Lloyd Bacon | Fifty Million Frenchmen / 1931

pansy’s disqualified

by Douglas Messerli

 

Joseph Jackson, Eddie Welch, and Al Boasberg (screenplay, based on the musical by Herbert Fields, E. Ray Goetz, and Cole Porter), Lloyd Bacon (director) Fifty Million Frenchmen / 1931

 

The motion picture Fifty Million Frenchmen was “based”—if one can describe the complete gutting of the original and its replacement with a “book” that was already dead on arrival as a kind of adaptation—on the Cole Porter of 1929, which had the same characters but little else. Because of the sudden total lack of the American public’s interest in cinematic musical comedies, inundated as they were with the rise of the talkies, Warner Brothers held back their technicolor musical film hoping things might quickly change. Alas, they didn’t, and by 1931 they had stripped away the Porter’s score and the drained the color out to a black-and-white production to release a script written by three movie hacks, Joseph Jackson, Eddie Welch, Al Boalsberg,* who replaced a theater book by Herbert Fields that was already stretching the limits of Broadway acceptance of zany plots. They assigned the direction to Lloyd Bacon, who had only three mediocre comedies under his belt (he later did 42nd Street), and who certainly didn’t have the fearlessness of the original director Monty Wooley. The Technicolor musical was released in other countries but is now lost.

      The reviewer from the Pre-Code.com site summarizes my feelings about this film:

 

 “All we have left is a start and go comedy that doesn’t shy away from the corniest gags it can manage.

      The plot, as it is, involves a bet between Jack and Michael, two rich men who are vacationing in Paris. Both are in love with Lulu, a dim blonde who is also vacationing in Paris. Jack makes a bet that he can get her to marry him without the use of his wealth, and Michael employs a pair of bumbling detectives, Simon and Peter (the comedic team of Olsen and Johnson), to make sure Jack doesn’t cheat.

       Olsen and Johnson as the star attractions falter here since their schtick is that they don’t really have much of one. Johnson has a high-pitched goofy sort of squeal and Olsen has a stick up his rear, but that’s the most of it. Their personalities melt in the face of a joke, as well, making their interplay seem fairly generic.”

       For the most part there is no real plot, and the work is centered around numerous vaudeville-like skits. For example, upon entering the Ritz bar, Olsen and Johnson, observing a nearby drunken patron who has passed out, attempt to mix a drink using his open, snoring mouth as the shaker. After Johnson is robbed by a woman who they’ve been working with as detectives, Olsen remarks: “Swell detective you are, letting a dame steal your watch,” Johnson snapping back, “That’s all right. I got her bracelet,” holding up the item for all to see as he giggles uncontrollably.

       Jack, the lead, spends most of the movie moping over his inability to find the woman he loves, Lulu Carroll (Claudia Dell), who, as the Pre-Code writer observes, “is as interesting as a piece of cardboard,” so that we hardly care whether or not he might find her without using any the millions he’s inherited. But at least he’s a plausible stereotype, the closest to character for which this film strives.

     Given the years of its birth, along with its parentage of Cole Porter and Monty Wooley, there is inevitably a fair share of “pansy jokes” to be tossed off at various occasions. Indeed, there are enough that perhaps, had this film been just a little more interesting, it might have found its way out of my out my grouping of persnickety sissies and into the more solid and sinful sodomite films; but Bacon and his actors evidently don’t even know what to make of the queer jokes that creep up from time to time.

       Early the film when someone asks what brought them to Paris, Olsen quickly replies “I came over looking for a man,” but since no one knows what to do with that suggestive line evidently, Johnson quickly adds, “I came looking for a woman,” the inquirer asking, “Aren’t there any women where you come from?, he answering “Yes, but I know them all.” Ba-bum, another dead end.

       Soon after, a “real live” pansy slides up next to them at the bar, asking for a drink. “O barman, barman, I say, old fellow, a tall, frosted glass with the tiniest piece of lemon peel.” All Johnson can do is uncontrollably squeal, which might lead our prissy friend to imagine for a moment that he’s one of his kind, but such behavior is so absurd that he simply doesn’t know what to make of it as he continues, “A dram of whiskey, a digestion of bitters, a lump and a half of sugar, garnished with a sprig of mint, two cherries, two red cherries.” He’s made clear who he is, but Johnson is so busy squealing that we hardly identify his species let alone his sexuality. The audience doesn’t need Johnson’s taunts to know what was going down, and probably is now more confused than well-humored.

