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Cinema Ozu (5a): Salvaged Fighting Friends

I decided to bundle a stretch of three mostly-lost and one completely lost film under one "number" in the series, though in separate sub-posts.

9: Fighting Friends: Japanese Style / Wasei kenka tomodachi (1929)
Status: 14 minutes of footage in a Japanese multi-DVD Ozu boxset (and currently on YouTube)
Script: lost
Prints: none survive

Fighting Friends: Japanese Style is the first of a short run of Ozu titles that technically survive, but in extremely truncated forms. The 14 minutes of Fighting Friends are embedded further down, but first: some context.

Ozu's go-to script collaborator, Kogo Noda, had an idea for a movie about two roommates who fall for the same girl. The film ended up being about two truck drivers who are buddies and at once fierce rivals.

"I think we just hit someone."

They hit a dirty homeless girl with their truck one day and take her home to live with them. Watch the surviving minutes and then continue on (so as to not spoil what there is to spoil).

Once she cleans up, they both fall for her, only to be disappointed that she falls for a young man in the neighborhood. The truckers patch up relations with one another and their friendship is renewed. Not seen in the footage above is that the truck drivers catch the young guy chatting up a bar hostess. It's a scandal, it's a outrage [ed. note: before anyone emails me to correct grammar, this is a reference to Oklahoma!]. It's a story device present used in A Couple on the Move: the Scandalous Misunderstanding Based on Inference.

They eventually find out that the bar hostess is in fact the young man's sister. Everyone is happy, and the couple gets married. We also see the birth of an Ozu staple: the ending involves a trip on a train. The young couple heads off on their honeymoon, cheered on by the truckers, who follow alongside in the vehicle that hit the girl in the first place.

Again, we find this to be an antecedent of a future Ozu feature (Passing Fancy), and another buddy movie dynamic like we saw in Days of Youth (and unfortunately can't in the lost Dreams of Youth). Bordwell likens the story to being an analogue of the buddy pictures that costarred Wallace Beery, and I couldn't agree more, based on the few remaining minutes of Fighting Friends. I should add that the "Japanese Style" in the title was Ozu and Noda acknowledging that the style of the story was considered stale and old-fashioned at the time. It was their way of saying "we know you've seen this a million times before".

Up next is another mostly-lost film. It's the first in Ozu's trio of films whose titles end in "But...". We'll look at the 8 minutes we can of I Graduated, But... tomorrow.

Cinema Ozu is a limited-run series of articles about the career and impact of Japanese filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu. My primary intent is to chronicle my own journey through his films, a fair number of which I have seen, but even more of which I have not. The most essential research tools I have used are David Bordwell's book Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema and definitive Ozu fansite "Ozu-san".

The series is also timed to celebrate the July 2010 U.S. release of The Only Son and There Was a Father as a DVD double-set by The Criterion Collection. You can find all entries in Cinema Ozu here. New to the series? It's best to start from the beginning.