• That Night's Wife
  • That Night's Wife
  • Woman of Tokyo


That Night’s Wife & Woman of Tokyo

(Sono yo no tsuma)

Yasujiro Ozu
Japan, 1930

Copresented by the San Francisco Silent Film Festival

  • Judith Rosenberg
    On Piano
    Judith Rosenberg
featuring

Tokihiko Okada, Emiko Yagumo, Mitsuko Ichimura, Togo Yamamoto,

This is a crime melodrama based on a Western-style magazine story and inspired by Fritz Lang and American thrillers. As ever, Yasujiro Ozu tests the conventions as he employs them, “drawing on thriller iconography for its own sake” and thereby distancing himself from the genre, as David Bordwell noted. The film is set in a twelve-hour period. A commercial artist of meager means is driven to robbery in order to provide medicine for his critically ill daughter. As the film opens, he is being pursued by the police. After a series of diversions, he hails a gypsy cab that delivers him to his door—but the night is young. Much of the delight of this film is in the play of visuals and the use of space, from the taxicab with its mirrors to the family’s cluttered apartment, where most of the action takes place.

FILM DETAILS 
Screenwriter
  • Kogo Noda
Based On

  • a story adaptation by Ozu

Cinematographer
  • Hideo Shigehara
Language
  • Silent
  • with English intertitles
Print Info
  • B&W
  • 35mm
  • Silent
  • 65 mins
Source
  • Janus Films
Followed By

Woman of Tokyo
(Tokyo no onna)

Yasujiro Ozu, Japan, 1933

FEATURING
Yoshiko Okada
Ureo Egawa
Kinuyo Tanaka
Shinyo Nara

“Woman of Tokyo was the moment when [Yasujiro] Ozu became Ozu; when the egg cracked. Form and content synchronized. Photography was not of but was” (Nathaniel Dorsky). Amazing, or perhaps not, that it should have happened with a “quickie,” short both in length (forty-seven minutes) and in its making (eight days). The story involves a young woman who resorts to prostitution to help put her younger brother through college; when he finds out, tragedy ensues. Reminiscent, in its theme of women’s sacrifice, of the social-realist films that Kenji Mizoguchi began making at this time, still it has at least one diversion from the tragedy (a clip from an Ernst Lubitsch film). J. Hoberman called Woman of Tokyo “a subtle riot of discordant formal devices. . . . The crucial scene is dominated by a giant close-up of a teapot, and the ending is a breathtaking wrench of perspective from individual tragedy to matter-of-fact social breakdown. Ozu never made another film like this one, and neither has anyone else.” 

Judy Bloch

FILM DETAILS 
Screenwriter
  • Kogo Noda
  • Tadao Ikeda
Based On

  • a story by "Ernst Schwartz" (Ozu)

Cinematographer
  • Hideo Shigehara
Language
  • Silent
  • with English intertitles
Print Info
  • B&W
  • 35mm
  • Silent
  • 47 mins
source
  • Janus Films

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