       The best role in this film in search of a way to be simultaneously naughty and funny, is given the American tourist, Violet (Helen Broderick, who later played the marvelous Madge Hardwick, Everett Edward Horton’s worldly-wise wife in the Rogers and Astaire vehicle Top Hat). Here she plays a woman who has already seen the town without being able to find anything that’s left her feeling she’s “insulted,” and wants Jack, now working as a tourist guide, to take her someplace truly naughty. 

     He shows her dirty postcards, but she’s already bought several of them and sent them off to her nephews and nieces. He offers to take her to “dark theaters with little holes in the walls you can look in,” which she finds vaguely of interest (if she were an art collector 30 years later she would certainly have purchased Marcel Duchamp’s Étant donnés), and offers her a knife which when you look into its pinhole is a picture of a muscleman covered only by a thong. She’s not insulted, but does ask, soon after, to see it once again.

      A short while later she encounters Olsen and Johnson working as baggage handlers nearby, who have accidently just opened a large traveling case in which there are drawers and drawers filled with women’s lingerie. Coming upon them, she wonders what they’re doing with all the “Curios,” suggesting her attitude toward such feminine undergarments.

 

Simon: “You’re wrong, lady. This is female underwear!”

Violet: “I was right. Curios. You know, I promised the folks back in America I’d come back with some underwear.”

Simon: “Oh, lady. You should have started out with some.”

Violet: “I meant for the folks back home!” 

 

She turns to go, but turns back again, calling out, “Which one of you two girls is a model,” Simon looking Peter, “I told you to keep your hands off your hip.”

     Amazingly, she finally does get them both to model her lingerie choices, dragging in a little bit of crossdressing into the film’s search for naughtiness. But even she’s not convinced, and purchases nothing from them.

     In between these events and the film’s not speedy enough end, Jack, Peter, and Simon attend a formal ball where they pretend to be magicians and show up at the racetracks where they all bet on a losing horse named Pansy, of course. Despite a number of lame jokes (“I hope pansy isn’t a polite horse.” “Who’s pansy by?” “I don’t know. Every time I see her she’s by herself.”), the horse miraculously wins only to be immediately declared as “disqualified.” Bringing back Violet just to deliver the quip, the director has Jack tell her the bad news, “Pansy’s been disqualified,” to which she quips—obviously foretelling the Hays Code decision of two years later—“I thought she would be.”  The writers, however, can’t even let that joke lay, for a few minutes later Pansy is once again declared to be the winner.

     Chasing for a closing, the film later requires Jack to be kidnapped with Simon and Peter running on foot after the auto into which the villains—hired by his betting partner Michael—have tossed him. They follow the car followed by nearly every gendarme in Paris through the auto-clogged streets over the roofs of the cars, down a newly tarred side-street, and through a whorehouse that appears to fear group orgies, before finally catching up and bringing us back to the end of the bet just in time to explain to nitwit who he wants to marry that he’s truly well-to-do. Consequently, she doesn’t ask a single question and mutters out the words, “I do” just as the movie gives up trying to do anything further to save itself or possibly insult its audiences any further.   

 

*Of the three, Boalsberg was the exception, having written, by 1931, Keaton’s The General and Chasing Rainbows, and later contributing to Freaks, A Night at the Opera, and A Day at the Races. In 1933 he also directed one a movie with one of the healthiest portrayals of a gay figure in the 1930s, Myrt and Marge. But at the time Jackson had already written for dozens of now-forgotten films, so he was obviously hired as the head writer.

 

Los Angeles, April 19, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2022).

Ray Yeung | Suk suk (Twilight's Kiss) / 2019

brief encounter

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ray Yeung (screenwriter and director) Suk suk (Twilight's Kiss) / 2019

 

This is a truly beautiful, loving, and quite painful story of two elderly closeted gay men who, despite their sexuality, have created families in which they are still very much entwined. We in the West, often envy and praise the Asian culture’s embracement of the elderly into family life. But there are obvious dilemmas that come with such heavily entrenched familial relationships for older gay man such as the central figures in this film, Pak (Tai-Bo) and Hoi (Ben Yuen).

     Pak, still married to an embittered woman, Ching (Patra Au), whose anger with him has spread to her own children, including her daughter who is pregnant and about to marry the unemployed father of her unborn child; she is particularly incensed when the couple, having no money, determine to have a small, inexpensive marriage. But we can easily perceive that she knows or at least suspects her husband’s life-time activities and is suspicious of his day and sometimes night-time absences.

