Yasujiro Ozu - That Night's Wife (1930)

Adapted from the Oscar Shisgall short story From Nine to Nine, That Night's Wife is, in my mind, Ozu's most successful crime thriller. Dragnet Girl might be considered a more ripe offering, but Wife has a visual energy that had me literally glued to the screen for its 65-minute running time. The script by Kogo Noda is also nicely crafted. The film can be divided into two parts: in the first one, Shuji robs an office to get enough money to buy medicine for his critically sick daughter Michiko. We cross cut between Shuji's escape after the robbery and his home where his wife Mayumi takes care of their daughter. The second part takes place almost exclusively inside Shuji's and Mayumi's apartment, where they take a detective hostage so that Shuji can be at his daughter's side until she gets better. Moved by the family's dedication and love for their little one, Detective Kagawa lets Shuji escape but the young father decides that he doesn't want to live a life on the run and prefers to go to prison.

With a relatively light-weight script, Ozu gives us a lot of stylistic arabesques. During the first part, we do not only get one of very few instances of Ozu cross-cutting, but he puts his own spin on it too. His signature cut-aways function here as transitional elements between the two lines of action. In one instance, he cuts from the apartment to the police chasing Shuji. We get a shot of a lamp inside the apartment, a shot of a pot flower, a shot of a streetlamp and some tree leafs, a shot of leaf shadows on a wall, and finally a shot of Shuji crouching in the dark. Later, Ozu links Shuji's escape and his daughter's critical illness by cutting from Shuji's feet, to Michiko's slippers and Mayumi's feet, as she lays sleeping on her daughter's bed. There is also a strong emphasis on hands. When Shuji runs out of the office he just robbed, Ozu tracks in on the imprint of a hand on the closing office door. Later, he cuts from the hands of policemen pointing on a sketch of Tokyo's streets, to the gloved hands of the cab driver who brings Shuji home after the robbery. Cut to the distressed father's face, and cut back to the driver's hands on the stirring wheel. It's a peculiar sequence of images that prepares us for the fact that the cab driver is in reality Detective Kagawa.

Aside from using his bravado editing and cutaways to make narrative points, Ozu experiments a lot with tracking shots. No other Ozu film, I think, has such an articulated camera. The most spectacular example is the way he conveys moments of arresting fear for Shiju and Mayumi. When Kagawa knocks for the first time at their apartment door, Ozu tracks in on the door, dissolves to the the same door seen from Kagawa's perspective, and tracks back at the same speed. It's a startling and singular image in Ozu's catalogue. What distinguishes Ozu from a lot of other directors, however, is that he doesn't use these methods to merely show off his artistic prowess, but that he intersperses them at precise moments in the film to enhance the narrative. Through visual means Ozu makes us feel the couple's panic as they realize that the police is at their door. That's simply great cinema.

Noda's script uses typical Hollywood tropes to delineate characters. He puts Shuji in two impossibly tense situations and watches how he reacts. That's what we call "revealing characters through action". The first situation finds Shiju fleeing from the police. He calls his daughter's doctor to inquire on her condition. Doc tells him that she might not make it through the night and that Shiju should go home immediately and be at her side. But Shiju has to lay low during the night so as to not get caught by the cops. Going home could mean being arrested. What does he do? Through his next choice, we know what type of character he is: he goes home. There, Mayumi holds Kagawa at gun point. Shiju has the possibility to escape. But his daughter cries for him. What does he do? He stays home and takes care his daughter, even though that means taking Kagawa hostage. Factor in the fact that he is willing to commit a serious crime in order to help his daughter, and we have a pretty good idea of who this guy is. And all of that without a single line of dialogue. That is a fairly common Hollywood way to characterize film protagonists while avoiding to turn them into talking heads. Unfortunately, as exemplified recently by The Kids Are All Right, Inception or Jack Goes Boating, it is presently a practice on the verge of extinction.