Ornamental Hairpin

Yasujiro Ozu regular Chishu Ryu and legendary actress/director Kinuyo Tanaka star in Hiroshi Shimizu’s elegiac tale of two strangers brought together by fate at a mountain onsen resort. Some visitors come and go at this riverside inn, but others remain, such as a family with two boys, a grumpy professor, and a soldier (Ryu) who has injured himself after stepping on a hairpin lost by a woman (Tanaka) who then helps care for him. Just beyond, Japan wages war, but here our hero and heroine remain in a semipermanent retreat from militarism or the demands of “alcohol, cigarettes, make-up.” Comic, mournful, and romantic in turns, and boasting some of Shimizu’s most evocative and expressive location shooting, Ornamental Hairpin was condemned at the time for its pointedly un-militaristic theme. (“Film stock is so precious these days,” complained critic Akira Shimizu, “yet Hiroshi Shimizu comes up with such la-di-da stuff.”) “It is less an escapist film,” noted Alexander Jacoby, “than a film about the need to escape.”