     Pak is still working as a taxi driver, a job which evidently, over the years, has allowed him to support his family well. These days, however, we don’t really see him picking up customers as much as using the taxi as a vehicle to cruise between public bathrooms, where, in part because of his age, he rarely is able to engage in any sexual activity.

     Coming out of one such public facility, he encounters Hoi on a public bench nearby and momentarily joins him. But Pak seems to desire immediate sexual contact, while Hoi seeks friendship first, and the meeting ends up with Pak walking away.

   Hoi lives with his son Wan (Chun Yip Lo), his wife, and young daughter. Hoi, who divorced evidently early on, has raised Wan alone. But the son is now rather a monster, a strict fundamentalist Christian who has demanded his own father convert and criticizes his elder for almost all his loving behavior towards his daughter and refusals to attend the endless church gatherings the family embraces. Wan is like a puritan, unable to accept nearly anything outside of the narrow world which he inhabits, even his father serving up sweet puddings to his grandchild. Even more than Pak’s closed off relationship, Hoi is denied almost any joy he might take from his elderly life with the pleasures of family unless they meet with the church strictures which are so narrow that pleasure seems to have been erased.

      Both men, however, are devoted to their families, proud of what they have made of their hard work and suffering. But now, particularly, in their elder age when you might have been given some possibility of enjoying that hard work, they are denied, in various ways, the pleasures life might offer them and which they have so long denied themselves.

    Of the two, Hoi is the far more savvy regarding the gay world. It is he who takes Pak to a gay sauna and leads him to a private back room where they have sex. Hoi, moreover, is involved with the Mature Tongzhi Society, a social group that caters to men 60, who young men are trying to get involved with supporting a governmental project to create senior citizen residences exclusively for gay people. The only problem is that almost all of the men of their social group are still closeted and fearful of coming out to their families, and no one seems willing to appear as a spokesperson for the appeal.

    In the meantime, Hoi and Pak see more of each other and grow closer and fonder through their secret meetings. Hoi, knowing that his family will be away for the weekend, invites Pak to join him at their home where he will prepare a meal. And one of the most brilliant and wonderfully touching outings the two men have together is at the wet market where almost as a couple they shop for dinner, Hoi knowledgeably bartering for the prices with grocers he seems to know, and, at some points, Pak insisting on paying. The meal they cook and share is as close to a real domestic relationship that these men can ever imagine, Hoi insisting Pak eat everything like an overeager and caring partner whose Pak’s own wife has never been.

     The love between grows, even as we observe Hoi, in particular, reaching out to others of his group who find it difficult to even return home or shop for themselves.

     Yet Hoi, indoctrinated by his love for his son into Christian fundamentalism feels it necessary to gift a necklace with a silver cross on it to his new friend, a gift which the agnostic Pak doesn’t know how to react to until Hoi explains that if they die, how will he be able to find him without the token.

     Pak, in turn, invites Hoi to his daughter’s wedding banquet which he and his wife are now paying for. Introduced merely as a friend, however, Hoi remains in the shadows. As Alison Simon writes in Variety: “As Hoi observes the social dynamics in Pak’s extended family, so different from his own, you can see in his eyes the mental acknowledgement that dating a married man is asking for trouble.”

     More importantly, as a wedding present to his new son-in-law, Pak turns over his taxi to him so that he might obtain a taxi license and earn a living to support his beloved daughter. There is a final goodbye to his home away from his house, as he lovingly shows the newlywed how to wash and care for the vehicle, and how to help make the riders feel that this is his home where they are temporarily welcome.

     But giving up his taxi also means losing all mobility and, even more importantly, any logical excuses of leaving his house.

     Hoi, himself, has abandoned his life to his pious Christian son. Even while listening in his own room to the rather quiet to the testimony of one of his friends who has finally come forward to speak out for senior houses for gay people, he is told by Wan to turn it down since it might wake up their daughter, Grace.

     Both men, loving their family, still must sacrifice their love and sexuality. The joy retirement might provide them is even missing from their lives, where both are imprisoned by their pasts.

    In the final scene, having stolen away by bus, Pak enters a Christian church, not for any religious purpose but just to remind himself of the one true love he was briefly permitted in his life, Hoi.

