Walk Cheerfully

In the early '30's, Yasujiro Ozu directed a number of silent gangster movies.  Ozu, of course, is famous for his austere "transcendental style," a understated way of making movies that came to fruition in a series of domestic dramas produced after World War Two and continuing until Ozu's death in 1963.  The gangster films that Ozu made at the tail end of the silent era in Japan are surprising in that they reveal a very different approach to movie-making than the exquisitely disciplined classical style for which this director is now best known.  Indeed, a picture like Walk Cheerfully (1930) is thstylistically the polar opposite to the Master's later films like Late Spring (1949)or Tokyo Story (1953)  Walk Cheerfully begins with a bravura camera motion, indeed, the kind of tracking shot that Hollywood directors used to call a "Chinese dolly" -- the camera moves in one direction while the principal characters seemingly central to the image moves in the opposite direction.  (In Ozu's later work, the camera is almost always stationary, poised at tatami level -- that is, viewing the action from the perspective of someone seated on a tatami mat in a traditional Japanese home.)  The movie is filled with movement -- cameras ride along with cars cruising Tokyo's suburbs -- and the picture is raw with inventive camera angles and strange perspectives.  The plot is simple and generic.  A handsome young crook lives with two buddies in what appears to be a gymnasium -- they are always boxing at punching bags and there are posters in English advertising pugilistic exhibitions displayed on the walls.  The thugs hang out in sleazy harbor taverns and work a two-man con, rolling teamsters on the docks.  It's not really appropriate to refer to the bad boys in this picture as Yakuza -- they are too puppyish and harmless to pose any real threat to anyone.  The handsome crook falls in love with an office girl, a sweet secretary who is suffering from sexual harassment at the hands of her boss.  The boy-gangster goes on a couple dates with the office girl and she discovers to her dismay that the young man has a criminal background.  The real thrust of the narrative is the love story -- that is, whether the girl can reform the young man and make a respectable citizen out of him.  The movie is enthralled with the artifacts of Japan's modernization -- the gangsters wear fedoras and flashy suits out of a Warner Brothers crime movie and all of the signs are in English (even in the shipping office where the girl works, the signs on the doors and storefront are written in English characters).  There are some interesting details.  The office girl's kid sister carries a kewpie doll; it gets run over by the youthful gangster's sedan and we see it crushed into the asphalt in the center of the road.  The gangsters are like figures from Damon Runyon story -- they have elaborately choreographed gang gestures and when they meet one another, they bob their heads and swivel their hips in a kind of stylized Conga dance of recognition.  It's charming and idiotic at the same time and reminds me of the indelible little song and dance routine in a barroom that Ozu staged in his last film An Autumn Afternoon.  On one of their dates, the young lovers have a picnic at the great Buddha figure at Kamakura -- a remarkable shot shows the gangster's jalopy parked directly under the colossal meditating figure; the Buddha seems to be cradling the jalopy in his lap.  This kind of shot is typical of the film, an intentionally jarring combination of Western and Japanese elements.  Clearly, the young Ozu was in love with the camera and in silent films, where there was no need to record and synchronize sound, he felt free to experiment with the imagery, telling his story in boldly pictorial terms.  However, the tone of the film is similar in many respects to Ozu's later work -- the gangsters are too gentle to be intimidating and the young girl has a loving mother with whom she commiserates (the family needs the income so she tells the girl to put up with the sexual harassment) as well as lively kid-sister.  The mood of the film is understated and comical in a wry way -- an emotional texture that is similar to Ozu's celebrated later films but here annotated with camera pyrotechnics.