Walk Cheerfully (1930)
Directed by Yasujirô Ozu

Film Review

For anyone whose familiarity with Yasujiro Ozu is confined to his post-WWII films, his early films can only come as something of a revelation, exhibiting a surprising mix of styles that appears totally at odds with Ozu's very distinctive, tightly constrained aesthetic.  Walk Cheerfully, the first of Ozu's gangster films, shows this in spades, a pacey collision of crime drama and romantic melodrama that feels more American than Japanese in both its story and composition.   An obsessive devotee of western culture, Ozu had a particular fascination with American gangster films, including many of Josef von Sternberg's  early films, such as Underworld (1927) and The Dragnet (1928) - and Japanese cinema audiences at this time shared this obsession.  It is no accident that many of Ozu's films of the early 1930s have a distinctly American feel to them.  Like many of his compatriots, for him America represented modernity, an escape from the feudalistic shackles of the past.  American culture was a kind of drug to which the young Yasujiro Ozu was hopelessly addicted.

Walk Cheerfully is probably the most westernised of all Ozu's films.  The plot (inherited from a friend and fellow director at Kamata studio, Shimizu Hiroshi) is a sorry accumulation of American-style clichés - a rogue turns away from a life of crime so that he can win the heart of a virtuous woman.  There is no opportunity for deep character analysis, no opportunity to link the story to issues affecting contemporary Japanese society.  It is a straightfoward redemption melodrama and Ozu treats it as such, although he perhaps invests his characters with more humanity and dignity than many of his American counterparts.  The film may have been shot in Japan but it appears to be set on the other side of the Pacific, a sprawling urban metropolis with a busy dockyard attached, where all signs are in English and most of the characters wear western-style outfits and adopt western mannerisms.  (It is tempting to think that, had this not been a silent film, the dialogue would have been entirely in American English.)  There are a few fleeting concessions to Japanese culture, but these are a mere exotic embellishment in what is unmistakably an affectionate Hollywood pastiche.

Walk Cheerfully begins with an exterior tracking shot which sets the pace and tone of the film.  Right from the start, we know that this is going to be a fast-moving entertainment, and once the film is underway the pace hardly lets up for a moment.  For a director who is renowned for his static camera set-ups, the camera is remarkably agile in this film.  In addition to the abundant tracking shots and zooms, there is a rare use (for Ozu) of cross-cutting as the film slips momentarily into Perils of Pauline mode, with the hero rushing to save the heroine from a fate worst than death.  The interior lighting is also atypical for Ozu, more expressionistic than naturalistic, again mimicking the style of contemporary American crime films.

Ozu was just 26 when he made Walk Cheerfully, his fourteenth film, so it is hardly surprising that it bares scant resemblance to the formalised masterpieces he regularly turned out in his mature phase and for which he is best known.  It is a young man's film, showing a young filmmaker's flair for wild experimentation, and possibly an overly optimistic view of human nature.  Although it is classed as a gangster film, it can equally be enjoyed as a melodrama, morality play, even a comedy.  It is, above all, Ozu's most ebullient tribute to American cinema, leaving us in no doubt that he was a westerner at heart.  How strange then that, by the time the west had come to know about him in the 1960s, he would be regarded as one of the most quintessential of all Japanese filmmakers...

Film Synopsis

Koyama Kenji, nicknamed Kenji the Knife, is a small-time crook who makes a dishonest living with his friends Senko, Gunpei and Chieko.  One day, he notices an attractive young woman, Yasue, leaving a jewellers' shop with an expensive ring, which she has bought for her employer.  Kenji later runs into Yasue when she is taking a picnic with her younger sister.  He offers her a lift in his car and soon realises that he is in love with her.  Kenji is not the only man who has designs on Yasue.  Her boss intends starting an illicit relationship with her and, with Chieko's connivance, he manages to lure her to a hotel room.  Kenji comes to Yasue's rescue but, knowing about his criminal background, the young woman refuses to have anything to do with him until he has changed his ways.  So great is Kenji's love for Yasue that he gives up his life of crime and starts looking for honest work.  Just when Kenji has made it up with Yasue his criminal past suddenly catches up with him...