Yasujiro Ozu’s most fondly remembered silent film, and one of his most cinematic, this funny and bittersweet family comedy about two young brothers who lose faith in their working-class father when they see him playing the fool in an innocent office filmstrip, served as the basis for the director’s own Technicolor “Good Morning”, two and a half decades later. In the latter film the boys play the silent treatment after their father refuses to buy them a new TV, here it’s a hunger strike when they realize their father’s position as the subordinate to the father of one of their school friends, who they feel superior to; both films deal predominately with the struggles of a father to please his growing and ever critical children, but given the enormous gap in time between the projects, including the devastation of the war, it’s interesting to note how innocent the earlier film plays compared to the stark capitalist satire of the latter. Most Ozu buffs prefer the silent film to it’s late life remake, not just because it comes from a time when Ozu was still experimenting with a moving camera and looser editing style that he all but abandoned after the war, but because it so joyously revels in the livelihood of school kids – fighting with bullies, feeding sparrow eggs to the dog to spell a playground myth, ditching class and forging a homework assignment – before coming to its more dramatic family resolutions. Of all the great directors, nobody remade his own work better than Ozu, he did it many times and often both films are exemplary, such is the case here; “Good Morning” serves its purpose at a time and era when Ozu was winding down and critical of Japan’s post-war westernization, but here he was just building his style and reputation – the film won the prestigious Kinemo Jumpo award for Best Film of the year, the first, but not the last time Ozu would be so honored.