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dad1153 wrote:^^^ Which 'discarded' great movie did Ebert remove from his Top 100 to make room for "Only Son"?

It's not a Top 100. There are 328 at the moment.

How nice the see the face of young Joan Crawford presiding over the events of The Only Son!

These films look really rough, and maybe I wish that these would have gotten the Eclipse treatment with a little more consideration given to the late color films, but I'm thankful to have them and thankful also for Bordwell and Thompson's comments which really put the films (There Was a Father, especially) into context.

I was all ready to consider There Was a Father a minor Ozu until the scene where

Spoiler

the father collapses,

which completely took me by surprise, and then the very emotional final scenes. I was not quite prepared for the strong pathos of these two films, and am happy to have my assumptions about Ozu's work shaken up a little.

the Only Son is a major work in a minor key. I've not watched Ozu's later films for several years, having been exploring his earlier work, lately, so the tone of this film took me by surprise as it anticipates Ozu's more downbeat meditations on life and its limitations. The pessimistic tone, and sense of shame and sacrifice that permeate the film are a little bit overwhelming. My initial estimation of the film is a relatively lower than I expected, but I can already feel the film taking up a permanent residence and can tell it will be one I will be thinking on for quite a while, so I anticipate my appreciation for it and evaluation will only go up.

I did like the self reflexive moment in the film, "this is a talkie." and how Ozu used the camera movements of the German film in contrast to his own static industrial landscapes of Tokyo. and he counterpoints the German film directly with the mother's lack of interest, in a way he seems to be suggesting its the tremendous difference of the German film that is interesting, not that it is better but it is exotic in its otherness, and that is not something the mother is interested in.

and I think the interlude with the German film feeds into the music that ends the film. for all the son's failings he lives in a broader far more complicated world, and the mother's world is far more insular, and limited. So while she is trapped by the sacrifices she has made and the limited life she lives in the factory tenement, and he is also trapped but he is a somewhat less trapped than her.

The movie watching scene was very poignant for me. The mother's reactions were almost exactly what I would have anticipated had I made MY (late) mother watch a foreign film.

I would note that this is the kind of film that Ozu himself would NOT have liked (considering ultra-closeups obnoxious, among other things).

I don't think that late Ozu films (with one or two exceptions) focuses on life's limitations (or are especially downbeat). Rather he presents life as it is (as he sees it) Both past and modernity have real attractions and real flaws -- but one must learn to live in the present, regardless.

Michael Kerpan wrote:The movie watching scene was very poignant for me. The mother's reactions were almost exactly what I would have anticipated had I made MY (late) mother watch a foreign film.

The look she gives her son as they watch the movie is priceless, the look of "are you really making me sit through this?" I love scenes of people watching movies in movies (which might help explain why Goodbye Dragon Inn is one of my favorite films of recent vintage), and I think even though Ozu probably would have hated this movie, he manages to find a fairly poetic moment to linger on: the scarf above the grass/wheat (if I'm not completely misremembering). I was surprised that he spent as much time as he did showing what is on the screen, but it's a nice interlude.

Matt wrote:The look she gives her son as they watch the movie is priceless, the look of "are you really making me sit through this?"

That glance makes me crack up.

Ozu also appropriates much of Lubitsch's section of "If I Had a Million" in his "Tokyo Woman" -- where this film serves as a date movie for two of the main characters.

Chisu Ryu's son in "The Only Son" is one of the worst crying kids I've ever seen in an Ozu movie, even worse than the actor's son in "Floating Weeds". How come Japanese child actors have terrible acting skills when it comes to crying?!

Has anyone seen the film "Leise flehen meine Lieder", the German movie they watch in the theater?

Most Japanese movies of this era (which I have seen) deliberately present children crying in a stylized manner. My sense that is that Ozu (and probably others -- including the audience of the era) would have found a highly realistic portrayal of a child crying their eyes out too distressing. But in some instances, the crying episodes by kids in Ozu are "performances" by the child characters -- to a certain extent, the crying is for show.

I've always thought of that as Ozu poking fun of kids who fake tears to get what they want. I mean, if they wanted to, they could have just blown dust in their eyes or cut onions or something. There was probably a reason he wanted it emphasized like that.

Since nobody seems to have answered my earlier query about the There Was a Father soundtrack definitively, I'll do it myself!

I compared the new Criterion with the old Panorama last night and am pleased to announce that the bizarre problems with the cleaned-up soundtrack have been addressed. Criterion's un-fucked-with cracklefest may be gloriously noisy, but at least the actors sound like human beings. I can also confirm that the disastrous clean-up Shochiku did for the previous release scrubbed off an awful lot of background sound and detail, so it's the whole world of the film that now sounds normal, not just the actors. Who would have guessed that most of the film doesn't actually take place underwater?

Steven H wrote:I've always thought of that as Ozu poking fun of kids who fake tears to get what they want. I mean, if they wanted to, they could have just blown dust in their eyes or cut onions or something. There was probably a reason he wanted it emphasized like that.

In Japanese films of this era, there does not seem to be much difference in presentation between kids who are supposed to be _really_ crying and kids who are (in part) putting on a bit of an act (to garner sympathy).

