To pay for his daughter Michiko’s medical treatment, artist Hashizume Shuji breaks into an office. When the police arrive on the scene, he hops on a taxi, not realizing that the driver is undercover cop Kagawa. Meanwhile, the doctor tells Hashizume’s wife Mayumi that if Michiko survives the night, the worst will be over. Kagawa appears to arrest Hashizume, but Mayumi takes her husband’s gun and holds him captive, begging him to let her husband keep watch over Michiko for one night. The next morning, Mayumi tries to help her husband slip away, but he returns to turn himself in. —Ozu-san.com
Yasujiro Ozu was born in the old Fukagawa district of Tokyo, to a fertilizer merchant, in 1903. In 1923, after a couple of years as an assistant teacher in rural Japan, Ozu was hired as assistant cameraman at the Shochiku Motion Picture Company. Early in his career, Ozu began to experiment with an idiosyncratic film style that ran contrary to the conventions of Japanese or Hollywood cinema of the day. He strove to reduce and simplify his film style; he cast such mainstays as the fade, the dissolve, and the pan from his cinematic palette. He shot solely from a low camera angle, using a 50mm lens, and he subordinated spatial continuity to visual aesthetics. Ozu directed his first film in 1927,The Sword of Penitence. In 1932, he began to hit his creative stride with the touching comedy I Was Born, But…, which was his first commercial success. During World War II, he made few films such as There Was a Father.
After the war, Ozu reached his creative peak and made some of his finest… read more
A great movie full of guilty gestures and faces. The frequent dolly's and close-ups are pretty sublime as well. As for the narrative elements and the mise en scene, put it this way: never has Tokyo looked so much like Chicago or Lang's Berlin.
In this early silent melodrama from master director Yasujiro Ozu, a policeman follows a robber back to his apartment where his wife is attending their sick daughter. The wife pulls a gun and the policeman is held hostage. Most of the film takes place in this one location and over the course of the night the policeman becomes sympathetic to the robber's plight and is even prepared to let him escape in the morning.....
