The oft-quoted cliché about Yasujirō Ozu is that he is the most “Japanese” of Japanese directors, a somewhat problematic claim (is there really a single ideal expression of Japanese character?) that nonetheless strives to describe a style and sensibility that rejected the cinematic influences of the West. His evolution is all the more fascinating given his love of Hollywood films as a voracious young film buff. His film career began in the early 1920s as an assistant cameraman at Shochiku, Japan’s biggest film studio. He remained at Shochiku his entire career, working his way up to assistant to director Tadamoto Okubo before making his directorial debut in 1927. The film, the only period piece of his career, has not survived. Ozu made every type of genre in those early years, from lighthearted college comedies to crime dramas and romantic melodramas to social dramas, turning out as many as six features a year. But, he really found his voice in shomin-geki, which translates to “home drama,” stories that explore the everyday lives of middle and lower middle-class citizens.
Where so many of his contemporaries delved into adventures and elegant period dramas, Ozu’s films are contemporary to his times. From his silent films in the early 1920s to his final film in 1962, An Autumn Afternoon, he set his quietly understated family dramas and modest comedies in the homes and workplaces of everyday citizens trying to make a life for themselves and their children. His films are a veritable survey of Japanese society from the late 1920s to the early 1960s, exploring themes of social expectations, familial responsibility, sacrifice and the collision of traditional culture and modern life, from The Depression through The War to the transition of a new democracy and Western-style economy.
TCM celebrates the legacy of Yasujirō Ozu, proclaimed by film critic and historian David Bordwell as “the greatest director ever to work in the history of cinema,” with 20 features plus the TV premiere of a new documentary on the legendary filmmaker.
[Originally published in Movietone News 33, July 1974]
Silent Ozu – Three Crime Dramas (Eclipse 42) (Criterion, DVD) is an apt companion piece to Criterion’s previous set of silent Yasujiro Ozu films on their Eclipse line. The artist called the most “Japanese” of Japanese directors, famous for the quiet restraint and rigorous simplicity of his sound films, was a voracious film buff more interested in Hollywood movies than his own national cinema early in his career and he thrived in a great variety of genres. The previous Eclipse set collected a trio of family comedies. This one offers three gangster films: Ozu noir, so to speak, inspired by the late silent crime pictures by Josef von Sternberg and American pictures. These films are more intimate character pieces than the gangster romantic tragedies of their American cousins, but they are lively productions directed with a dynamic style he stripped away through the 1930s.
The five-disc set The Films of Budd Boetticher from Sony Pictures Home Video more than doubles the number of Boetticher films on DVD (before the release of this box set, only four of his 35 features were available, and only a few more on VHS and laserdisc), but more importantly, it finally gives this American director his due with beautiful editions of his essential films, especially his definitive The Tall T (mastered to fit the 16×9 frame) and his widescreen classics Ride Lonesome and Comanche Station, all tightly scripted by Kennedy with a lyrical approach of dialogue, all set in an increasingly abstract nowhereland of the desert. The offbeat black comedy Buchanan Rides Alone and the grim Decision at Sundown are minor companion pieces with a few major pleasures (among them a beautiful turn by a young L.Q. Jones as an amiable young cowpoke in Buchanan). In all of them, Boetticher took the “limitations” of his stiff, craggy star and turned them into essential elements of his characters: a hard, inexpressive man at home on a horse and in the wilderness, a survivor with few words and no wasted actions. The same can be said for Boetticher’s direction: every shot of his best films is austere and pared to the essentials, yet directed with an ease that made them live and breath. Martin Scorsese provides a marvelous video introduction to The Tall T (and, by extension, the entire series) and Ride Lonesome with a mixture of historical perspective and cinephile love of the films and Clint Eastwood introduces Comanche Station, but an even greater contribution is the documentary Budd Boetticher: A Man Can Do That, a feature-length portrait of the director and his life and career produced by Eastwood and directed by Bruce Ricker.