     Throughout, as in many Chinese films, a song accompanies these men’s most intimate moments, this sun by Qing Shan, 微風細雨 which basically translates in “Gentle breeze and drizzle,” which basically reiterates the sad autumns of their lives.

      I saw this movie several years ago, when it was first released, but I guess I wasn’t ready to write about it, although I loved it immediately. Finally, I have been able to watch it again and comment. I can only say, as I have in the past, that Hong Kong director Ray Yeung is one of the best of contemporary gay filmmakers.

 

Los Angeles, July 30, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2026).

 

Peter Browne | Firsts / 2025

snap judgment

by Douglas Messerli

 

Peter Browne (screenwriter and director) Firsts / 2025 [7.20 minutes]

 

A highly self-conscious gay man, Peter (Charles Realubit), suffering from a bipolar condition, finally chooses to date someone he’s met on-line, Dante (Quentin Boyer). You’ll have to pardon the quite obnoxious narrative voice constantly interrupting the story-line instead of the director simply providing the conversation the two may actually engage in. The lines, moreover, are all stolen from too many other gay movies about dating, but this time with a certain twist.

    Dante has a sister, Sam (Kristen Caroselli) who, so he realizes with a phone call, “is off her meds again.”

     Is she going to be okay? asks Dante.

   The answer is what cuts him off again from the world he has finally thought he has entered, a possible male relationship.

    “Who knows,” answers Dante. “She’s bipolar.”

    The stigma is there, and the date is off.

    As the obnoxious female narrator reports, for Peter it suggests again that there is something fundamentally wrong with him, “which, let’s be honest, there was.”

    As someone who has lived most of my life with what I have believe is a person with an undiagnosed borderline bipolar condition, I can well understand. One moment your companion is sweet and charming, the next angry and even violent. At times he is positive and fully contributing to the world, the next depressed and unsure of where he’s going. If you don’t like Ferris Wheels, I suggest you don’t marry a bipolar person. For frankly, there is no way to calm or correct the radical shifts in personality. They are only to be expected and survived.

    But the love for that person does not cease, and that is where Peter is totally mistaken, having judged his new friend on the basis of a single statement.

    For a moment, in a split camera view, we see both men suffering the sudden break in possibilities, sitting by their cellphones as they attempt to re-instate the relationship, foot to frame almost as in Doris Day and Rock Hudson in Pillow Talk.

    Then one day Dante, out walking with his sister Sam, runs into Peter, confronting him nicely with the fact that he never texted him back, when at least he could have just…. We know the empty part of the phrase: he might have just explained he wasn’t interested. And suddenly Peter opens up telling him it was comment about his sister, that he too has often gone on and off his medicines: “Sometimes you don’t want a soft dick! Or the constant hunger, or the weight gain, right?”

    Peter proclaims he’s so “So sick of guys making judgments based on one line of dialogue.”

    Dante: “You mean the way you judged me off of one line of dialogue?”

    Dante explains: “She’s my sister. I love her. You’re wrong.”

    The sister turns to the camera and continues to analyze the situation, as if we needed further explanation.

     But the sister, fortunately, does quickly resolve the problem as they head together to the pharmacy for more meds, after which they will share a pancake breakfast.

     And they all live happily ever after.

   This film is more than slightly irritating in its tone and approach, and certainly is a piece of fluff despite its quite serious topic about how bipolar people are forced to live in a world of constant alterations of mood and perception about their worlds. But I do believe, having a sister with the same condition will most certainly help Dante live in a relationship with Peter, is he so chooses. The absurd narration already has them married.

 

Los Angeles, July 30, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2026).

Lee Rose | Jack / 2004

my dad’s gay. but at least he doesn’t beat his wife

by Douglas Messerli

 

A. M. Homes (screenplay, based on her fiction), Lee Rose (director) Jack / 2004

 

Who could not like a television film made to be seen on Showtime, Hallmark and other such feel-good networks starring a young Anton Yelchin, Ron Silver, and Stockard Channing as members of family that has suddenly, and more importantly from the 15-year-old boy’s point of view, inexplicably fallen apart? The problems, seen through the eyes of Yelchin as the titular character are centered upon the fact that the boy’s idolized father, Paul has gradually come to discover himself as a gay man, and has left his wife Anne and son Jack to live with his new lover Bob (Paul McGillion).

