Takeshi Sakamoto comes to Shûji Sano. He says you're doing well with your automobile agency. You're 34. It's time you got married. Here's a picture of the young lady I have in mind. And he shows him a picture of aristocratic Setsuko Hara.
Sano is awestruck, just as you or I would be. Everyone in the family seems to approve, which seems mad. Eventually it comes out. Miss Hara's father is in prison, the family fortune is gone and there's a million yen mortgage on the house, where the piano has been sold off, the furniture is threadbare, and the elegant hardware is likewise gone. If he marries Miss Sato, there will be a financial arrangement.
Sano is insanely in love with Miss Hara, as anyone would be. She, however, is a beautifully behaved young lady. Sano doesn't care about the money, for once in his life. All he wishes, is for Miss Hara to love him.
What is Keisuke Kinoshita doing, directing a screwball comedy from some one else's script after the War? Well, I'm sure he was well paid for it, and he fills it with some good slapstick. More than that, he fills it with the upper-class snobbery of the fallen aristocrat, the warmth of the bar that Sano frequents. In the brief period of perhaps ten years, when the old class structure was knocked down, to be replaced by a purely mercantile pseudo-aristocracy, there was some hope that the old, wrong barriers would be gone forever.
Looking at it with a cold eye, I thought I would note it was well made. Yet my opinion of it rose as it went on, filled not only with the obvious subplots and characters -- Sano's foster brother, Keiji Sada, is desperately in love with a woman whom Sano forbids he marry, because she is too low-class; Eiko Takamatsu gets stinking drunk and tells off Miss Hara; and so forth. Yet there are the moments of sterling performances, like Fusako Fujima as Miss Hara's grandmother, who natters on blithely how miserable her grand daughter has grown since her engagement. And there's Sano's performance, as a man who has fought his way up from poverty, while remaining kind.
And Setsuko Hara. I don't know how many performances I've seen her give, and just about every time, it seems I think whatever I'm looking at is among her finest. Just like this one.
