A widow sends her only son away to receive a better education. Years later, she visits him, finding him a poor school teacher with a wife and son.A widow sends her only son away to receive a better education. Years later, she visits him, finding him a poor school teacher with a wife and son.A widow sends her only son away to receive a better education. Years later, she visits him, finding him a poor school teacher with a wife and son.A widow sends her only son away to receive a better education. Years later, she visits him, finding him a poor school teacher with a wife and son.A widow sends her only son away to receive a better education. Years later, she visits him, finding him a poor school teacher with a wife and son.
Jun Yokoyama
- Okubo's sonas Okubo's son
- (as Bakudan Kozô)
Seiichi Katô
- Kinjo no koas Kinjo no ko
- (as Seiichi Kato)
Tomio Aoki
- Tomiboas Tomibo
- (as Tokkan Kozô)
In 1923, in the province of Shinshu, the widow and simple worker of a silk factory Tsune Nonomiya (O-Tsune) decides to send her only son to Tokyo for having a better education. Thirteen years later, she visits her son Ryosuke Nonomiya (Shinichi Himori), and finds that he is a poor and frustrated night-school teacher with a wife, Sugiko (Yoshiko Tsubouchi), and a baby boy. —Claudio Carvalho, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Top review
Early Ozu masterpiece
Of all the major directors in the world, Ozu was the last one to convert to sound; "The Only Son" was his first "all-talkie" film (in 1936), and it is remarkably inventive (technically) as well as deeply moving. Once again, his film deals with family dynamics: in this case, a widowed mother who has worked selflessly to provide her son with an education. But when she goes to visit him, she finds that he has not fulfilled his promise: he's stuck in a mediocre job, he has a wife and child and can't make any drastic changes because of his responsibilities. The ways that the mother and son try to reach an understanding, and their mutual resignation to the disappointments of life, create a glancing but powerful sense of that "quiet desperation" which was so often Ozu's theme.
helpful•223
- lqualls-dchin
- May 18, 2003
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