     Of course, such a film must first find a way around Paul’s difficulty in attempting to explain the situation to his son, and then deal with Jack’s reaction, whatever that may be. But obviously both of those issues also depend very much on the time-frame in which these revelations are taking place. In the world based on A. M. Homes book, written when she was only 19, it appears we might almost be in the suburban 1950s, perhaps the early 1960s, particularly given the emblematic signs the director, Lee Rose, has posted of all American boyhood during the movie’s credits: a skateboard, a basketball, a football, a baseball bat, a soccer ball, and a pair of roller skates all planted, apparently, in the family’s front yard, as if accidentally left there. It’s enough to give even the head coach of American University, where Homes went to school, a good case of jock itch. I didn’t so much scratch my crotch as my head in pondering why just one token from US boyhood might not have served better than six or more emblems of boyhood normalcy. Perhaps the skateboards suggests the 1970s or 1980s. We never quite find out what decade we’re in.

     The intelligent and sensitive Jack, who we meet mostly through his external moderation of his internal feelings and who comes off, at moments, to have the amazing insights and wisdom of the young Barry Gordon playing Nick Burns in A Thousand Clowns, could not possibly be the same boy who lives in that house. Indeed, his home is the kind of two-story clapboard construction one sees more in urban areas. Anne, a wise-cracking, understandably bitter, basketball-playing mother who never makes breakfast and can hardly cook, seems anything but the placid suburban housewife that her best friend, Elaine Burka (Wendy Crewson) portrays, as if the two got confused and showed up thinking they were on different movie sets. In short, we don’t know where we’re at except in some sort of stereotypical vision of the good ‘ole USA.

      No wonder Paul is having such a difficult time explaining to Jack what’s happened as he invites his son out to the very best restaurants that serve up delicacies such as mousse, squid, game hen, and whatever else it takes make a homosexual happy to the hamburger eating Jack. For such a bright kid in his narrative voiceovers, however, Jack appears to be rather dense about sensing what his father is trying to tell him. And when Paul finally does, with the two of them in a boat in some whipped up wildlife paradise, Jack simply cannot deal with having a queer father, diving into the lake and swimming off with a determination to never speak to this new stranger again.

      No sooner has he confessed what he has just been told to his best friend on the basketball team, Max (Giacomo Baessato), than someone spray-paints the words “fag baby” on his school locker door. Jack’s friend has clearly let a few of his school chums know the situation, trying to appease Jack’s wrath by writing, in red ink, above it: “Not a….”

      When Paul finally convinces Jack to join him and Bob on a bowling outing, since they’ve also invited two gay friends, one of whose daughter, Maggie (Britt Irvin), who is the most beautiful girl in the school on which Jack has a crush, the son is somewhat mollified. The two, as children with gay fathers, suddenly have a great deal to say to one another and even make a movie date. But as they eat in the alley after, Maggie’s father kisses his gay partner, sending all the kids, Jack, Max, and Maggie into nervous twitters. Certainly, this movie can’t be set in the 1990s!

      In that same bowling alley, a hostile school bully shows up witnessing the whole gathering and, you guessed it, now sweeping up Maggie into their schoolmate’s adolescent abuse. As Jack reports to Max: “I’m about two minutes away from losing my mind...” Reporting to the school nurse—who evidently shares the humor of the puberty-tortured kids around her, asking him, “So shall we call this a mental health moment?”—he calls his mother to come pick him up.

      In short, Jack has not only the normal difficulties of a 15-year-old in comprehending what a shift in sexual interest might mean, but practically announces it as a disease to which he himself has now been exposed. Although both Anne and Paul make lame attempts to explain to Jack that he cannot inherit being gay and that, despite the changes around him, he will remain the same being he always was, that they both still love him, and that, well….sometimes you just can’t change the way you are, there is utterly no attempt to sit the boy down and attempt to explain what sexuality is really about and why some people prefer opposite sex partners while others prefer the same sex. The movie, rather, treats it all as a ridiculous joke that simply must be endured by the children of such altered relationships.

      When Jack finally tells Paul of the school abuse he’s suffered, the confused father asks is something he might do such as speak to his schoolmates, Jack makes the perfect comeback:  “Like what, have a school assembly: ‘Okay everybody, Jack’s father’s here to talk about homosexuality and why we shouldn’t call his son fag baby.’”

       But don’t worry folks, everything will turn out okey-dokey. On a camping trip into the back country with Max’s father, mother, and brother, not only does he discover that Mr. Burka is more than a little alcoholic, but that he regularly beats his beautiful wife Eliane, this time quite seriously.  

