Walk Cheerfully

     Yasujiro Ozu's Walk Cheerfully (1930), in spite of its title, is a crime melodrama.  Kenji--Ken the Knife (Minoru Takada)--is a thief working with a small gang.  One day, he sees Yasue (Hiroko Kawasaki) emerging from a jewelry store and getting into a big expensive car.  He believes she's a wealthy young woman, but his associate and past love interest, Chieko (Satoko Date), works in the same office with Yasue.  Ono (Takeshi Sakamoto), their boss, comes on to Yasue.  He sent her to the jewelry store in his car, and evidently wants to make her his mistress, Mad Men-style.
     Later, Kenji nearly runs over Yasue's little sister.  This only in a movie-type coincidence commences his relationship with Yasue, who, finding out he's a criminal, insists she'll not have anything to do with him unless he adopts a straight life.  He loses friends, including the embittered Chieko, when he severs ties with his past, getting a job as a window washer.
     Chieko takes revenge by arranging an assignation at a run down hotel between her boss, Ono, and Yasue.  Ono, alone with Yasue, behaves like a pushy creep, stopped by Kenji--clued in by Chieko herself to force him to behave violently.  Chieko wants Ken the Knife to return in order to help her with a heist she and her new boyfriend are planning.  Kenji shoves Ono, Yasue flees, but the Knife stays hidden.
     Yasue later witnesses Kenji and Chieko as the latter tries to get him to join in with her heist plan.  He resists, Chieko's boyfriend shoots him in the arm, but later on Chieko rats him out to the cops.  Chieko is a pain in the ass.
     Kenji resolves to do time, amounting to several months.  He's reunited with Yasue, everything is fine.
     I've made this movie seem like a typical Hollywood crime melodrama, yet the plot isn't what's remarkable about it.  Yasujiro Ozu's signature style is frequently present: his live action outside the studio scenes with real driving shots, for instance; his reliance on real locations (in Tokyo, I assume) including vistas of urban Japan in 1929-1930, years before some of these locales were probably destroyed by American bombing.  Ozu's use of "pillow shots," in-between images connecting scenes, often shots without people of buildings, infrastructure, laundry hanging on lines, is already present in this early film, the tenth of his career.
     The presentation of the banal story material sometimes rises above the plot.  Interesting, too, are the allusions to American culture: a poster of Clara Bow, another advertising the Joan Crawford film, Our Dancing Daughters, the 1920s-style Western clothes worn by the underworld characters, their penchant for games like golf and billiards.  The pure and good Yasue wears traditional Japanese garb while her co-worker Chieko dresses like a wannabe Gloria Swanson.  The performers, especially Minoru Takada as Kenji and Satoko Date as the scheming Chieko, carry themselves with a realism not matched by the film's many incredible coincidences.
     The film is part of The Criterion Collection's subsidiary Eclipse Series, entitled Silent Ozu--Three Crime Dramas.  I plan to review the other two films in this DVD set soon.

                                                                              Vic Neptune  

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