Yasujiro Ozu will always be best known for his mid-century dramas, like Tokyo Story, Late Spring, and Floating Weeds. They have a towering reputation in world cinema: their distinctive visual style defining what an Ozu film ‘is’ for most people. But doesn’t this make his earlier work intriguing? His three so-called gangster films, in particular: silent movies loaded with violence, menace, and flamboyant style—with motion—set in a Japan that in some senses could be anywhere, and where Western influences are obvious and abounding. Walk Cheerfully was the first of these.
It’s a love story, and not a complex one. Kenji (Minoru Takada) is a hoodlum, known on the streets as Ken the Knife. He makes a passable living as a mugger and pickpocket, spending most of his time with Senko (Hisao Yoshitani), his buddy, flunky, and accomplice, and Chieko (Satoko Date), his girl. One day, after completing a routine scam (shot by Ozu with frequent cuts and plenty of action), Kenji spies Yasue (Hiroko Kawasaki) exiting a store. Struck by her beauty—or is it her class?—he starts down a long path of redemption that will make him worthy of her.
If you think you’ve seen this before, you probably have. And Ozu had, too. Walk Cheerfully is the work of a young director enthralled by films from other places, and eager to pay homage to them. Over the course of ninety minutes or so we see early noir fashions, German Expressionist lighting (even a bit of Germany’s famous “unchained camera”), a poster of Joan Crawford’s Our Dancing Daughters, another of Clara Bow from Rough House Rosie. Art historian Kathe Geist has broken down the film’s office sequence, shot by shot, and found much to compare it with Berlin, Symphony of a City, which Ozu could have seen as early as 1927. This is a fantastical world—a hyper culture that couldn’t be further removed from the films Ozu became known for later: stories about the joys and cruelties of everyday life.
What Walk Cheerfully lacks in psychological depth, it makes up for with heart. Kenji is dapper and cool, but feels deeply; Senko, squat and bumbling, is also earnest and impressively loyal. These are men we believe can go straight. In fact, they already know how to act that way. In the film’s first sequence we see Kenji pass as an innocent onlooker, confused about a crime that he actually orchestrated. He must have a violent side, but it’s rarely seen, the main exception being a noble one, when he saves Yasue from a rapist (Takeshi Sakamoto), who also happens to be her boss. Even his nickname, intimidating as it sounds, may be a sign of his better nature. As Geist notes, guns were rare in Japan, and not to be taken for granted, even in a gangster film. Ken the Knife is a man to take seriously, but he rarely feels lethal.
If Kenji and Senko occupy a liminal space between good and bad, it must be said that good and bad, in this film, aren’t so clear cut—a telling departure from his American influences. Often it’s a matter of disguise: Kenji’s dress makes him appear respectable, but what does that even mean, when Yasue’s boss, the sleaziest character in the film, wears a suit, too (and shares, with Senko—a crook—an affinity for a style of hat)? Chieko, party girl and accomplice that she is, has a day job. Only Yasue is what she appears to be: an epitome of humble womanhood, which the flawed characters, Chieko included, must reckon with.
Of course most of these people should change. What makes some admirable, and others detestable, is their willingness to do it—and once Kenji begins that journey, we feel for him, because it’s hard. Ozu offers us a few signposts, but nothing too deep: we see Senko leaving his hat behind, then backing up to fetch it; Kenji picking up a doll, broken and discarded by Yasue’s sister the day they met, and deciding it’s not worth keeping. Kenji’s eventual turn to honest work makes him seem like a penitent: he bears the drudgery of washing windows without any complaints, like he doesn’t miss his old life at all.
In real life he probably would. But this isn’t real life.
Ozu was still in his twenties when he made Walk Cheerfully, having worked at Shochiku Film Company since 1923. The bulk of his output up to that point was silent comedy, most of it light, much of it lost. His cinematographer, Hideo Shigehara, worked with him almost exclusively, and continued to do so until Shigehara’s retirement in the late 1930s, at which point his apprentice, Yuhara Atsuta, took over the lens. But big changes were ahead. The next five years saw Ozu make or top the Kinema Junpo top-ten poll with Tokyo Chorus (1931), I Was Born, But… (1932), Passing Fancy (1933), A Story of Floating Weeds (1934), and An Inn in Tokyo (1935). He made his first sound film in 1936 (The Only Son). His star was rising, and with it his license to experiment—or resist—and here the multiplicity of styles and genres he’d absorbed gave him material.
If Walk Cheerfully is a minor work in the Ozu canon, we can still appreciate its elegance. It feels, at times, like something choreographed as much as scripted. Characters of a similar type (hoods or police) move in lockstep, making simultaneous turns; heightening the fantasy and even humor beneath Kenji’s grim situation. Even the plot seems rhythmic, with Kenji’s and Yasue’s lives far apart, then seemingly closer as similar circumstances befall them—the effect can be like that of a danced duet, the performers coming together in the middle of the stage, before parting again.
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When studying the work of an artistic genius, there is a strong temptation to categorize. Picasso had his Blue Period; Michelangelo, those unfinished sculptures, the figures left encased in rock, emblematic of his later life. To consider them is to expand our own perception of the person; to humanize them as creators in time—people who were young once, and who matured; their own brilliance the product of many influences. If Ozu’s Walk Cheerfully doesn’t require—or reward—such deep analysis, it is only because the master’s mind is so fully, deliberately on display. To watch it is to join young Yasujiro for a movie night; to visit his home and talk about his passions, be shown the things he collected, the artwork he hung on his walls. It is to imagine, too, a director at a crucial moment, when his career could’ve gone in multiple directions. In 1930 you could have sat in a theater and watched Walk Cheerfully and thought it a pastiche of things done well—and predicted Ozu’s successful future as a maker of comedies or romances, crime films or melodramas. Least of all, perhaps, the kind of films that ended up making him famous. There’s a lesson in that. No genre, no style is a barrier to greatness, if the artist has an abiding love for what they do, and a drive to do it well.
Presented at SFSFF 2023 with live musical accompaniment by Utsav Lal