That Night's Wife

Critics, including this writer, have commented with feigned astonishment on the fact that Yasujiro Ozu's early, flamboyant crime films are stylistically different from the low-key family melodramas for which the director is justly famous.  More important, I think, are the continuities between Ozu's gangster pictures and his serene later movies about aging widowers, unmarried daughters, and melancholy elderly couples.  A good example of a silent crime film with significant connections to the director's later work is That Night's Wife (1930). This picture involves an impoverished young father who commits a crime, apparently a bank robbery, to finance his baby-daughter's medical treatment.  The movie begins with highly stylized, expressionistic imagery of a bank robbery:  there is deep shadow and we see the silhouette of a gun-man fleeing through empty and dark streets.  Colossal architecture dwarfs the fleeing robber and, soon, he is pursued by a crowd of cops.  The city streets glisten in the darkness and cavernous alleyways offer momentary respite for the fugitive.  The cumulative effect of the film's opening ten minutes is that it is an exhaustive exhibit of crime film clichés, most of them unconvincing and, as it turns out, far too grandiose for the rather quotidian subject of the film -- that is, a vigil by the bedside of a sick, and, possibly, dying child.  It seems that Ozu stages the opening crime as a symphony of blacks and whites, a pompous overture that casts doubt as to whether what we are seeing is as important as it is worked-up to appear.  The remainder of the film takes place in a two-room apartment where the mother of a sick child meets with a doctor and, then, attends to her ill baby, kneeling at the bedside of the little girl.  After the doctor leaves, the bank robber appears and, then, a morose-looking flat-foot, the detective who has tracked the young criminal to his lair.  Declining to arrest the young father, the cop shares in the bedside vigil with the sick child and, only in the morning, when the baby is declared to be out of danger, arrests her father.  The young gunman is peculiarly pretty, with a soft, pale face -- he looks more gentle and helpless than his wife.  Ozu's weakness is his sentimentality -- even his greatest films, viewed in some lights, can seem mawkish.  (Ozu's austere late "transcendental style" is, in part, a hedge against the director's maudlin tendencies.)  That Night's Wife is excessively sentimental and, although it is only 65 minutes long, seems to drag -- there's not a lot even a great visual director like Ozu can do with an immobile baby, a kneeling woman, two men staring balefully at one another and a claustrophobic two room apartment.  As in his later films, Ozu is fond of establishing character and tone by still life close-ups -- this movie features "empty frames" showing discarded dolls and whiskey bottles, cigarette butts, and various knick-knacks.  The most interesting feature of the film is the décor in the gangster's apartment -- it resembles the bizarre decorations in another of Ozu's crime films in this Criterion Eclipse series, the more brazen and jocular Walk Cheerfully (also 1930).  In That Night's Wife, the apartment walls are emblazoned with American movie posters (one of them bearing the name of Walter Huston -- I think it is a poster for Dodsworth).  Fragments of poems (or pop song lyrics) and colloquial sayings written in English seem to be penciled onto the walls -- one panel reads "Three is a crowd, Two is company."  There are curious abstractions that have Soviet constructivist look.  I have no idea what these visual devices are supposed to represent but they are entrancing -- did Japanese gangsters practice English by writing fragments of tin-pan alley songs on their walls?