Walk Cheerfully

Walk Cheerfully (1930) is the first film in the Yasujiro Ozu's Eclipse Series 42: Silent Ozu - Three Crime Dramas. Early Ozu films are quite striking when compared with the austere later films in which his style has become crystallized in a very identifiable pattern of film making. However, in Ozu earlier films there is much more experimentation with camera movement and foreign influences are much more evident-particularly the Hollywood influences. (The same is true of Mikio Naruse's early films as well). I note this, because I recently re-watched his Ozu's 1949 classic Late Spring. Walk Cheerfully is a perfect example of the early Ozu style, it seems to be influenced by the Hollywood crime dramas. Ozu employs innovative camera movements. For example, there are several interesting tracking shots: the film opens with a crowd chasing a man, a petty thief Senko (Hisao Yoshitani) who turns out to be the crime partner of the handsome and rough hood Kenji, a.k.a. Ken the Knife (Minoru Takada) and a camera mounted on a car to give a bird's eye perspective of the road. Ozu also uses bold set designs: including walls covered in American movie posters and a song written in English)—the kind of experimentation one would see much less of in his later films. In this film these two hoodlums decide to go straight after Kenji has met a citizen to his liking-Yasue (Hiroko Kawasaki), who implores him to go straight before she'll see him and Senko decides to follow suit. But this is not easily done since it involves spurning his crooked former squeeze, Chieko (Satoko Date) and former criminal associate Gunpeo (Teruo Mori). They will not let the former gang dissolve peacefully. Unlike most of Ozu's later films, this one has what would be called a conventional "Hollywood" ending.