May 12, 2016
That Night’s Wife
– Japan, 1930
Not much happens
in Yasujiro Ozu’s 1930 silent film That
Night’s Wife. I say this not as a criticism, but as an introduction to the
notion that a movie’s thrust is sometimes in its actor’s faces and not its
script. Here, we get knowing glances between characters who know the truth is
too bleak to say aloud, pained expressions on characters trying to put on brave
faces, and the ever-changing human landscapes of characters in enormous
emotional fluctuation. It is something silent films often excelled at showing,
and something that spoken words or long-winded explanations often weakens.
Yasujiro Ozu understood this, and, judging from the rest of his work, it is
something he never truly forgot.
That Night’s Wife
is a family melodrama that would have made D.W. Griffith proud. The film
involves a desperate family (Takohiko Okada and Emiko Yagumo), a sick child
(Mitsuko Ichimura), and a police detective (Togo Yamamoto), and in its early
moments, the audience learns pretty much all they need to know about the plot.
In those scenes, a masked man commits armed robbery and then rushes home to
tend to his very ill young daughter, who, as their doctor explains it, is
facing the toughest battle of her life. To get home, he takes a cab driven by
someone who keeps giving him suspicious looks, as if he is on to him – and in
truth, he is. From there, the film becomes a waiting game, in which one person
is on alert for the slightest slip-up, and the other two wait anxiously for the
any hint of recovery.
After a slow start, the film build to a very powerful
ending, and the credit for this goes solely to the hard work of the cast, who
without words make us understand what a good man driven to desperation goes
through and what a man whose job it is to uphold justice is faced with in a
situation in which being legally correct feels almost wrong. I also admired the
way the mother in the film is never a passive bystander relying on her husband
to save the day. At certain points, she displays a strength that is both
admirable and a bit worrying. At key points, I began to suspect that she would
do quite well for herself on the other side of the law.
At just sixty-five minutes, That Night’s Wife does not have much time in which to tell its
story, and therefore it is slightly disappointing that so much time is wasted
in the first quarter of the film. In those early moments, Ozu shows us police
cars arriving, policemen lining up to receive instructions, and policemen
rushing off to catch their man. None of these actions seems particularly
important and it’s unclear what message they are sending. After all, these same
policemen enable the criminal to get away. And then there’s the matter of the
robbery itself and the film’s McGuffin, ill-gotten gains from the robbery.
There’s every indication that the money is desperately needed to pay for the
child’s medical care, yet its gain or loss becomes increasingly
inconsequential. The visiting doctor never demands payment, and there’s no
mention of the prohibitive cost of medicine. This renders the robbery
unnecessary, which would be fine if someone in the film acknowledged it and
repented. No one does. Instead, the
characters linger, the father at his daughter’s side, the mother trying to
protect them both, and the detective watching, waiting, and praying for a slip
up.
That Night’s Wife is
not in the vein of Ozu’s later taut masterpieces. It lacks complete
originality, partly because it bares such a close resemblance to other “sick
children stories” that cinema was churning out during the silent period. Mikio
Naruse would do a variation of the same theme a year later with Flunky, Work Hard, and Griffith had made
The Country Doctor in 1909. Seen in
this light, That Night’s Wife may
sound like a minor footnote in the career of one of cinema’s giants, yet what
the film does better than many similarly-themed films is give the cast time to
fully express their angst and inner conflict, and as a result of that, the film
builds in both power and resonance and ends in a scene that, while a bit of a
cliché, must have had audiences reaching for a handkerchief. In short, Okada,
Yagumo, and Yamamoto are a revelation, and their performances alone are enough
to recommend the film. (on DVD as part of Eclipse’s Silent Ozu – Three Crime Dramas)
3 stars
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