Tokyo no yado (1935)

Director:

Yasujiro Ozu

Writers:

Masao Arata (writer)
Tadao Ikeda (writer)

Release Date:

21 November 1935 (Japan)

Genre:

Drama

Cast

Takeshi Sakamoto	...	Kihachi
Yoshiko Okada	...	Otaka
Chôko Iida	...	Otsune
Tomio Aoki	...	Zenko
rest of cast listed alphabetically:
Kazuko Ojima	...	Kuniko
Chishû Ryû	...	Police man
Takayuki Suematsu	...	Masako

Also Known As:

An Inn in Tokyo

Runtime:

Japan:80 min

Country:

Japan

Color:

Black and White

Aspect Ratio:

1.37 : 1

Sound Mix:

Silent

Company:

Shôchiku Eiga

Trivia:

The credits indicate that the script was based on an original work by a foreign writer with a name that sounds like "Winzart Monet", but it is actually a gag name, derived from "without money".

Movie Connections:

Referenced in Ikite wa mita keredo - Ozu Yasujirô den (1983)

searing social melodrama from Ozu

This early great work from The Master is a sobering melodrama honed squarely on a single unemployed, homeless father struggling to feed and shelter his two sons. Ozu does a fine job capturing the dynamic between the two boys by themselves and with their father, but the film really gets interesting when two women enter the story: a young single mother, also homeless, and an old friend who finds the father a job. The maudlin climax seems to anticipate Ford's GRAPES OF WRATH and DeSican melodrama -- though in the wrong ways -- but prior to that Ozu comes up with an quirky expressionist sequence to reflect the father's unraveling moral state.