Cinema Talk

Naruse made two films in 1939, both of them are home dramas. The first, The Whole Family Works managed to slip through the grasp of the censors at the time and the result is one of Naruse’s favorite of his own films. The other film is this, which seems to have been very much affected by the censors. It starts out as a interesting discourse on class, then becomes a soapy melodrama (with some impressive poetic touches), and then becomes a gross and literal flag-waving celebration of the Japanese military. Most of the content seems to fit Naruse but the final direction is so dubious, it threatens to complete dismantle the potential shown at the film’s beginning.

Nobuko and Tomiko are pals at school, but with very different backgrounds. Nobuko has a safe, middle class home life, but she drops from first in her class to tenth.  Meanwhile, Tomiko, who lives with her impoverished single mother and grandmother, has risen to number one in her class. The two girls don’t seem particularly interested in competing academically but Nobuko’s mother is unsatisfied with her daughter’s marks. She goes to her daughter’s teacher for some explanation, but mostly to blame him with her daughter’s report card. During their conversation, she learns that Tomiko is number one in class and this leads her to an argument with her husband, Kei. Kei was once romantically involved with Tomiko’s mother, Tsutako. This conversation brings up a past that was never addressed and confuses the two young girls.

The film’s best moment come from the two young school pals, Nobuko and Tomiko. There’s something interesting going on with class politics here, as the more stable home seems to be the less wealthy one, though Naruse smartly doesn’t make it seem like being poor is better. It’s even brought up later  in the film that Tsutako is the better mother, another point of jealousy for the other mother. The discourse of class doesn’t last particularly long, however, as the film’s real plot becomes clear: Kei and Tsutako have a romantic history and they might still be acting upon it. There’s signs of this throughout the film and Naruse wisely keeps them subtle.

The biggest problem with this “scandalous” sort of story is that comes by dismissing a much more interesting story. Watching Nobuko and Tomiko be kids is both more interesting and better looking. There’s a tightness to the compositions during the “adult” material, but it never really saves a rather dull story. Naruse’s unfair treatment of Nobuko’s mother seems very odd, she’s very clearly marked as the bad character, where in reality it is her husband who might be the one committing infidelity. More importantly, there’s a un-Naruse poetry to the scenes involving the children. It looks like lost footage from a Hiroshi Shimizu film rather than anything else from Naruse. There’s some wonderful individual moments, which almost seems intentionally placed to pace the more dreary soap opera-ish content.

The melodramatic story isn’t nearly as problematic as the film’s final turn. Kei gets his draft notice and everyone seems to put aside their differences to send him off in a celebratory fashion. For a film with almost no mention or even hint of the military, it suddenly shapes itself into an overwhelming showcase for militarism. At this point, the film kind of loses its potential to be a truly great Naruse. Takako Irie, who would later appear in Sanjuro is very good here as Tsutako, making some of the more blandly photographed scenes. The real strengths here are the poetic outdoor sequences and the wonderful interactions between the two young girls, played by mostly unknowns. There’s a lot of elements that could have made up a great movie here, but they seem to have been squandered.

One might think that following the success of The 400 Blows, Jean-Pierre Leaud would have been a big commodity in France. This is not the case, though, as this late effort from social realism veteran Julien Duvivier is his only credited role in between his famous first role and the next entry into the Antoine Doinel saga. Still, this feels like a very obvious attempt to capitalize on the success of Leaud’s debut performance, covering the same territory with teen angst. It’s still a nice effort from one of France’s most unfairly treated filmmakers, but this isn’t the film I would use to build an argument about someone’s greatness.

Fifteen year old Jojo has run away from home to escape his controlling stepmother. He manages to make ends meet with some odd jobs, and living on a roof overlooking Pigalle. His romantic interest, Jenny, is much older than him but he manages to convince himself that he’s a potential boyfriend. In the mean time, Jenny becomes involved with a former boxer, Dicky, who Jojo knows as a frequent to his father’s bar. He begins to take more of an interest in Marietta, a girl who is actually his age, but when money becomes an issue again, he might not have a way to finance a relationship.

I get the impression that one’s enjoyment of this film goes as far as they like JPL. Personally, I’m something of a fan so my enjoyment of this film probably goes further than it does for most. There’s an early sequence in which he gets drunk, which leads into a bar brawl. The scene is almost cartoony in its execution, Duvivier chooses to make everything intentionally wobbly, embodying the steadicam as a drunk’s shaky legs. It’s a silly scene as JPL himself stumbles around, but he seems to contribute a great deal of vitality to the scene, making it appear full of life and energy, as opposed to a silly, studio-bound attempt at realism.

JPL is fortunately, surrounded by great talent here. Duvivier is not really going out of his way to make something formally exciting, but he manages to get performances from his actors that simultaneously downplays the drama, but manages to evoke the mental chaos of being a youth. Magali Noel, fresh off a role in Fellini’s legendary La dolce vita,  plays his first and older love interest. She’s probably best known for her collaboration with Fellini, specifically 1973’s Amarcord, where she’s lusted after by teenage boys the same way she is here.

Leaud’s Jojo is rivaled by a washed out boxer, Dicky, played by a longtime French television actor Pierre Mondy. He’s largely unheard of outside of France, but some might remember him as Napoleon in Abel Gance’s The Battle of Austerlitz, which was released the same year as this film. Even less heard of is Monique Brienne, who plays Leaud’s younger love interest. This is her only credited screen role, which is a shame. She’s completely charming as Marietta, who is first ignored by Jojo on the grounds that she’s “just a kid.” We root for Jojo to finally notice her and he does, but his own stubbornness makes the relationship destined to fail.

