatest films ever made. Directed by Akira Kurosawa and starring a young Toshiro Mifune and the charming studio stalwart Takashi Shimura in one of his finest performances (his best being in Kurosawa’s Ikiru). Kurosawa drew on tropes and traditions of American Westerns as well as samurai movies, and in turn The Seven Samurai influenced both of those genres—albeit the samurai movie to a much greater degree—directly shaping such films as The Magnificent Seven (a remake of the Western-influence samurai movie as a Western) and more recently Takashi Miike’s 13 Assassins, which features a peasant warrior who is the direct descendent, if not an outright copy, of Mifune’s character in Seven Samurai.

The Tale of Zatoichi (1962) is not in the same class as Seven Samurai, but the long-running series of samurai movies is still a treat. Shintaro Katsu stars as Zatoichi, a blind masseuse roaming the Japanese countryside, who conceals a deadly sword in his cane and terrific swordsmanship beneath his bumbling façade.  Most of the films in the series seem to have much the same plot: Zatoichi comes to a new town where there is some strife, often involving gangsters and gamblers, and his attraction to a beautiful woman or sense of justice draws him into the conflict; when it’s over he’s slain all the bad guys, most of them in one climatic battle, but has to leave town, driven out, back to his wanderings, by a sense of his own flawed nature and of the violence he feels follows in his wake. Or something like that. You can figure it out for yourself if you have the time: Hulu is showing 18 of them for free at the moment.

I grew up watching these on weekends in a local Japanese theatre. They’re brilliant. After you watch them, you can read about the series on Wikipedia or check it out on Amazon. Takashi Kitano did a mostly excellent remake/updating of Zatoichi a few years back, with himself in the title role — but it was a bit to serious and realistic, and lacked the hokey charm I find in the originals.

Stagecoach (1939)—the film that transformed Westerns, bringing both John Ford and John Wayne to prominence.  The first appearance of John Wayne in the film is one of the great entrances of American cinema.

Notorious (1946)—one of Ingrid Bergman’s most powerful performances and Cary Grant as you have never seen him before. Bergman is a party-going playgirl in South America recruited to act as a spy; Cary Grant is her spy-master.

Charade (1963)—a movie I love, really so extravagantly that I might argue for it as one of the greatest movies of all time, though I know that in truth it isn’t. But Cary Grant has never been more charming, I think, which is saying a lot, and Audrey Hepburn is luminous and… funny. Really funny. I don’t think her gift of comic timing has ever been showcased as well (except perhaps in How to Steal a Million). Hepburn plays a young Parisian wife who suddenly finds herself a widow, and Cary Grant pops into her life as…well, watch it and see.  Directed by Stanley Donen, who started out as a song-and-dance man with Gene Kelly as his partner. He made his directorial debut working with Kelly on Singin’ in the Rain and On the Town (perhaps the greatest integrated musical ever), on which he is credited as co-director, and then went on to make a number of very good films on his own, including Indiscreet with Grant and Ingrid Bergman; but those first musicals aside, this is clearly his masterpiece.

The Blob (1958). A classic monster movie that still scares.  An unintentionally smart mash-up of teen movie and 50s sci fi monster flick, with one of Steve McQueen’s first performances, and a bizarrely fun and goofy theme song by Burt Bacharach.

The Ruling Class (1972). A tour de force performance by Peter O’Toole, one of his finest, as the mentally unbalanced heir of a British noble.  DO NOT read any details about this film before watching it (even my earlier post on it), as there’s a surprise twist about 2/3rds of the way through, and it is worth being surprised by it.  This is a cult classic, which used to get rapturous receptions at the UC Theatre in Berkeley during fairly frequent screenings in the late 1970s through mid 1980s. A bitterly black comedy whose social commentary may not seem particularly startling or original now, but was fairly sharp back in the day.  Worth watching for O’Toole’s performance alone.

Quadrophenia (1979)—a great soundtrack by The Who, mods versus rockers, and Sting.

Most of these are from the wonderful Criterion Collection, which guarantees that the prints and their digital transfer will be of the highest quality, and that the versions of the films will be the most original (no half-baked cuts for the American market or anything like that).

If you have a Roku or anything similar, you can even sign up for a free one-week trial, call in sick and stay home to watch all of them for free, over a few gloriously indulgent days of movie magic, on your (hopefully big screen) TV. Otherwise you can watch them on your computer; you know, now that I think of if, the office I’m working in right now has excellent broadband, and no network restrictions…

Filed under: Movies, Classic Films, Film, Japan, Kurosawa

Mothra, Giant Monster Movies (daikaiju eiga), Zatoichi and Takashi Shimura

There’s a weird, sometimes silly, sometimes quite moving, beauty in 1961’s Mothra.

Glenn, over on A Pessimist Is Never Disappointed, calls attention to one of the more unexpected aspects of the Japanese “giant monster” movies, in a discussion of one of the best of them, Mothra—a film that doesn’t get nearly the attention it deserves, overshadowed as it is by its more famous brethren, the “Godzilla” movies.

It is surprising to realize how many of the Japanese “giant monster” movies are indeed “quite moving.” The original Godzilla (1954) perhaps less so, but in subsequent appearances, when Godzilla emerged as the “hero” of the films, there was often something moving, poignant even in his struggles and eventual departure. In the later movies, Godzilla is a lot like the lone gunfighter of a Western, like Clint Eastwood’s character in High Plains Drifter or Shane in that movie. He comes to town—admittedly stomping a lot of it flat in the process—fights the bad monster, and then has to leave when the final battle is over, having no place in the world he has just made safe once again.

Filed under: Movies, Classic Films, Japan, monster, samurai, science fiction