Shukujo to hige

A super early Yasujiro Ozu silent film, and I'm not sure there's a ton to say about it. It was the shortest film of my watchlist, and I felt like that made it a good option to watch (plus I just watched a Wim Wenders documentary about Ozu and Japan, and I've been writing about both lately).

This feels like a comedy about a guy who can't really fit in, because he has a beard, and then it pivots in the second half to focus on the sorts of conflict I'm more used to seeing in Ozu films. I think for its time, it's decent, and I can imagine there are plenty of cultural references or even just ideas explored that are lost on me, watching it nearly 100 years later and in a different country.

It's interesting from a historical point of view, and certainly not dreadfully made, but I can't say I got a huge amount out of it.

This eccentric comedy of manners follows a love quadrangle centered on a kendo master (Tokihiko Okada), whose chauvinistic upholding of Japanese culture screeches to a halt when he falls for a progressive (but not too progressive) office worker. He shaves his beard (after protesting memorably that "all great men have beards!" including Lincoln, Darwin and Marx), puts on a suit and learns the Western ways of wooing a woman, attracting a haughty aristocrat and a gangster floozy in the process. The three very different women seem to be presented as three feminine responses to the Western modernization of Japan, with the office girl being the ideal (conversant in Western ways while wrapped fetchingly in a kimono). Ozu's often hilarious depictions of Okada's romantic entanglements owe a good deal to Lubitsch, but his sensitivity to cultural disparity is uniquely his.

The title would today suggest something entirely different, but this is an early Ozu comedy with an entirely different point. Tokihiko Okada is graduating from college, but no employer wants to hire some one with a full, bushy beard, which he wears, he explains, like Abraham Lincoln, to keep the ladies away. However, after he rescues Hiroko Kawasaki from a street gang, she advises him in a friendly fashion that the beard is getting in the way of his job-hunting.... so he shaves it, gets a job and suddenly, he is the object of desire of Miss Kawasaki -- whom he likes -- but also a predatory rich girl and a gangster's moll.

It's a thoroughly Lubitschian set-up, but while Ozu in this period is an international talent -- the inevitable movie poster on display is from the Laurel & Hardy version of THE DEVIL'S BROTHER -- the philosophical impulse is far more reminiscent of his previous year's effort, WALK CHEERFULLY.

The print I saw was not in good condition and the notes indicated that sections were missing. Certainly, some transitions were a bit abrupt, although that might be attributable to differences in elements of comic timing between nations. The result is that while this is a thoroughly enjoyable piece, it's by no means anything special.