Glad to hear that Criterion has cleaned up the sound on There Was a Father. I once had a tape of a long-ago TV broadcast which looked absolutely awful but _sounded_ better than the Shochiku DVD.

Michael Kerpan wrote:Glad to hear that Criterion has cleaned up the sound on There Was a Father. I once had a tape of a long-ago TV broadcast which looked absolutely awful but _sounded_ better than the Shochiku DVD.

It's definitely worth a double dip - at least until the BFI get around to issuing it on Blu (fingers crossed). The image, while rough, is also significantly better than the Panorama (and presumably the Shochiku).

Finally got around to "The Only Son" last night and I was pretty surprised to see that, this being allegedly Ozu's first "talkie", his technique and "style" was already becoming quite solidified and the film comes across as fairly "mature" Ozu in form. His use of sound and music here really wasn't altogether different from some of his stuff 20-30 years later. You can see he generally had a very strong vision of how he wanted his movies to look and feel by even this point in his career.

As far as the crying kid goes, Chisu Ryu does in fact hand his son some money which immediately shuts the kid up, so in this particular scene, they were definitely going for the "fake crying to get what he wants" angle.

I also like the completely hilarious way in which the film gives Ryosuke his "moment of glory". You KNEW that kid had it coming! The funniest thing is we always just see the horse casually standing around, which makes the situation all the more comedic.

I had avoided watching "There Was a Father" for a while because of various places billing it as some sort of Ozu "wartime propaganda" film, so I was pleasantly surprised to find that you could easily slot this in with Ozu's "regular" postwar output and it wouldn't really look out of place. The themes of duty and sacrifice instead play out as your typical Ozu "traditionalist parent vs reluctantly acqueiscing child" conflict. In most cases in Ozu's films it's a father pushing his daughter to get married, because, well, that's what they should do before they become a "lonely old maid." In this case it's about the child becoming a good contributor to society, being a man and all that. Of course, as usual with most Ozu, there's nuance here--he doesn't condemn the rigid mentality of the father but he's obviously sympathetic to the son's desire to put family first as well. So basically, your usual Ozu parent-child dynamic at play here with a few different wrinkles to change it up.

Not really a normal parent-child relationship in TWaF. While the father clearly loves the son (and vice versa), he clearly places his duty to the nation WAY over any sort of personal concerns. Ozu paints the father as admirable (thus making censors happy). Yet he subtly (and almost always wordlessly) undermines the choices made by the father. The relationship portrayed was not really traditional -- but rather was patterned on the militarist/nationalist rhetoric of that era. I think, all things considered (with particular focus on the ending), Ozu hints at his own prefernce for the son's viewpoint.

Films before Only Son were proto-talkies (in a sense) as Ozu was making essentially talkies, albeit doing dialog via intertitles. Partly this was intended to take control away from the benshi (film narrators), which was a Shochiku priority. More importantly, Ozu wanted to experiment with the rhythms he was obseving in Hollywood talkies.

There's no way of knowing what was thought to be the "normal" attitude to have in Japan during that time, though, unless we lived in that era. History books might give us some idea, but you can't necessarily trust a book to accurately measure the general feel of population attitudes during each of era of history. I certainly won't assume anything as "fact" either way; for all we know many Japanese audiences "may" have agreed with the general rhetoric of the father. Placing duty to the nation over personal concern was at one time considered a "normal" attitude to have in many nations--Americans included--so it's utterly conceivable that the father could in fact be thought of as "traditional" back in 1942. Granted, his reasoning for keeping his son away when an utterly logical counter-reason that they could stay together and still fulfill the same function (the son working in Tokyo) is bizarrely brushed off (the biggest argument for it being contrived to reflect a "larger" message), but his general rhetoric doesn't necessarily seem out of place with what a large part of population possibly agreed with. Again, Ozu just seems to use this as a device to set up a parent-child conflict that isn't THAT dissimilar from the more domesticated parent-child conflicts of his postwar films. I can understand why the general Japanese sentiment of duty to the nation might shift after WWII so that after 1945 it was not as popular an attitude to have, but I can definitely see it being thought of as "normal" before that time.

I just don't feel like the censors played as large a part as it's commonly believed in this film. Has Ozu ever really painted any of his characters in a truly negative light? I can't really recall, so it's not surprising to me that the film is sensitive to the father's concerns while not being in full agreement with him.

I'm not arguing I think TWaF is some underrated top drawer Ozu, mind you--I think earlier in the thread you rated it where it should be rated. But I don't feel like the film has been compromised in a way that boxes Ozu into a corner he wouldn't necessarily already reside in.

Probably the the right word is "normative" -- there was lots of explicit propaganda about putting the nation (and Emperor) above mere family concerns. There was lots of explicit disapproval of more typical (family-focused) behavior -- which was attacked for (among other things) being too Western. Japanese nationalists were intent on re-making Japan -- as a sort of militarist Shinto paradise (which had never, in fact, actually existed).

There is a very good book on Japanese cinema in the immediate-pre-war and war-time period -- but I can't recall the name at the moment.

jojo -- for more about movie-making in Japan from the late 20s to the mid-40s, check out Peter High's "Imperial Screen". For the years 1945-1951 (or thereabouts), see Kyoko Hirano's "Mr. Smith Goes to Tokyo".