An Inn in Tokyo (Shochiku, 1935)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

At 9 p.m. I watched a program on Turner Classic Movies’ “Silent Sunday Showcase” featuring a Japanese silent film made in 1935 – yes, that’s right – at a time when most of the film industries in countries sufficiently developed to have one had long switched over to sound. It was called An Inn in Tokyo and was directed by Yasujiro Ozu, who was apparently the Japanese Charlie Chaplin, the last holdout among the country’s major directors to keep making silent films in the face of the talking revolution. Actually An Inn in Tokyo was originally advertised and released as a “sound film” in the Eisensteinian sense of a movie that would carry its own music-and-effects soundtrack but would contain no spoken dialogue. Reportedly Ozu made over 30 silent films but only one-third of them survive, and after this one he bit the bullet and made two talkies before being drafted into the Japanese army in 1937. During the next decade he made only two films – apparently the Japanese government didn’t conscript its filmmakers in uniform to make military training films the way the U.S. military did – and Ozu ended the war in a British prisoner-of-war camp and didn’t resume his career until 1947. Then he started making the movies he’s best known for, including Late Spring, Early Summer, Early Spring and Tokyo Story, until his death in 1963 at age 60.

Host Jacqueline Stewart (a striking-looking African-American who used to wear a long pigtail but has since cut it off – if she’s not careful someone is going to make a joke about her starring in G. I. Jane 2 and her significant other is going to slap the person) said that the film influenced the italian neo-realist directors of a decade or so later, but there are plenty of American films from the 1920’s about poverty, including Josef von Sternberg’s The Salvation Hunters (1925) and William Wellman’s Beggars for Life (1927), which could have influenced this, and the ending is straight out of Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights, released in 1931 and therefore just four years old when An Inn in Tokyo was filmed. It’s a good movie but also a sober and depressing one: it’s about a homeless man named Kihachi (Takeshi Sakamoto) and his two sons, Otsune (Choko Iida) and Zenko (Tomio Aoki), wandering the streets of Tokyo. Though the Tokyo skyline as we see it is filled with large water towers and oil tanks indicating that 1930’s Japan is a modern-day industrial country, none of the city’s burgeoning factories are open to hiring Kihachi. They’re so desperately hungry that they eat a pretend meal consisting of pantomimed plates and cups and an imaginary bottle of sake.

When they get word that the local police are advertising 40 sen in reward money to anyone who brings in a stray dog, Otsune finds a dog but then blows the money on a military-style cap he saw a fellow young boy wearing. Later the two boys decide they’re tired of carrying around dad’s backpack and so they just drop it alongside the road – and when they think better of it and go back, of course the pack is gone. Dad seems to accept all this with a sort of hangdog resignation instead of anger. Then fate intervenes in the form of two women, one the local innkeeper who helps Kihachi find a job at long last and one a fellow homeless person, a widow named Otaka (Yoshiko Okada) who’s traveling with a young daughter named Kuniko (Kezuko Ojima). For the next 10 days Kihachi seems, at least he tells us later, like the happiest he’s ever been – he’s working (though we never see at what), he’s making money, and he largely blows his first paycheck on a binge of sake. Then he learns from Otaka that her daughter Kuniko – who’s already hit it off with Kihachi’s sons – is in desperate need of medical attention for dysentery, so Kihachi steals to get the money for Kuniko’s care (in the similar situation in Chaplin’s City Lights, Chaplin’s “Tramp” character commits robbery to raise the money for the operation his girlfriend needs to see after she’s been blind the whole movie), and in the final scene Kihachi arranges with the innkeeper to take his sons and goes off to the nearest police station to turn himself in, while a final title explains that he has become a whole human being and redeemed himself for the first time.

An Inn in Tokyo is a great movie but also a particularly gloomy one, and it survived in poor condition – when the nitrate wear got too heavy, especially in periods of no music, one can hear the soundtrack head reading the nitrate burns as static – one roots for these characters but one also understands that fate is stacked against them and the odds that they’re actually going to end the film happier and more prosperous than they began it are not good. Besides, especially for a director like Ozu who resisted dialogue so long, it’s an oddly “talky” silent film, replete with dialogue intertitles (Ozu was not one of the silent directors like Chaplin, Murnau or Vidor who was trying to cut the number of titles to a bare minimum) and with a largely static camera. It’s actually shot more like an early talkie than a late silent, and oddly Turner Classic Movies followed it with The Voice That Thrilled the World, a 1943 two-reeler from Warner Bros. that presented the advent of sound in films as an unquestioned artistic as well as technical advance – a far cry from the TCM promo that had preceded it and defended the art of the silent film as unique and powerful in its own right.