Chichi ariki (1942)

Director:

Yasujiro Ozu

Writers:

Tadao Ikeda (writer)
Yasujiro Ozu (writer)

Release Date:

November 1982 (USA)

Genre:

Drama

Plot:

Shuhei Horikawa, a poor schoolteacher, struggles to raise his son Ryohei by himself, despite neither money nor prospects. |

Cast

Chishû Ryû	...	Shuhei Horikawa
Shûji Sano	...	Ryohei
Shin Saburi	...	Yasutaro Kurokawa
Takeshi Sakamoto	...	Makoto Hirata
Mitsuko Mito	...	Fumi
Masayoshi Otsuka	...	Seichi
Shinichi Himori	...	Minoru Uchida
Haruhiko Tsuda	...	Ryohei as a child
rest of cast listed alphabetically:
Kanji Kawara	...	Teacher of junior high school
Yûsuke Kurata	...	Teacher of junior high school
Tsuneo Osugi

Also Known As:

There Was a Father

Runtime:

USA:94 min | Japan:94 min

Country:

Japan

Language:

Japanese

Color:

Black and White

Aspect Ratio:

1.37 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono

Certification:

Brazil:18

Company:

Shôchiku Eiga

Movie Connections:

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

subversive sadness cracks through wartime propaganda

Another sober wartime drama, this time a sort of reworking of THE ONLY SON as a widower schoolteacher decides to send his boy to a boarding school to give him the best education possible and seek a higher paying position to afford tuition. The film takes a sudden leap forward in time as the grown son desires to take care of his aging father, but the father forbids the son to compromise his own career. The war is barely mentioned but the film can easily be read as a propagandistic statement about self-sacrifice and devotion to duty, even at the cost of family unity. However, the pensive, tentative mood Ozu captures at the end, embodied in the son's distant, troubled look as he thinks about his father, hints at Ozu's own reservations with the moral message being issued. The scenes of father and son together in both halves of the story have a gentle perfection that gives the film all the beauty it requires, thanks to great performances by Shuji Sano as the grown son and Chishyu Ryo as the father. Amazingly, Ryu was only 38 when he gave this totally believable performance as an aging patriarch -- in fact he barely looks any different than he does in AN AUTUMN AFTERNOON twenty years later!