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Cinema Ozu (6): Walk Cheerfully

Kenji the Knife and the girl he falls for

14: Walk Cheerfully / Hogaraka ni ayume (1930)
Status: no DVD, has aired on foreign TV
Script: full script preserved
Prints: original negative and multiple prints survive

As we get into more full features, my writeups will naturally focus less on plot regurgitation and much more on oblique impressions of the film itself. First up, we have a movie that I'd personally deem Noir Lite, based on the shooting style and subject matter. It doesn't get remotely as gritty, violent, or dark as true Noir, so it's best to think of this as a light romantic comedy merely painted in Noir aesthetics.

Walk Cheerfully is the first of a select few "gentleman criminal" movies from Ozu. Based on my limited tiptoeing into Japanese cinema of the period, they didn't really have full-on tommy gun-toting killers like we did in the US at the same time. The Yakuza worked in groups that were more like secret societies than "gangs" and went by the code of bushido. They were the most honorable among thieves.

In the 1920's, street hoods that dressed in American clothes developed alongside them. They wore suits and hats and were thoroughly westernized. So is this movie. Again, those who only know his later work are largely oblivious to how much Ozu was into Hollywood mass market junk food rather than the arthouse world his legend lives in.

"Kenji the Knife", a name obviously inspired by Threepenny Opera's Mack the Knife.

In Walk Cheerfully, Kenji the Knife (Minoru Takeda) and his brother Senko (Hisao Yoshitani) are among these gentleman street hoods. They're racketeers, but good of heart. One day, they come close to or actually hit a young girl with their car.

The girl's attractive older sister Yasue (Hiroku Kawasaki) catches the eye of Kenji, who already has an annoying, petty girlfriend named Chieko (Satoko Date). Their gang boss, Ono (Takeshi Sakamoto), takes a liking to Yasue, who has less than no interest in him. She also resists Kenji's overtures, insisting that she'll have nothing to do with him until he makes an honest living.

The thrust of WC is how much better an option it is to live life on the straight and narrow. There are plenty of structural elements in the story that remind me of Ozu's disowned first feature, Sword of Pentience (which I think translates better as Edge of Regret). I watched WC in complete silence on an Italian TV bootleg, really wishing there were some sort of musical accompaniment like there is on Criterion's Silent Ozu Eclipse set.

I almost split myself laughing at the brief appearance of Tatsuo Saito as a Pomerian-carrying, cigarette holder-twirling gang leader. I'm trying to put together a Cinema Ozu "Appendix" piece (the first of a few) on Saito for next week.

Bordwell indicates heavy influences from Josef von Sternberg's Underworld (1927), which is credited with launching the American gangster genre (and which Criterion is putting out in August). There's a bar sequence that is visibly "quoted" in Walk Cheerfully, among other bits. I've only seen clips of Underworld in documentaries and film classes, and now want to see the whole thing all the more.

A signature Ozu techinique really starts to take hold here. Instead of the terms I've seen used, I refer to it as "image memory". This occurs when objects (in shots of any type) take on different meaning later in the story. Without spoiling much, an example in WC would be the line of taxis seen in the opening shot echoing later in a character becoming a taxi driver. Very much a minor work, but work looking at for the emerging threads of Ozu's overall style.

Hope for a Region1 DVD: This is a title that I'd consider an ideal candidate for a third Ozu Eclipse set, along with a few other titles I'm writing about soon. I'll pitch all of my hopeful ideas in a future installment once we get past all of the films that aren't available on Region 1 DVD, but suffice to say that this one could pair nicely with both That Night's Wife and Dragnet Girl as "Ozu's Criminals" or with some other movies as a larger "Early Ozu" set. I could go on, but I'd be here all day.

Tomorrow brings two pieces. The first is "Part A" of I Flunked, But..., Ozu's next feature and the second part of his "But..." trio. It's the only one of his surviving films that I have failed to track down, but I am determined to do so. The second concerns the above-mentioned That Night's Wife, where a desperate father defies law and order for the sake of his sick child.

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.