     Elaine drives off with the boys, her face black-and-blue. And along the way, Jack calls his mother, who’s not home, and then his father to come check on Max’s mother when they arrive home. In a hokey Indian shop, he buys an Indian headdress and a spear, clearly a young boy’s attempt to signal to Elaine that he will protect her, also offering her as a present, we suspect, of a hand-woven ring to announce his secret pledge.

       So Jack discovers his family is just normally crazy, not miserably crazy like Max and his folks. He even gets to like his father and, to a certain degree, Bob. And he grows especially close, as his 16th birthday rolls around, to his now true love-interest, the other fag baby, Maggie. Evidently “fag-babies” in this time and world—whenever and wherever it is—naturally make bonds.

        I’m sure it never crossed the minds of author Homes and director Rose, their stomachs swollen with a Christmas ham or Thanksgiving turkey stuffed with the best of intentions, that there might be anything homophobic about their tale. Afterall, Jack got through his hard times by realizing that he is not a queer but just “Jack” with his whole life ahead of him. And they didn’t even gag, I am certain, on their empty clichés.

     No one connected with this film, it appears, might have ever imagined that Paul is the real one who has been made to suffer, and that his only salvation has been the truth he has come to about his being queer. Apparently, he and Bob have no real agreement with Anne about child visitation rights. In fact, we know nothing much about Bob and Paul’s relationship, how they fell in love, and how Paul came to terms with himself, information which might have truly helped Jack—who at one point asks why his father can’t just forget the phase he’s passing through, and come back home—to understand what sexuality is not always something firm and finished, but can be fluid and even indeterminant as one comes to realize one’s inner needs and desires. Or that sometimes one’s wired sexuality just isn’t perceived until later in maturity.

       All that might be necessary to deal honestly with Jack’s understandable questions is sucked out of the work in its predictable sympathy with and accordant attention to wife and child, much like Todd Haynes’ Far from Heaven, another film with lots of good intentions but in its almost nostalgic reverence for the sexual and racial limitations of the past, offers few honest solutions. Growing to perceive that one’s family situation is not as bad as others, is no answer to coming to terms with just how remarkably brave and honorable both Jack’s parents despite their individual suffering. The movie even seems to imply that Jack will be just fine because, after all, he’s a heterosexual, a basketball player, one of the normal kids with a skateboard, bat, foot- and soccer-ball in every pocket.

      I can just see a brand-new Hallmark card: on the outside it shows two partying guys with the words “Hey, we’re gay!” And inside: “But it’s all right ‘cause you’re still you.”

 

Los Angeles, October 9, 2020

Reprinted from World Cinema Review and My Queer Cinema blog (October 2020).  

Yasujirō Ozu | 東京暮色 (Tōkyō boshoku) (Tokyo Twilight) / 1957

gambling with life

by Douglas Messerli

 

Yasujirō Ozu and Kōgo Noda (screenplay), Yasujirō Ozu (director) 東京暮色 (Tōkyō boshoku) (Tokyo Twilight) / 1957

 

Japanese director Yasujirō Ozu’s Tokyo Twilight of 1957 is one of his darkest and despairing of his works. Here, as in most of his films, the focus is on domestic relationships, but whereas in most of his cinematic depictions people come to a common level, signifying open communication, in the Sugiyama home people come and go with the quick ring of the opening door as they sit and stand at various levels, or hurry off to their own rooms within.

     Shukichi Sugiyama (Chishū Rhū), a successful banker, lives at home with his youngest daughter, Akiko (Ineko Arima), who has been attending the university but, to his disappointment, has decided instead to become and English-language stenographer. She is at the age when, as a grown woman, she is testing the limits of her freedom, and, having fallen in love with a fellow student, Kenji, she stays out late each night; in the local bars and gambling parlors she is known as a wild woman.

     Just prior to the beginning of the film’s events, Aikio’s elder, more domestically responsible sister, Takako, has temporarily left her professor husband Yasuo Naumata, and with her toddler daughter has moved back home. She alone seems to care for her father, who gratefully accepts her attentions, although he mostly eats out each evening before returning home.

      In many of the film’s early scenes, we follow both the elder Sugiyama and his youngest daughter through a series of tea houses, bars, and other locations, wherein passing strangers and friends reveal information both inconsequential and personal, that establishes the context of the drama’s events.

     With a few cinematic strokes, Ozu makes it clear that Akiko, seeking out her boyfriend, is pregnant. And we later discover from Sugiyama’s sister, Haruko Sugimura (Shigeko Takeuchi) that Akiko has attempted to borrow money from her, without giving her the reason, which we must presume is for an abortion.

