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Cinema Ozu (22): Kihachi Betrayed by Innocent Maid

Feature #31:
An Innocent Maid / Hakoiri musume
(1935)
Status: believed to be completely lost
Script: fully preserved
Region1 DVD: N/A

Information on this one from Bordwell's book is more limited than usual for a lost film. I would assume that this is mostly due to its utter failure critically and commercially. Kihachi has very little to do with this intended franchise-starter. Takeshi Sakamoto once again plays the can't-catch-a-break rascal whose son Tomibo (Tomio "Tokkan Kozo" Aoki) is, as always, more mature than his father. They live in a back alley making rice cakes, overhearing and prying into the developing events in a love triangle.

Shochiku decided they were going to make a rapidly-produced, and no doubt generic, romantic comedy series out of An Innocent Maid. The movie ran eight reels in release form, after apparent heavy cuts frmo censors. My extrapolated theory is that Kihachi and Tomibo were the portion of the movie in which Ozu actually had some investment. They no doubt had some little bits of business (or else why have them?), but all indications point to very limited presence of either actor outside the periphery. Well, until the finale, that is.

Kinuyo Tanaka, star of Dragnet Girl and later a legend, plays Oshige, a young woman torn between two suitors. She prefers the young Arata (Ryoichi Takeuchi) to the cotton merchant Murata (Kiyoshi Seino). Her mother Otsune (Choko Iida) pushes her toward the much older entrepreneur. This is the second out of three times in the Kihachi cycle where Iida plays "Otsune" and Tokkan Kozo plays "Tomibo".

Just as the heroine is set to marry the man she doesn't love, Kihachi interrupts the proceedings, insisting that everyone listen to each other's feelings. The ending is presumably neat, tidy, and happy. The movie was almost Kihachi's swan song, but we get one more go-round with him before the war changes everyone and everything.

Next is Ozu's only documentary, Kagamijishi. Unavailable in the US, filming techniques used in the theatre sequences of both Floating Weeds movies are seen here more refined (and with camera movement).

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.