A Mother Should Be Loved (1934)
Directed by Yasujirô Ozu

Film Review

After Passing Fancy (1933), a film whose themes include a son's unthinking rejection of his father, Yasujirô Ozu was bound to make a similar film in which a mother was the object of filial abandonment.  Ozu had barely completed work on the script for A Mother Should Be Loved when his father died, and his grief can be felt throughout the film, which rates as possibly his most melodramatic and lachrymose.  This is a typical haha mono or 'mother film', a genre that was extremely popular in Japan from the 1920s to the 1950s, and to which Ozu contributed one of his best films, The Only Son (1936), although throughout his career he was more preoccupied with the relationship between fathers and sons.

A Mother Should Be Loved has never been rated highly by Ozu's enthusiasts, and the director was himself pretty dismissive of it, referring to it as 'dull'.  The cloying title was foisted on him by his bosses - he preferred the more abstract Tokyo Twilight, which he would later use for one of his best sound films.  Ozu particularly disliked the contrivance of the two brothers having different mothers, as he felt this weakened the overarching theme of the film, which was the slow but inevitable decline of a typical middle class family after the death of its patriarch.  Ozu would return to this same subject many times in the course of his subsequent career, perhaps most successfully in The Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family (1941), the film that established him as commercially successful filmmaker in Japan.

There is another, more obvious, reason why A Mother Should Be Loved has tended to be overlooked and judged harshly by its critics.  The first and last of its nine reels have been lost, and so the film in its present state lacks both a beginning and an ending.  The loss of the first reel hardly matters as its content can effectively be summarised in a few sentences and adds little to the ensuing drama.  The fact that the spectator is denied an ending is more problematic, and it is hard to gauge how powerful the plot resolution must have been from a mere précis of the script.

As was ever the case in Ozu's early films, it is not too hard to spot the western influences.  The old cleaning woman who shows up in the last surviving reel and serves as a convenient deus ex machina is borrowed from Harry F. Millarde's Over the Hill to the Poorhouse (1920), an American melodrama in which a mother ends up as an impoverished cleaner after being rejected by her children.  A poster for Julien Duvivier's Poil de carotte (1932) is glimpsed in one scene, linking the unfortunate neglected child of that film with the main character of Ozu's film, Sadao.  The irony, of course, is that Sadao has been spoiled and cosseted by his stepmother and feels neglected only because he cannot forgive her from keeping the circumstances of his birth from him.  Another poster, of Lewis Milestone's Rain (1932), has a portrait of Joan Crawford dominating a brothel set, appropriately since in that film Crawford plays a prostitute struggling to redeem herself.

From what remains of it, it is clear that A Mother Should Be Loved is a lesser Ozu work, too melodramatic and contrived to have anything like the emotional resonance of the director's later 'home dramas' in which the striving for authenticity was paramount.  Yet, despite its obvious shortcomings, this is a stylish and compelling piece in which Ozu shows his customary visual flair as he continues to develop his unique style.  As the family's personal circumstances deteriorate, putting an increased strain on the relationship between the two brothers and their mother, the mood of the film gradually darkens, culminating in one of the most bitter scenes in any Ozu film, with a son refusing to have anything more to do with the woman who selflessly raised him since he was a small boy.  How frustrating that we are denied the reconciliation scene, but given that too much of Ozu's early work has been lost forever (along with so many masterpieces of early Japanese cinema), we should be grateful that most of Ozu's films survive intact, allowing us witness the gradual development of a true master of the seventh art.  Many other film directors were far less fortunate.

Film Synopsis

Whilst they are at school, two brothers - Sadao and Kosaku - learn that their father has just died from a heart attack.  After the funeral, Okazuki, their uncle, visits their mother, Chieko, and asks her to carry on raising Sadao as if he were her own son.  Some years later, when the brothers have entered college, Sadao sees his birth certificate and discovers that Chieko is not his mother.  He is in fact the son of his father's first wife, who died before he can remember.  Unable to forgive Chieko for deceiving him, Sadao soon begins to despise her.  He notices that she treats him more favourably than her own son and he finally becomes so resentful that he storms out of his home and moves into a brothel.  Kosaku and his mother appeal to Sadao to return home, but he stubbornly refuses, until an old cleaning woman has a few quiet words with him...