Written By
Ozu Yasujiro ('James Maki')
Ikeda Tadao
Cinematography
Sugimoto Shojiro
Cast
Sakamoto Takeshi (Kihachi)
Fushimi Nobuko (Harue)
Ohikata Den (Jiro)
Iida Choko (Otome)
Tomio Aoki (Tomio)
Tani Reiko (Barber)
Ryu Chishu (Man of boat)
Synopsis
Kihachi Kimura lives a hand to mouth existence
raising his son Tomio. One day he meets Harue,
who has nowhere to go. Besotted with her, he gets
his friend Otome to take her in. But Harue loves
his fellow-worker Jiro. Kihachi goes off the rails
until Tomio has a tantrum. Jihachi gives him a
huge sum of pocket money, and Tomio gets critically
ill gorging on snacks. Jiro and Harue confess
their love. He gets a loan to pay for Toimio's
treatment, and takes on a job in Hokkaido. When
Kihachi finds out, he rushes to take his place,
but starts to miss his son and jumps ship to get
back to Tokyo.
Thoughts from Ozu While I was growing up in Fukagawa, there
was a good-natured lay-about who frequented our
house. He became my model for Kihachi. Since Ikeda
Tadao had also come across many suck fellows in
Okachimachi, we delineated his character together.
There's a scene in which Kihachi's son gets teased
by his classmates because his father is always
running off to flirt with a girl he fancies. When
the boy comes home from school, he ruins Kihachi's
favorite plant. When Kihachi returns all flustered
after seeing his dream girl, his glee turns to
anger, and he gives his son a good thrashing.
The boy hits back and the two get into a big scuffle.
Eventually, Kihachi cools down and so does his
son, who then bursts into tears. If the negatives
still exists, I'd love to watch that scene again.
Background
The
30th film, shot from July to August of 1933. The
film has the second title Record of a Tenement
Gentleman First Story (Nagaya shinshiroku
daiichi wa). After the completion of Dragnet
Girl, Ozu wrote the screenplay for the film
College is a Nice Place (Daigaku yai
toko) with Arata Masao. This is a story about
a group of students living in a student boarding
house like in the good old days, but in a hopeless
situation, having lost the happiness of youth
of the former years. This story was considered
as too poor in box-office value and was stored
for later use (Ozu finished the film in 1936).
In this situation, Ozu made Passing Fancy
based on a screenplay by Ikeda Tadao. This film
started the "Kihachi series" with the
main character called Kihachi, played by Sakamoto
Takeshi. The main characters live now in in tenement
quarters in shitamachi, the old parts of Tokyo,
where the spirit of the Edo era is still alive.
In Ozu's work, this is a 180 degree turn. Ozu
knows the old parts of town inside out. Born in
1903 in Fukagawa, a part of shitamachi, he moved
to his father's hometown, Matsusaka in Mie prefecture,
at the age of 9, but returned to Fukagawa at the
age of 19. Ikeda Tadao too lived in Shitaya-Okachimachi
in shitamachi. These were their everyday surroundings.
The film is probably inspired by King Vidor's
The Champ (1931), the story of an unsuccessful
boxer and his comeback, mixed with a sentimental
plot about a father and son. Posters of this film
hang in the boxing gym of the previous Dragnet
Girl. Ozu and Ikeda took the subject of a
failed father and an honest son from this story
and transferred it to their hometown shitamachi.
The development from Dragnet Girl to Passing
Fancy, as it appears in the continuation of
the boxing elements, shows Ozu's conflict between
modernism and internationalism on the one hand,
and the shitamachi community and the internationalism
on the other hand. This has an impact even on
contemporary viewers, who at first sight might
consider the story of Passing Fancy obsolete.
Kihachi's self-sacrifice for Jiro and Harue (his
decision to go to Hokkaido) seems to be influenced
by John Ford's Three Bad Men (1926). The
film ends with Kihachi jumping into the sea, but
in the screenplay, the story continues until Kihachi
reaches home and is welcomed by his friends. In
the film, Ozu avoids the too simple happy ending.
More importantly, Ozu criticizes a certain trend
of the times, the unconscious impulse to return
to the past.
Personal
Thoughts and Comments
With Passing Fancy Ozu place a sense of
heartwarming comedy amongst the setting of a Tokyo
slum. In the most thoughtful and beautifully realized
expression, Ozu captures the essence of a father-son
relationship. The setting of this film was a change
from Ozu's earliest work. While his previous films
dealt more with subjects of youth and college,
Passing Fancy became a transition into
the working world. Passing Fancy was the
first of an eventual thematic trilogy of sorts
about Kihachi, a stubborn everyday man with a
good heart. In these films (which also include
A Story of Floating Weeds and An Inn
in Tokyo), Kihachi is played by Ozu-regular
Takeshi Sakamoto. Through Ozu's open, unpredictable,
and simplistic narrative style, as well as Sakamoto's
incredible performance, a deeply complex emotional
texture is revealed within this character as well
as his son (who is played with equal brilliance
by Tomio Aoki). The film opens with a remarkable
sequence that details Ozu's mastery of comedy
and visual expression. Passing Fancy is
a masterpiece of silent cinema, and a film that
stands among the most pivotal of all Ozu's work.
