Tokihiko Okada is a salaryman at an insurance company in Tokyo. He has a wife, Emiko Yagumo, a son, a daughter (played by Hideko Takamine) and a baby. Money is tight, but a bonus is coming his way. Unfortunately for him, a fellow worker is fired in a manner that suggests the boss wants him gone before his pension vests. Okada goes to speak to the boss, gets into a shoving match with him, and is fired himself.
At first it seems that it will be a matter of picking up a new job, but he soon finds himself one of the "Tokyo Chorus" of the unemployed. Matters grow worse and worse...
This movie starts out as a comedy, with Physical Education teacher Tatsuo Saitô terrorizing his students -- including Okada -- like a cop in a Hal Roach comedy writing tickets. As the movie goes on, the tone begins to take on a more serious tone, with outbursts of real problems -- like when Miss Takamine has to go to the hospital -- amidst the comedy, which grows ever more wan. When Okada goes to work for his former teacher, handing out leaflets advertising his restaurant, his wife sees him doing so, and is humiliated; Okada, who starts this movie like Harold Lloyd trying to keep up with the Joneses, has crashed through the floor of the educated middle class, into the lower class; this is not America, where he can be redeemed and restored, but Japan, where appearances are more important than the reality. This is no longer a comedy, but a tragedy.
The print I saw on TCM was certainly not pristine; the titles were worn, and there was extensive chipping. The story was also far more episodic than fluid. This is not the Ozu of the 1950s, but a different one, with slapstick and tracking shots. These last points raise an issue I have been thinking of. Ozu is famous for the way he directed his later movies: long, still takes shot from floor level. Why the change? The late introduction of sound movies into Japan meant that the problems of moving cameras had been solved by the time Ozu made his first sound feature in 1936. He only gradually abandoned tracking shots, and was still using them as late as 1949.
I have concluded that a good movie is composed of story, character, incident and camerawork, and as Ozu entered the 1950s, he settled firmly on character and the interactions between them as his interest. With his often-repeated plots, his people's relationships were the stuff that fascinated him and his audience. Incident (in the form of slapstick comedy) and camera movement were matters that distracted viewers from the people, and made it too easy for them. By removing the overt comedy, Ozu removed the distraction. By removing the camera movement, he made his audience work harder at understanding the characters, which invested them in the process
Anyway, that's my understanding at the moment. What's yours?
