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Cinema Ozu (3): First of the Lost Films

It's been a while since the second entry in this series, but since announcing Cinema Ozu, I had to do a great deal of preparatory work in order to continue. One of the fruits of this work is that there will be a new 'CO' piece every day this week (and likely the next one too, at this rate).

I've returned with the first in a sub-series on the lost films of Ozu that will be peppered throughout the project. Seventeen of Ozu's films are irretrievably lost. In fact, none of his first seven films survive. No scripts, stills, or prints are known to exist.

A recurring theme that cropped up in researching these vanished first films is that there's very little specific info about their storylines, as well as their precise running times. My greatest resource (for this article and most of the series), has been a combination of excellent fansite Ozu-san and David Bordwell's Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema, which is now long-out of print. Bordwell is the definitive english-language scholar and passionate advocate of Ozu. Just look at how often Criterion uses him for their Ozu releases. His book is the backbone of reference material I'll cite frequently, so get used to seeing his last name (and while we're at it, click the link above and start reading his blog).

Overview

Most of Ozu's early films were three- or five-reelers, like that of any new director at a studio during that era. Most titles would have hovered at around the hour mark if not a little longer. The general impression is that Ozu felt that most of the following were better left forgotten and didn't reflect his voice as an artist (with one notable exception, Body Beautiful). He was a contract "worker" on these, and not the "auteur".

Before moving up to the top job, Ozu liked the freedom of being an assistant director much in the way Kevin Smith enjoyed the anonymity of being a convenience store clerk while whittling away at his script for Inconvenience (which became Clerks). Please don't take that as my endorsement of Smith as being equivalent to Ozu, because it isn't. What I'm getting at is that neither was really being watched or put in charge of others, and could do their own thing for the most part. It's a difficult freedom to concede.

1: Sword of Penitence / Zange no yaiba (1927)

The story on how Ozu got his first job as director is a little hazy from scraps of interviews I could find and the always-fraught world of translated Japanese. With that proviso, here's the best that I can sort out (partly based on Ozu's account and that of others):

Once Ozu finally gave in to pressure from friends and colleagues to make his first feature, he planned to make a script he had written called Mountain of Hard Times. Then he was assigned to work in his usual role of assistant on Sword of Penitence, written by the man who would be Ozu's longtime writing partner, Kogo Noda.

The intended director dropped out for one reason or another, and Ozu got bumped up to the top job, with the studio stipulation that he would thereafter be a director in their period drama unit. This is like getting told you're going to be the showrunner of a long-running TV series and then find out that you're now in charge of Days of Our Lives.

I would dispute the validity of calling Sword of Penitence (1927) Yasujiro Ozu's "first feature". It's my read that Ozu really had very little to do with it, since he was drafted into military service very early in production, hurried to finish filming, and was called to duty just before finishing principal photography. Ozu had nothing to do with editing or any reshoots, and he only saw the finished product once. He was less than impressed. On top of this, the studio closed its period drama department by the time Ozu returned from military service, so he got bumped over to the comedy/melodrama unit.

Based on the title, one may want to assume that there's a lost Ozu samurai film, but nothing could be further from the case. Think of it as a "cost of crime" moral play with people wearing period clothing. If I were to re-translate the title with a layer of interpretation (based on the synopsis below), I'd call it Blade of Regret.

The movie itself concerns a thief and his brother, a recent parolee. The parolee wants to go straight, but his former partner doesn't want him to. The parolee's good-for-nothing brother then steals a hairpin and leaves it with his recently-freed brother, who is in turn jailed for the theft. The woman who had the hairpin stolen gets the innocent parolee off the hook, but he quickly loses his legit job and succumbs to drinking. He returns to crime alongside his brother only to find themselves on the run from the parolee's former partner. Despite the help of a different woman, the ex-partner tracks down and kills the thief, leaving the parolee as the survivor. Sounds like loads of laughs and fun.

2: The Dreams of Youth / Wakodo no yume (1928)

Ozu turned down offer after offer from the studio, wanting to down-shift back to being able to coast as an assistant. When they gave him the opportunity to direct one of his own scripts, he hopped back into the director's chair.

Dreams was the first of many Ozu movies featuring a pair of guys feuding in some manner. Okada and Kato are rommates at a boarding house. Kato has an unpaid bill from a tailor that he pays with Okada's clothes. Okada's dad makes a long trip to visit his son, but Okada is without clothes. Hilarity ensues. The roommates both romance girlfriends, and the film concludes with the two couples spending an afternoon together. Cue the 'love conquers all' theme.

That which is known about this one serves as an interesting comparison to later films Where Now Are the Dreams of Youth? and Equinox Flower, which I'll talk about later on. Bordwell notes that critics marked this as the first example of Ozu's perception of being "progressive", as well as his penchant for bodily function humor. While out at the park, Okada writes "I love you" to his girl, she writes back indicating "toilet", and runs off to the restroom. That's toilet humor I can believe in...being so overcome with joy that you have to evacuate your bowels.

