Days Of Youth

Days Of Youth (1929) is the earliest surviving Yasujiro Ozu comedy. It is a college comedy about two college friends, the lazy rouge Watanabe (Ichiro Yuki)  and bookish Yamamoto (Tatsuo Saito) who go skiing and are chasing the same girl, Chieko (Junko Matsui). They decide to go skiing and with their college chums and meet Chieko on the slopes. All sorts of shenanigans happen while on the slopes, the film is over long at one hour 43 minutes. The most interesting shots occur at the beginning and end of the film as Ozu establishes the location of the boy's rental room near an unnamed university in Tokyo. In Ozu's early films, he wears the American influences on his sleeves (for instance the still above shows a Hollywood comedy poster of 7th Heaven on the wall of the rental room). The version I saw did not have any back ground sound-so during the second half I played iTunes randomly in the background-some songs syncs up with the images-it's pretty hard to sit through 103 minutes without sound. It was interesting to see in terms of where Ozu starts in his career, but it is decidedly minor Ozu.