The Dancing Girl of Izu (1933) User Reviews

Very Enjoyable Golden Age Japanese Film

[Steven_Harrison · 8/10 · 22 August 2005]

The title translates literally as "Dancing Girl of Izu".

A very enjoyable, if maybe overly sentimental film from one of the most, relatively, well known Japanese Golden Age directors. The plot is of a young man, fresh out of "high school" (but really undergraduate college as far as western audiences are concerned) who falls for a young itinerant actress, who, along with her brother, becomes involved with some shady and interesting characters which leads to conflict (and a memorable resolution.) This silent was originally planned to be a sound film, but due to budget restraints wasn't. I couldn't help but think during viewing that this was it's fatal flaw. A film this energetic (very Griffith like, with more cuts than I could count, the most Eisensteinian Japanese film I'd seen since Page of Madness) needed a musical counterpoint (and the overblown benshi narration on the video copy I viewed didn't last two minutes before my manual muting of it.) This film came after Gosho's highly successful (the first truly successful talkie in Japan) My Neighbor's Wife and Mine (which I'll watch soon enough), and also initiated a long series of Dancing Girl of Izu films (six to date) along with introducing the Junbungaku ("pure literature") movement in film adaptations. It also was a massive boon to the career of Tanaka Kinuyo, which makes it pretty important from any point of view. I did very much enjoy it (despite the problems mentioned earlier) and would consider it an equal to the single 30s era Naruse film I've seen (Wife! Be Like A Rose, and until I see otherwise I consider this director to begin hitting his stride in the 50s), but definitely lesser than Ozu, Yamanaka, and Shimizu. Watched with no subtitles, though I had a copy of the new book on Gosho, and McDonald's piece on the adaptation to help me through (more than enough). Highly recommended if you have a chance to see it.

Steven

Impressive Japanese drama.

[Mozjoukine · 12 April 2015]

Finding this one so long after it's production is a surprise. It outclasses the then contemporary work of known directors like Ozu and Mizoguchi and, taken with the few later Gosho films to circulate (Four Chimneys, Inn in Osaka), indicates a major talent.

The plot beats our anticipation as sympathy shifts from the family of traveling players to the presumed villain, the rich mine owner benefiting from their misfortune. The film is nearest in tone to the then recent American films of Frank Borzage, which may have been an influence but it is more complex and sharper. Compositions are remarkable sophisticated and the editing tight and without flaw. Add in a totally winning performance by young Kinuo Tanaka.

Offering more than the obvious story content, it is one of the best records of the Westernisation of Japan then in progress, with it's educated characters in European clothing (the cloth cap and the student's short hair cut are notable plot points) while the more traditional characters still wear kimonos and sit around charcoal braziers.It would be interesting to know whether that was the makers' intention or a by-product of their observation skills.

The You Tube copy is murky but has excellent English subtitles

A Conventional Tale Told By a Master

[boblipton · 9/10 · 28 April 2018]

A college student on his way to visit a fellow student and a country festival falls in with a girl, her brother and his wife. Once they were mine owners, but they lost the mine and are reduced to wandering players. Meanwhile, an engineer visits a mine owner and demands a bonus now that the mine is profitable. The mine owner refuses. The engineer had high-tailed it out of town when things had gotten tough. Harsh words are exchanged.

Heinosuke Gosho's tale of tough times on the road and young love is a very well-told tale, with some fine acting and good camerawork. However, my academic nature cannot help but compare it to Ozu's works in the 1930s. The actor who plays the engineer, Reikichi Kawamura, was a regular in Ozu's films through 1947, and early on, the ingenue, Kinuyo Tanaka, sings a song in which she compares herself to a floating weed..... ding! ding! ding! ding! and so I started making comparisons and trying to decide who did what better.

Yet on reflection, any comparison is a false one, because even though the two directors worked in the same genre, they worked them to different ends. Story is what occurs when character meets situation and one or both must change; the path is plot; and the more believable all are (for realistic fiction, not symbolic fiction like sf or fantasy or westerns), the better; and for too much early Japanese film, it seems to me, character is twisted unrealistically to fit the convenience of the plot.

Both Gosho and Ozu were intent on realistic characters in realistic situations, but it seems to me that Ozu was far more interested in character. Perhaps that is why, after the war, he abandoned much camera movement and settled on a still camera at floor level and long takes: less flash, look at the people. Gosho, at least in this movie, is clearly interested in the plot, in how the characters are revealed and how they change.

Ozu, because he adhered less to plot as we understand it, seems less conventional than Gosho. We've seen youngsters fall in love in hundreds, if not thousands of works of fiction, and the only question is whether it's a happy or a tragic ending. To put it bluntly and unfairly, the story that Gosho wants to tell us is an oft-told tale, so he had better find some interesting way of telling us. Ozu's stories are more unconventional, and it is their unfamiliarity that fascinates us, their riddles that ensnare us. Yet Gosho, in telling his conventional tale in the same setting that Ozu used for his unconventional stories, tells this one just as well.