DVD Release Date: April 21, 2015
Price: DVD $44.95
Studio: Criterion
The great Japanese filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu (Tokyo Story) is best known for the stately, meditative domestic dramas he made after World War II.
But during his first decade at Shochiku studios, where he dabbled in many genres, he put out a trio of precisely rendered, magnificently shot and edited silent crime films about the hopes, dreams, and loves of small-time crooks. There are compiled here in Criterion’s Eclipse 42 series.
Heavily influenced in narrative and visual style by the American films that Ozu adored, these movies are revelatory early examples of his cinematic genius, accompanied here by new piano scores by Neil Brand.
The three-DVD box set includes the following crime dramas:
Walk Cheerfully (1930)
In Ozu’s Walk Cheerfully, which gracefully combines elements of the relationship drama and the gangster story, small-time hood Kenji, a.k.a. Ken the Knife, wants to go straight for good girl Yasue but finds that starting over isn’t as simple as it sounds. This was the Japanese master’s first true homage to American crime movies, and it is a fleetly told, expressively shot work of humor and emotional depth.
Yasujiro Ozu’s 1930 crime drama That Night’s Wife
That Night’s Wife (1930)
In noirish darkness, a man commits a shocking robbery. But, as we soon learn, this seeming criminal mastermind is actually a sensitive everyman driven to commit desperate deeds for the sake of his family. Unfolding over the course of one night, the film combines suspense with the emotional domestic drama one associates with Ozu’s later masterpieces and employs beautifully evocative camera work.
Dragnet Girl (1933)
This formally accomplished and psychologically complex gangster tale pivots on the growing attraction between Joji, a hardened career criminal, and Kazuko, the sweet-natured older sister of a newly initiated young hoodlum—a relationship that provokes the jealousy of Joji’s otherwise patient moll, Tokiko. With effortlessly co4ol performances and visual inventiveness, Dragnet Girl is a bravura work from Yasujiro Ozu.
The films are presented with Japanese intertitles with English subtitles.
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Buy or Rent Eclipse 42: Silent Ozu – Three Crime Dramas
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