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Cinema Ozu (Appendix A): Tatsuo Saito, Actor

First, a note on how these Appendices will work. All of the individual entries related to the subject will be listed at the end of each post. I will update the Appendix articles over time so that new information can be included and so that the links are relatively up to date.

Saito in a non-Ozu movie.

As with the articles I've written on Ozu's lost films, I'm working with a deficit of information. I will clearly mark assumptions and speculation I engage in below, but I've plumbed all the facts that I've got at my disposal.

Tatsuo Saito appeared in 20 of Ozu's films. All but four of those were made prior to 1933, including Ozu's first major commercial success, I Was Born, But..., in which he co-starred. At the time of this writing, my retrospective journey through Ozu's career is just shy of a four-year gap in their collaboration (from right after Where Now Are the Dreams of Youth? until 1936's College is a Nice Place). They then worked together on What Did the Lady Forget? in 1937, and then Ozu himself took his first break from filmmaking in ten years of directing. Ozu picked back up in 1941 with Saito again working with him on the first of two WWII-concurrent features (Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family). Another multi-year hiatus from Ozu followed 1942's There Was a Father (until 1947). Saito would only work with him once more after the end of WWII, on 1950's The Munekata Sisters.

One of my favorite surviving (though very abbreviated) Saito performances as a kidnapper in Tokkan kozo (1929)

I'm not aware of any major falling out between Ozu and Saito along the lines of what happened between Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune. Regardless, Chishu Ryu was phased in as Ozu's go-to male lead right around 1932, with Saito phased out more gradually than Tatsuya Nakadai took over as Kurosawa's. Saito's parts in virtually all his collaborations with Ozu from 1932 on could be summed up as "the kindly professor".

Looking at his filmography, I think the real reasons for 1950 marking the end of the Ozu-Saito collaboration is that Saito sought out Hollywood work. His first American picture was 1952's Geisha Girl. He followed that up with 1955's Three Stripes in the Sun, which starred the legend Aldo Ray. He would go on to work on pictures with Audie Murphy (Joe Butterfly), Shadow of a Doubt's Teresa Wright (Escapade in Japan), Robert Wagner & Joan Collins (Stopover Tokyo), and Shirley MacLaine (My Geisha).

Saito's final film role was in 1965's Lord Jim, where he played the character of Du-Ramin. He would succumb to stomach cancer just three years later in 1968, aged 66.

Cinema Ozu articles related to Tatsuo Saito:
(3): First of the Lost Films
(4): Days of Youth
(5d): Salvaged Tokkan Kozo
(7a): I Flunked, But...
(7b): Flunked Significance
(8): That Night's Wife
(9): The 3 Lost Films of 1930

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.