AN INN IN TOKYO (68)

Directed by: Yasujiro Ozu (1935)

Starring: Takeshi Sakamoto, Tokkan Kozo, Yoshiko Okada

The Pitch: An unemployed man wanders the outskirts of 1930s Tokyo with his two young sons, looking for work.

Theo Sez: The early scenes are a revelation : those (like me) who know Ozu only from his 50s work may well wonder when exactly this expansive neo-realist turned into the arthritic old coot of those gentle, rather introverted, everyone-on-a-tatami-mat movies - and, more to the point, why the later work is by far the more acclaimed (surely just a question of the films' availability). Depression-era Tokyo - semi-urban, like the post-war Rome of BICYCLE THIEVES - is memorably evoked as a place of dusty roads and crooked telegraph poles, a warren of streets surrounded by pylons and factories (though with never any work) ; and, as our three protagonists wander through this unprepossessing landscape, the film manages to encompass both the sad-eyed weariness of the father (and of every other adult he meets) and the goofy antics of his kids, most touchingly in the scene where the three of them share an imaginary meal, gobbling invisible rice to take the edge off their hunger. The later scenes are also a surprise, but a less welcome one - rather musty 30s melodrama, culminating in heroic self-sacrifice for the life of a child. Still an interesting movie, a glimpse into what is - both in terms of film history and of what films have shown us - very much an unknown world.