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Cinema Ozu (9): The 3 Lost Films of 1930

Ozu's three final films of 1930 are irretrievably lost. David Bordwell, once again, is the only Ozu authority (in English, at least) to give us clues as to what we're missing out on these 80 years later.

A production still from Ozu's 19th film Young Miss. Note the looming presence of Harold Lloyd.

17: The Vengeful Spirit of Eros / Eroshin no onyo (1930)
no script or prints survive

I'm going to once again engage my re-titling/re-interpretation abilities and say that this one should have been translated as Cupid's Revenge. After reading the synopsis, this was not so serious a film as to require a title like The Vengeful Spirit of Eros. Ozu's boss ordered him to take a mandatory time off at a spa and at the same time, return from the vacation with a finished film. In later interviews, Ozu couldn't remember the plot, which he says often in regard to his early films.

Tatsuo Saito and Satoko Date play a couple who fall for each other and commit "lovers' suicide" for an unclear reason. Date, you'll recall, played Kenji the Knife's nasty "bad girl" ladyfriend in Walk Cheerfully. The boyfriend's pal finds his body washed up on the shore. He has just barely survived. The boyfriend fears that his girlfriend's spirit will haunt him, but he finds that she's quickly gotten a job in a dance hall and has also been slutting it up big-time. I get the impression that she never planned to kill herself and just wanted to be rid of her boyfriend. This proves the necessity of female empowerment, since it appears that in Japan of this time period, the only way a girl could dump her guy was by having him killed.

So, furious and vengeful, he plots to scare her with rubber snakes. Yes, rubber snakes. She sees through the ploy and tricks her now ex-beau into fighting with the friend who rescued him. The next day, he sees her walking with two new boyfriends.

No one seems to know how long Ozu's original cut was, but it was apparently sexy and saucy enough that the censors cut out a fair amount of footage. What was released was only three reels long (half an hour, maybe a bit more), and has been stamped the most disposable of all Ozu's work. The movie's loss of its most salacious parts resulted in a sexy perverse comedy that was shot becoming just a mediocre comedy.

18: Lost Luck, or The Luck That Touched the Leg / Ashi ni sawatta koun (1930)
no script or prints survive

Tatsuo Saito and Mitsuko Yoshikawa play a couple for Ozu for the fourth time here. Their first three pairings were all in lost films like this one, but their fifth turn together as a couple survives yet (I Was Born, But...). The first Ozu film that Yoshikawa can be seen in is The Lady and the Beard, which I'll get into early next week.

Of all the brief synopses among Bordwell's pieces on the lost films, this is the shortest and also the most difficult to imagine. I'll paraphrase:

Salaryman Furugawa (Saito) finds a bundle of 4000 Yen wrapped in newspaper and returns it to the owner, who rewards him with 500 Yen. Furugawa's pals and coworkers leap on him like a swarm of mosquitoes and bleed him for all but 180 Yen. His wife (Yoshikawa) is less than pleased. The next morning, Furugawa's boss offers him everything he'd need to start a chicken farm for only 100 yen. What luck! Unfortunately, Furugawa returns home to find that his wife spent the 180Y on fabric and a sewing machine so that she can make herself kimonos. The next morning, Furugawa happens upon another bundle wrapped in newspaper. This time, it's a ball of rice. Cue the wah-wah trombone.

In later interviews excerpted by Ozu-san, the director admits he doesn't even remember what this one was about. The reviews from the time agree. They seem to indicate it was a tragicomedy that didn't really please anyone due to focusing on nothing but ironic misery.

19: Young Miss / Ojosan (1930)
full script preserved, no prints known

The longest Ozu film so far, Young Miss ran 12 reels (over two hours). Bordwell, of all people, has considerable difficulty condensing the plot into a simple synopsis. As best I can tell, Shochiku had a couple of up-and-coming comedic stars in Sumiko Kurishima and Tokihiko Okada and they wanted a very "modern", American-alike movie to plug them into.

Kurishima plays the titular Young Miss, a female journalist using a pen name who beats a couple of veteran reporters to various scoops. Okada and the ever-present Tatsuo Saito play the buddy reporters. The three of them team up to expose an underground gentleman's club for ultra-wealthy voyeurs.

There is no indication of an intelligible (or actual) conclusion. Bordwell quotes one of the ads saying that it "brings you the nonsense of modern life". Regardless, the reviews called it one of the best movies of that year. The studio plugged tons of money, three of their top writers, four top stars, and a far longer running time than usual.

A last thought based on looking at filmographies: Kurishima would only re-team with Ozu once more, in 1937's What Did the Lady Forget?. After her next movie in 1938, she would not appear on screen again for 18 years. As with many silent-era Japanese actors, WWII likely had a lot to do with her abrupt semi-retirement. Her final film was Mikio Naruse's Nagareru.

Next week brings the first "Appendix" piece (on Tatsuo Saito), two surviving films (The Lady and the Beard & Tokyo Chorus), and two lost films (Beauty's Sorrows & Spring Comes from the Ladies).

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.