3: Wife Lost / Nyobo funshitsu (1928)

Ozu made this five-reeler (among others) as a professional obligation to Shochiku, not because he necessarily wanted to. It was based on a short story from a magazine, and Ozu would later claim he couldn't remember the plot because it bored him so much. It was either completely unmemorable, or the hell that is put-upon work caused him to block it out of resentment.

The plot went like this:

Even though the main guy has a gorgeous wife, he strays with a dancer [editor's note: what a loser]. His wife's uncle hires a private eye to keep tabs on the cheating louse. The next bit of the brief synopsis that Bordwell unearthed makes me extrapolate that the husband and dancer hussy find themselves in a hotel together when they discover that the detective and wife are pursuing them. Until that point, they're none the wiser through a series of hijinks. This leads to a final chase with a motorcycle cop and all manner of sight gags.

Bordwell goes on to note that critics insisted that Ozu 'didn't get it' when it came to this style of "nansensu" caper comedy (sounds familiar...). He goes further to hypothesize that the critics may have been referring to Ozu's early imitation of Ernst Lubitsch and Harold Lloyd techniques (extremity close-ups) in his earliest surviving films.

4: Pumpkin / Kabocha (1928)

The only shred of info that Bordwell found on this, another five-reel "nansensu" comedy, was that it concerned a guy with...ahem, too many girlfriends. Ozu felt it was too rushed and too short, but he felt this was where he began to hit his stride when it came to managing continuity.

5: A Couple on the Move / Hikkoshi fufu (1928)

The story concerns a husband and wife who have just moved. The furniture man shows up at their previous residence to collect on their bill. He tracks them to their new place, and the wife pays him partially. She then leaves the house to find her husband at the corner store (presumably to get the rest of the money from him to pay the bill). She sees him helping the girl at the counter open a strongbox and assumes that he's hitting on to the shopgirl. She heads back home, fuming. The landlord drops by their place at the same time. Let's just say here that this next part would probably play out...more salaciously in a 2010 movie than it did in 1928.

The wife comes on to the landlord to piss off her husband, who comes home and gets very angry. After a fight, they decide to move again. I'm guessing that this happened previously and is the reason that they moved the first time. That evening, we find out that the shopgirl and the landlord are getting married, and everyone chills out.

Ozu took this as yet another "job" assignment from Shochiku, but according to him, he tried adding some of his own flourishes to it. Regrettably, the studio dumped half of his original edit in favor of their own, and Ozu was once again unsatisfied with the result of all of his effort.

6: Body Beautiful / Nikutaibi (1928)

Tatsuo Saito stars as the scrawny, unemployed husband of a painter. Saito had previously done Dreams of Youth, Wife Lost, and Pumpkin with Ozu, and would go on to do various other films with him for a while yet.

Here, Saito is playing Ichiro, a wispy little man who keeps up the house, does whatever his wife orders, and is generally a servant first and husband in name only. His wife's wealthy patron comes to the house, flirts with her, and later on proceeds to provoke and intimidate Ichiro at a bar. Furious and indignant at his wife's permissive behavior, Ichiro takes up painting. His wife hires a bodybuilder to be her new model in place of her wimpy hubby. When Ichiro and his wife's paintings are exhibited, he wins a prize and she throws away her paintbrushes [ed. note: and her ambition in life?] to become a subservient housewife.

Ozu's fifth film of 1928 (a five-reeler) was the master's first critical success, not the commonly-cited I Was Born, But... (1932). The critics said he finally broke free of the "nansensu" form and had produced a serviceable film that would today be considered somewhere in the tragicomedy/dramedy realm. Ozu felt that he finally settled into a groove and at once truly figured out his own filmmaking perspective. It's a shame that the first movie Ozu really felt proud of (in terms of craftsmanship) is gone forever, especially considering how good Saito is in later Ozu pictures.

7: Treasure Mountain / Takara no yama (1929)

Another "work" picture, Ozu cranked this out in a hurry. He seemed to remember a baseball game the morning of the sixth day of shooting more than the movie itself (again, according to the site Ozu-san). Mountain was an update of an old vaudeville show and was originally going to be called A Modern Spring Calendar. Reviews cited the movie as being slow and not very visually-engaging.

The plot concerns a guy who lives in a geisha house. He has a girlfriend, but he falls in love with one of the geishas. His dad won't give him any more money, and his 'modern' girlfriend wants him to move out of the geisha house (big surprise there).

Once he does ditch the geisha house and go after his girlfriend, she's already gotten engaged to someone else. He runs across the geisha by chance at a party where she's performing. They get back together, and the movie closes with him back at the geisha house eating green tea over rice. The later career echo of this movie (in plot at least) is The Lady and The Beard (1931).

More lost films will follow, the first of which are partially-lost films...only minutes of which survive. We'll start in on those later this week. The next installment of Cinema Ozu will concern the earliest of Ozu's work that does still survive in its entirety, Days of Youth.

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.