Charles Matthews

With its low-angle long takes and shots of buildings and landscapes bridging scenes, There Was a Father is unmistakably a film by Yasujiro Ozu. What doesn't seem characteristic of Ozu is the didactic, moralizing tone, the persistent stress on duty, on hard work, on self-sacrifice. You don't need to check the release date for the film to realize that this was Ozu's contribution to the war effort in the form of home front propaganda, very much in the manner of Akira Kurosawa's The Most Beautiful (1944) and Keisuke Kinoshita's The Living Magaroku (1943), designed to encourage greater wartime productivity. What sets Ozu's film apart from those two slightly later films is the relative absence of actual reference to the war, except for the grownup Ryohei's passing his draft physical and the remarkable moment when Shuhei encourages his son to bow at the shrine to his dead mother and give her the news. Ozu gives us a Japan in which life goes on, not one in which consciousness of the enemy dominates every waking moment. It's a film without much of a plot, in which the dramatic tension stems from the always postponed hope of father and son that they will one day live together. The main thing that keeps There Was a Father from becoming mawkish is the beautifully controlled performance by Chishu Ryu, Ozu's favorite actor, who had the great ability to play characters of almost any age. In Early Summer (1951), for example, he plays Setsuko Hara's brother, while in Tokyo Story (1953) he plays her elderly father-in-law. In There Was a Father we first see him as the dark-haired, stubble-bearded widower, raising the young Ryohei; by the end of the film Ryohei is grown and Shuhei is gray-haired and ill, but he's vividly convincing in both appearances. He also makes the determinedly self-sacrificing Shuhei convincing, when he gives up his teaching job because he feels responsible for the accidental death of one of his students, and even his moralizing speeches bear the weight of conviction. There Was a Father is the work of a great director forced to compromise by a totalitarian regime and managing to remain as true to his art as circumstances will allow.