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Cinema Ozu (5d): Salvaged Tokkan Kozo

12: A Straightforward Boy / Tokkan kozo (1929)
Status: fragments of 14 remaining minutes available on YouTube (as of this writing)
Script: none survive
Prints: no negative or prints survive

Before we get into the plot of Ozu's child abduction comedy (yup), I should take a moment to tackle the title, which does not translate well going from Japanese to English. "Tokkan kozo" is a colloquial expression for "a boy (or brat) who charges into you". Apparently, there is a nickname for the kind of kid that just knocks you on your ass in Japan, a place where little boys are as likely to run into you headfirst as look at you (apparently). This movie in particular is about a little boy who turns out to be more trouble for his kidnappers than he is worth.

The most common translations I've found for it have been "A Straightforward Boy" (used by Bordwell) and "The Charging Kid" (used by IMDb and others). I'd like to add my own interpretation-laced option to the mix: The Bowl-Over Kid. Mine uses a mix of a Western-inspired "The [insert phrase here] Kid" template and the fact that the movie is really about how this little boy knocks these guys for a loop, off their game, and so on. The trouble of getting around the cultural specificity of the title results in me just wanting to refer to it by its Japanese title.

This will probably remain my favorite still in the series. Senbo taunts the crime boss as if saying "I will devour your sanity whole!". Kidzilla here thinks that the kidnappers want to play a nice game of "Gojira in a China Shop".

While playing hide-and-go-seek, Senbo, the "kid" in question (Tomio Aoki), is lured away by kidnapper Bunkichi (Tatsuo Saito once again) who buys the boy candy and toys galore. Here's the first half of the surviving footage (apparently from a TV broadcast):

He plays the kid off as his own to a suspicious cop and gets the brat back to his boss (Takeshi Sakamoto, who appeared in some of Ozu's first films). The boss' head seems to be strategically shaved solely for the purpose of attaching suction darts. They appear to employ the kid as something of a servant, but he turns out to be a bigger annoyance than help. Unseen in the second clip below is that the fake-mustached Bunkichi tries to return the kid to his father, but Senbo's dad tells the weirdo kidnapper to keep the boy because he's such a pain in the ass.

I never expected I'd find a Texas connection in Ozu's work, but the movie is clearly an adaptation of O. Henry's The Ransom of Red Chief. I should note for the interested that Red Chief was made for TV in the US by Bob Clark back in '98, with Christopher Lloyd and Michael Jeter kidnapping Haley Joel Osment.

Desperate, Bunkichi tries to dump Senbo off with the friends he was playing with at the beginning of the movie. The kid tells his pals that this guy will buy you all the toys and candy you want, and we end with the kids chasing after the kidnapper to hilarious (?) effect.

Most amazing today is the fact that you could make such a thing as a "child abduction comedy" at a Japanese studio in the 20's. The vaudeville-style "mustache disguise" is just one example of various things that you never expect to see paired with something as serious and horrible as human trafficking movies. You could string a picture like this together with some of the original Our Gang and Dogville shorts and have a nice "is this real?!" marathon.

As with those American shorts, this movie was successful enough to make its young star immediately famous. Aoki became so well-known for this role that he changed his stage name to Tokkan-Kozo after the movie's title. Aoki initially got Ozu's attention as one of the four kids with glasses in Life of an Office Worker. Apparently, what tickled Ozu was that Aoki kept falling asleep in the middle of takes to hilarious effect. Below is an un-subtitled 1991 TV interview with Aoki-san that's still interesting to those who only speak English due to Aoki's still-evident impish personality.

The movie was only four reels, so it's among the shortest movies that Ozu made. Also notable is that they shot the whole thing in three days.

Tomorrow brings An Introduction to Marriage, another lost film that once again deals with marital distrust and mistaken assumptions.

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 many 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.