Yasujiro Ozu-Hijosen no onna ('Dragnet Girl') (1933)

Those who think of Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu only in terms of his favorite subject matter and distinctive style - films about eldest daughters of aging families reluctantly persuaded to marry and leave behind the parents they love, told in static, sitting-position shots filmed a few feet off the ground and cut together in straight cuts with the actors often looking directly into the camera - will be quite surprised by Dragnet Girl (Hijosen no onna, 1933) a stylish silent crime thriller with much to recommend it. DVDTalk




The picture is Ozu by way of Fritz Lang, closer to that director's German Expressionist crime films than, say, the Warner Bros. gangster movies being made in America at the time. Joji Oka and the great actress Kinuyo Tanaka, the latter a baby-faced 22 when the film was in production, star as Joji and Tokiko, an ex-prizefighter and his dame. She's a tough-talking moll who day-jobs as a typist. Her would-be suitor there, the boss's wealthy son, sets his sights on her but has no idea that she spends her nights at American style nightclubs, smoking cigarettes and chewing the fat with Joji's gang.




The gang's latest addition is another washed-up fighter, a featherweight named Hiroshi (Koji Mistui, billed here as Hideo Mitsui), whose very traditional sister, Kazuko (Sumiko Mizukubo) is appalled by her brother's new lifestyle. She persuades Joji to kick his recruit out of the gang before it's too late. He acquiesces partly because he's attracted to Kazuko's unspoiled, virginal nature. Tokiko rebels and considers bumping Kazuko off (she carries a pistol) before deciding that she's attracted to Kazuko's genuine nature too, and thus inspired tries to adopt a like-minded manner toward Joji, hoping to win him back.




Dragnet Girl isn't much more than a stylishly-directed crime melodrama, but style it has, in spades, with more tracking shots for instance than probably Ozu's last 15 films combined. (One particularly good shot has the camera strapped to the fender of a speeding car, the reflection of the road and surrounding buildings seen on the backside of one of the vehicle's headlights.) The emphasis is on the two women's efforts to make their men go straight and Tokiko's longing, tough-taking aside, to live like an ordinary women, and especially to be regarded by Joji as something other than a delinquent.




The picture was made just as Japan's growing militarism was beginning to squelch the country's growing fondness with all things western, though the picture is so starkly western in appearance one guesses that Ozu deliberately opted to suck everything Japanese out of it, the significant exception being Kazuko's traditional kimono and distinctly Japanese manner. The film abounds in western signage; except near the end, English writing is everywhere while Nihongo is nowhere to be found. At the TOA Boxing Club, the house rules are written in English, for instance, not Japanese. Hiroshi has a French poster of Lewis Milestone's 1930 film All Quiet on the Western Front on his wall.




Joji Oka, whose large, intense yet soft eyes and thin lips recall actor Jeremy Brett, was a big star in the 1930s but probably better known to American viewers as the sneering Phantom of Krankor in the bizarre Japanese sci-fi extravaganza Prince of Space (Yusei oji, 1959). Kinuyo Tanaka, even at 22, gives a mature and sensitive performance in the tradition of great silent actresses like Lillian Gish rather than what one finds in American gangster films of the early-'30s. Koji Mitsui, later known for playing hardened, cynical characters (he played the acid-tongued reporter in The Bad Sleep Well, for instance), appears here in a role 180-degrees from the sort that would eventually make him famous.