Chishu Ryu was Ozu’s lifelong friend and the most regular member of the stock company of actors he drew together. He is in Ozu’s earliest surviving film (his eighth) Wakaki hi (1929), played his first major role in Daigaku yoitoko (1936), and is in all the last 17 (and the star of many) of the director’s films. Just how consistent his contributions were in between is somewhat difficult to determine, as many of the films are lost or inaccessible. In the later works, Ryu’s appearances take on the character of a directorial trademark: if there is no star role for him, he turns up in a brief cameo, perhaps with no more than a line or two of dialogue. (Ryu’s consistent dependability was perhaps his defining quality as a professional: he was reportedly also on hand for all 45 of director Yoji Yamada’s inexplicably popular Tora-san films.)
In many of the later films the director/actor relationship becomes clearly symbiotic, in an extremely complex and fruitful way. There is no question… read more
Chishu Ryu was Ozu’s lifelong friend and the most regular member of the stock company of actors he drew together. He is in Ozu’s earliest surviving film (his eighth) Wakaki hi (1929), played his first major role in Daigaku yoitoko (1936), and is in all the last 17 (and the star of many) of the director’s films. Just how consistent his contributions were in between is somewhat difficult to determine, as many of the films are lost or inaccessible. In the later works, Ryu’s appearances take on the character of a directorial trademark: if there is no star role for him, he turns up in a brief cameo, perhaps with no more than a line or two of dialogue. (Ryu’s consistent dependability was perhaps his defining quality as a professional: he was reportedly also on hand for all 45 of director Yoji Yamada’s inexplicably popular Tora-san films.)
In many of the later films the director/actor relationship becomes clearly symbiotic, in an extremely complex and fruitful way. There is no question of Ryu “playing” Ozu or being a mouthpiece for the director’s statements, yet one repeatedly senses a special sympathy between the director and the Ryu character, a sympathy which never precludes the possibility of critical distance. In Banshun and Tokyo monogatari , for example, we are made firmly aware of the character’s limitations: the film’s vision is far wider than his vision, which it contains and transcends. The limitations (and this is consistent with other late Ozu works, not necessarily starring Ryu, for example Equinox Flower ) are defined in relation to the female characters (especially those played by Setsuko Hara): Ozu’s subtle feminism has never been as acknowledged as Mizoguchi’s or Naruse’s, and Ryu’s most frequent role in Ozu’s universe as a gentle yet somewhat obtuse patriarch deserves reviewing in this light.
In his final film appearances, Ryu is an explicitly revered icon, for both his aging contemporaries (such as Kurosawa) and younger acolytes, such as Wim Wenders, whose pilgrimage to meet Ryu in Tokyo-Ga is a moving tribute to both Ozu and his favorite actor. —Film Reference
