Two bruised souls enact a tender, hesitant romance in Shimizu’s alternately poignant and playful wartime love story. A soldier (played by later Ozu regular Chishu Ryu) is waylaid at a rural spa when he accidentally cuts his foot on the titular object. Soon enough he tracks down its lovely owner (Kinuyo Tanaka) and finds himself smitten. —The Criterion Collection
Hiroshi Shimizu was born in Shizuoka Prefecture on March 28, 1903 and passed away in Kyoto on June 23, 1966. He dropped out of his studies at Hokkaido University in order to join Shochiku’s Kamata studio as an assistant director 1922. Promoted to the director by the age of 21 with his first film, Toge no Kanata (Beyond the Pass) (1924), he enjoyed a reputation of being a skillful director, particularly for melodramas and comedies. A “trial marriage” to the actress Kinuyo Tanaka in 1927 ended in divorce two years later. Shimizu directed 140 films for Shochiku up to and throughout World War 2.
After the war he established the Hachinosu Eiga studio in collaboration with several colleagues. This allowed him to work independently of the studios, and films such as Children of the Beehive (1948), where he employed homeless children he had taken in and raised himself, resulted. He also directed films for Shin-Toho and Daiei, the last of which, Hana no Omokage (Image… read more
Incredible stylistic eclecticism- Shimizu cuts from wide-angles to close-ups, tracking shots to two-shots, in a way that would see random and willful in our standardized age, but it all hangs tight to the story and turns it into an exploration of a thousand possibilities. It's those ever-present possibilities that make the conclusion all the more sad.
Maybe the most delicate piece of war time propaganda ever made. No, not fair and not true. A disparate band of holiday makers coalesces into a community. A woman decides to leave her former life. A child grapples with what to write about his holiday and learns to pay attention to the out of the ordinary.
Above: Kinuyo Tanaka (left) letting the worries of the world creep into her vacation in Ornamental Hairpin. Image Courtesy of the