      When Akiko finally does catch up with her lover Kenji, he is overwhelmed by what he describes as his bad luck. Although he promises to meet her after he gets off from his job, he never shows up, soon after determining to leave Tokyo.

      After waiting for hours in the bar in which Kenji has promised to meet her, obviously a meeting place for a house of prostitution, the young Akiko is taken in by the police for questioning. Takako is called and arrives at the police station to take Aiko home.

     Takako attempts to keep the news from their father, but he too has been called in their absence, and questions Akiko about both her attempt to get a loan and her arrest. Takako finally succeeds, however, in stopping the questioning, sending the obviously upset Akiko to bed.

     In short, any real attempt to get at the truth is silenced in this house, and neither father or sister discovers the facts which may better help their troubled family member. Soon after, we observe Akiko at a clinic, having evidently found the proper amount of money to get the abortion. The father accidently discovers the source when a friend later reveals that he has lent Akiko money.

    We soon discover, moreover, another of the family’s secrets. A woman who runs a local mahjong parlor, Kisako Soma (Isuzu Yamada) is asking questions about Akiko, and seems to already know, reports a friend, a great deal about her. Aikio herself visits the parlor and speaks briefly to the woman, who invites her into a private room to talk, Akiko refusing to enter.

     She later reveals her encounter with Kisako to her sister, suggesting that the woman seemed almost like her mother, a woman who she has been told died when she herself was a toddler.

     The family’s busybody aunt confirms to Takako that she has encountered Kisako in a department store. Takako, who knows the true story of her mother’s abandonment of the family for another man, visits the mahjong parlor to demand that Kisako not reveal her identity to her sister.

     But once more, a casual comment by a friend that Akiko’s sister has visited the mahjong parlor leads the younger sister to confront her elder sibling. Takako is forced to reveal the truth, and in anger and now believing that her own “bad” ways may have been inherited if she was the daughter of the other man, she seeks out the woman, who takes her to a nearby location where the two can privately talk.

     Their conversation begins with the girl’s insistence to whether or not Sugiyama is her real father; when Kisako insists that he is, Akiko turns on her for her abandonment of the family and storms out.

     Depressed both by the abortion and her encounter with her mother, Akiko retreats to a Chinese noodle shop. When she accidentally encounters Kenji there, he tries to apologize for not showing up in the bar and lies to her about his feelings; Akiko slaps his face and runs from the shop. The owner hears a scream and leaves to find out what has happened while Kenjo merely sits alone in self-pity.

     Ozu reveals the rest of his story in a series of sequences with ellipses between them. In the first, Takako and her father sit by the bedside of the suffering Akiko, who coming briefly out of a coma, reports that she wants to begin over again and hopes that she will survive. This suggests that the “accident” may have been an attempt at suicide, but Ozu is careful not to definitely tell us what really happened.

     In the second sequence, Takako visits her mother to tell her of the death of Akiko and blame her, yet again, for her preference for her lover over the family and maternal responsibilities, leaving the elderly woman alone with the recognition that both of her daughters have suffered for her leaving them. Kisako’s husband, who, having been offered a job elsewhere, has been trying to convince his wife to join him, and now Takako tells him that she is ready to go.

     The third sequence entails a visit to the Sugiyama house by Kisako. Met at the doorway by Takako, she is not invited in, but nonetheless, Kisako gives her condolences and hands over the flowers she has brought, telling her daughter of her intentions to leave by train soon after.

     In the last sequence, Takako, finally seated at the same level as her father, tells him of her decision to return home, determined to try to make the relationship work for the sake of her own child.

     It is almost, in these last sequences, that the director were closing off all possible routes of real love and communication for his characters. Perhaps Takako will find a new life with Numata, but we have no evidence for his transformation or that she will find new happiness.

     Throughout this powerful story, Ozu shows almost all of his characters gambling. When Akiko goes in search of Kenji, she first encounters his classmates illegally gambling in their rooms. Again and again, the denizens of the mahjong parlor put their money on the line while claiming they always lose. Later, we observe even the family scion, Sugiyama, sneaking out of his bank to play the local slots. Akiko and Kisako, quite obviously, have bet their loves against love. So is Takako making a bet that life can be made better through personal sacrifice.

 

Los Angeles, October 28, 2015

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2015).