The film’s conclusion is a little melodramatic. Being bullied by Dicky and seeing Marietta on a date with another boy, Jojo decides to jump from his roof of his tiny apartment. One can feel that Duvivier was trying to accomplish something as involving as the film that made Leaud famous but it never really comes close. The original Antoine Doinel was repeatedly neglected and ignored. It was through the experiences we saw him endure that made his story fascinating and what makes even the lightest entries in that series seem poignant. Here, Jojo seems oddly spoiled, a weird claim for a boy impoverished. His heartbreak is understandable but his teenage crushes don’t seem dramatic enough to really warrant something so dramatic. A film like Il Posto, which came out at around the same time deals with characters at a similar age but manages to depict those complicated teen feelings accurately and put them into a more meaningful context. Here, Jojo is close to being a brat crying wolf. This is understandable since many of Leaud’s characters could be bratty, but the martyr complex his character takes on here is ugly, especially when it seems to only come from him neglecting Marietta and her taking an interest in another boy.

The movie is still  charming, mostly because of Leaud’s bratty persona. There’s humor in the way his character constantly tries to perform both maturity and masculinity, but it’s so thinly veined that it’s more often cute. In one instance, he tells Dicky that he’s dating Jenny and that sometimes he has to hit her. This type of talk is terrible on paper, but knowing the character, such actions seem entirely unlikely. He’s simply explaining what he thinks masculinity expects of him. That seems like a comedic touch, but the film’s conclusion seems to support Jojo’s woman-shaming tendencies. As a group of friends try to talk him away from suicide he claims that “everyone is a bastard” and “all girls are bitches.” One of them explains that girls aren’t bitches, but they’re just girls, which seems to tickle Jojo’s funny bone. His weird misogyny seems to been validated and the film’s ending, which is meant to be life-affirming, is all of a sudden a lot darker.

I guess everybody has to start somewhere, and this even applies to the great William A. Wellman. This early effort does show shades of his genre greatness, but it’s mostly a flighty romantic comedy that never really gets any legs. It kind of just spirals towards a finale that never really feels earned, or even interesting. The characters are flat and stock, but the film is actually watchable through Wellman’s own creative decisions. He tries to make the action interesting, though this playful experimentation is the opposite of the economic touch he would showcase in his best film. It’s an interesting entry for Wellman, but probably only for people who find him interesting in the first place.

Peter Good is hopelessly in love with his childhood sweetheart, Amy, but she’s not at all interested. Her affections are dedicated to city slicker, Harry Benson. Peter decides to become a detective in order to impress Amy, specifically going after bootleggers. Coincidentally, Harry invites Amy to The Booklovers, a club disguised as a library. It turns out Harry is a bootlegger, and Peter, now dressed in a ridiculous cowboy getup, sees this as the perfect opportunity to win Amy over.

The film’s best moments seem to be when Wellman shifts the focus away from his goofy protagonist. Peter Good (note the last name) is supposed to be a lovable oaf, but the lovable part never seems to come through. His affections for Amy are inexplicable, understandably I guess, considering this is meant to be a light-hearted comedy, but when he finally “wins” her over in the film’s final minute, it seems completely undeserved. Amy quickly condemns her relationship with Harry, which has seemed stable for the other 59 minutes, and proclaims her new found love for Peter. The screen fades to black and the audience can’t feel particularly warm for spending such time with vapid characters.

The comedy, although obviously tied to its time, does redeem some of the offensively stupid character developments. There’s a clever extended bit with Hank Mann, a frequent collaborator with Chaplin, that seems like an anticipation of Jacques Tati. Of course, his character is completely disconnected with the main story and with the film’s short running time, it seems like a waste. I guess it’s important because it actually gives the film some humor (more just “clever” bits) but the sequence seems to run a little too long. Another counterpoint would be that this sequence doesn’t include the character of Peter, which makes it much better than most of the film.

Joan Crawford makes a short appearance here, and it seems that her presence is what sparked a renewed interest in this film. Her performance is nothing impressive, though she acts George Arthur (last seen in Josef von Sternberg’s The Salvation Hunter) off the screen. In the film’s conclusion, she shows her appreciation for Peter with a kiss on his head, which makes him go crazy. Their potential relationship seems like the foundation for a logical happy ending but Amy (Gertrude Olmstead) sees this. She’s calm and collective for 58 minutes but then becomes hysterical, crumbling under the influence of the protagonist’s intended “good guyness.” It’s a really cheap payoff, but a fitting one, I guess.

One’s enjoyment of the film might be dependent on how much you can enjoy this type of humor. Maybe if you can somehow convince yourself that the protagonist is interesting and worth rooting for (he really isn’t and I can’t stress this enough), you can squeeze even more out of it. The most interesting element is Wellman’s formal experimentation. He starts this immediately with lengthy slow motion shots that are meant to be a comedic depiction of a dog licking up whiskey. There’s a clever “dream” action sequence that takes place in the sky, which is gimmicky but a nice break from most of the proceedings. It seems like Wellman had a lot of fun making this movie, and that’s probably the best thing anyone can say about this film. Unfortunately, he doesn’t manage to let us in on his enjoyment.