The first of Yasujiro Ozu’s series of popular silent comedies starring Takeshi Sakamoto as working class single dad Kihachi, here pining over a new tenant (Nobuko Fushimi), while his beloved bratty son is ignored and falls ill after eating too much candy. The plot is nominal (a love triangle with Kihachi’s best pal Jiro and the new girl is rather uninspired), but that doesn’t mean Ozu doesn’t present it with a marked amount of humor and emotion, especially in the final act, as Kihachi realizes his selfishness (in his parental duties, and in taking money from a kind barber to pay for medical expenses) and wonders if moving away to get a better job wouldn’t be best for everybody. It’s seemingly gigantic decisions like this that Ozu renders with such touchingly quaint observation, ultimately setting the groundwork for the weightier parent-child grown up relationships that would come to dominate his cinema in the following decades.