Dekigokoro, a.k.a. Passing Fancy (Shôchiku Studios, 1933)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After that TCM showed Dekigokoro (Passing Fancy), a 1933 Japanese silent film – 1933 was late for a silent film in Japan, too, but like Charlie Chaplin in the U.S., Ozu held out for silence as long as he could and didn’t make his first talkies, The Only Son and What Did the Woman Forget?, until 1936. My husband Charles and I had seen an even later Ozu silent, An Inn in Tokyo (1935), previously on TCM’s “Silent Sunday Nights.” Like this one it’s about a protagonist named Kihachi (Takeshi Sakamoto) who’s a factory worker in modern-day Tokyo raising a young son named Tomio (Tokkan Kozô, also known as Tomio Aoki) as a single parent. (As in the usual iconography of 1930’s films from both sides of the Pacific, we’re clearly meant to assume that Tomio’s mother is dead.) Kihachi and his work friend Jiro (Den Obinata, whom I found considerably sexier than Sakamoto) go out to a show, and on their way home they meet a young woman named Harue (Nobuko Fushimi) who’s destitute. They take her in and Kihachi falls for her, though she’s only interested in the younger and considerably hotter Jiro. The film was pretty much a snooze-fest during the first half (I kept nodding off during it) but it perked up considerably in the second half. Kihachi decides to treat his son Tomio by giving him a 50-sen coin (roughly comparable to the U.S. half-dollar) – which he spends entirely on sweets and ends up with a case of gastric enteritis. Kihachi takes Tomio to the emergency room (or what passed for one in Japan in 1933) and the doctor treats him successfully, but sticks Kihachi with a 50-yen bill he has no way to pay. Kihachi looks through his meager belongings to see if there’s anything he can sell to raise the money, but he realizes his stuff wouldn’t bring in more than five yen. Harue says she can raise the money for them, but both Kihachi and Jiro are horrified by that, especially since they know all too well just what she would have to do to make that kind of money.

Instead Jiro goes to a barber friend of his (Reikô Tani) and asks to borrow it, saying he’ll pay the barber back by taking a job as a laborer in Hokkaido, the farthest-north of Japan’s main islands, known for its active volcanoes. Kihachi hates the thought of Jiro taking such a tough job, and the day the ship for Hokkaido is scheduled to sail, Kihachi punches out Jiro intending to take his place on the ship and take the laborer’s job himself. He even arranges with the barber to take custody of Tomio in his absence, only as soon as he boards the ship he starts feeling homesick. He jumps off the ship and rather awkwardly swims back to Honshu, the largest of the Japanese islands and the site of Tokyo. One complication in Ozu’s script – he wrote the original story under the pseudonym “James Maki,” but Tadao Ikeda wrote the actual script from Ozu’s story – is that Kihachi is illiterate, hopelessly inept at deciphering even the large characters on a one-page leaflet he’s handed. Ozu seemed especially interested in stories about proletarian characters barely scraping by on the margins and almost done in by an unexpected major expense. He made his first film in 1927 and won the Kinema Junpo award for best film of the year, given by a Japanese film magazine, three years in a row for this film and the two on either side of it in his filmography, I Was Born, but … (1932) and A Story of Floating Weeds (1934). Then in 1937 the Japanese military drafted him and sent him to fight as a private in China. Japan didn’t think of conscripting its filmmakers to make war documentaries and training films the way the U.S. did, and Ozu ended the war in a British P.O.W. camp. He didn’t make another movie until 1947 (aside from two titles, The Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family in 1941 and There Was a Father in 1942, listed on his imdb.com filmography), and like American director George Stevens, Ozu’s war experiences made him a more serious-minded and slower director, making 15 movies between 1947 and 1962, the year before he died at age 60. Passing Fancy is an uneven movie, but once the son takes center stage midway through it becomes a quite rare and haunting one, and for me the most moving scene was one in which Kihachi hits his son Tomio, then is overcome with grief and guilt, and invites the boy to hit him – which he does repeatedly.