On Screen

...The father is at times withdrawn and uncommunicative, absent...

...Plain, ludicrously rather than pathetically plain, is what Miss Minnelli is...

...Thanks to deft editing, much of this works impressively...

...It may be too much to ask a musical to be thoughtful and illuminating, but if it comports itself as if it were both of those things, we do ask questions...

...the quiet harbor town is captured in some chugging motor boats and neat little houses decorously deployed up and down tree-studded hillocks...

...The selfish daughter can hardly wait to make her decent young sister, Kyoko, dig up some of mother's valuables, ostensibly as keepsakes...

...The sets and costumes and German locations are marvelously authentic and inventive, the atmosphere is cogently derived from the paintings and graphics of the Expressionists...

...His theme is almost always the family, and the conflict or occasional harmony between the generations within it...

...her sweetness has a wonderful complexity to it...

...The melancholy of this hits us as we recall her innocent glee upon arriving in Tokyo, when she remarked on how near it really is and how they must come up more often...

...They were, to be sure, helped by their actors...

...She urges her daughter-in-law to come visit them in Onomichi...

...Our hero is considered lucky...

...The dwelling becomes an inner landscape that, joining with the outer one, prepares us for the personalities of those who live in it...

...But the sadness then spills over into a third stage: We notice that goodness is not wholly ephemeral, for a link is established between good people that will sustain them, however tenuously and intermittently...

...The grandchildren are shown as spoiled brats whose behavior blatantly parallels their parents' failings...

...The old couple are good but not perfect...

...The chief device is cross-cutting??using the song-and-dance numbers at the Kit-Kat Klub as an ironic, or merely heightened, commentary on what happens in the story...

...But do not let that deter you from going: If a statue by Praxiteles can be a masterpiece without head and arms, so can this film without an adequate print or subtitles...

...They went from play to movie to stage musical to this movie musical...

...I can find no other category for it than "Ozu," which is to say extraordinarily humane, affecting and unique...

...he was incomparably greater, to my mind, than the overrated Mizoguchi...

...The films, with their titles usually taken modestly from the seasons (Late Spring, End of Summer, Early Autumn), tend to revolve around a marriage or a death in the family, around the isolation of individuals even under the warming cloaks of friendship, kinship, cohabitation...

...The subsidiary love story falls quite flat, owing to the dull performances or personalities of Marisa Berenson and Fritz Wepper...

...In fact, Miss Minnelli has only two things going for her: a father and a mother who got her there in the first place, and tasteless reviewers and audiences who keep her there...

...I don't prefer my grandchildren," the old gentleman replies, weighing his words carefully...

...Ozu's direction is sheer understatement...

...let us hope that they will finally be put to rest...

...Perhaps the most beautiful and moving of these still, deep works, Tokyo Story (1953), has had to wait 19 years for its first commercial showing in America...

...The father warmly insists that his wife was right, and presents her old-fashioned pocket watch as a memento to the tearful Noriko...

...The old couple start out for Onomichi, but the woman is taken ill and they have to spend a few days in Osaka with their unmarried son Keizio...

...those are the appurtenances of a clown??a funny clown, not even a sad one...

...Her obesity is excessive, and she is forgetful and not quite efficient...

...instead, she rattles around gawkily and disjointedly, like someone who never got over being un-feminine and unattractive...

...Its movement, interspersed with flashes of humor, is from joviality to wistfulness, thence to profound melancholy, redeemed by final illumination...

...he highly touted movie version of Cabaret marks the fourth transformation of Christopher Isher-wood's "Berlin Stories...

...But even the main threesome suffers from the casting...

...But those are hardly serious flaws...

...in Onomichi, they slide open to the mere natural sound of wood against wood...

...They come back to Tokyo early and find themselves without shelter for the night...

...As the mother, Chiyeko Higashimaya superbly balances cheerfulness with befuddlement, and is childlike and dignified and shrewd all at once...

...The mother is a bit naive, overapologetic, too eager to please...

...into Liza Minnelli, catastrophe...

...Thus the film begins with a street in Onomichi along which children are walking to school, in single file and at a steady, orderly pace...

...In Noriko's pitiful one-room apartment, the large package of Rinso testifies to cleanliness...

...One sleepless night they speculate about their children and grandchildren...

...When the mother spends that night at Noriko's, a great warmth, born earlier, is confirmed between them...

...It is in terms of such contrasts or, less frequently, parallels that Tokyo Story makes its points...

...A few arrogant chimney stacks and a honking auto horn convey the industrial city...

...Tokyo Story deals with an elderly couple who leave their young schoolteacher daughter behind in the small town of Onomichi, while they go to visit their married children in Tokyo...

...But the trouble with the film is that it pretends to say more than it does...

...Full of sake, the old-timers allow some grievances to surface??mostly disgruntlement about children...

...You can now, in Tokyo Story, by the Japanese master Yasu-jiro Ozu (1903-1963...

...The two young women are seen squatting in a lovely, simple but tasteful Japanese interior...

...sooner or later, Kyoko will also have to look out for her own interests first...

...Helmut Griem has the looks and bearing needed for the bisexual Baron, and that is about all the part requires...

...these people are truly good, and not simperers, dullards or nonentities...

...Especially if you have no talent...

...I would like to," Noriko says with her eager smile, "if it were a little nearer...

...The doctor's house, on the other hand, is introduced to us as his elder son (circa 11) rushes in on his return from school, cavalierly throws his things down and darts hither and yon aggressively and clamorously...

...During the death vigil and funeral a certain mellowing humanizes everyone, but at the postburial dinner people revert to form...

...Miss Minnelli cannot act any part without calling attention to how hard she is working at it and how far she is from having worked it out...

...comparable to the painter's quick background brushstrokes, in a matter of seconds they evoke the genius loci...

...The impact is always that of well-placed understatement...

...This was a mistake on the part of the filmmakers: The background sings the foreground right off the screen...

...But the real heartbreaker is No-riko's affirmation that she herself will soon become self-centered...

...If you can sit through this unemphatic little scene dry-eyed, not only do you not know about art, you do not even know about life...

...neither drama nor comedy-drama...

...We are reminded of how poor she is, and the old woman answers politely, "You are right...

...Once back in Onomichi, the mother's condition worsens...

...Ozu and his coscenarist, Kogo Noda, have worked a modest miracle...

...At first the interiors, too, are treated as scenery: A static camera looks into a house through one or more sets of open screen doors and catches the bustle of the inhabitants as they scurry or flounce in and out of the field of vision...

...The young woman protests that she is unworthy, that her thoughts have often strayed from her dead husband (as if that were a sin), but the old man gently makes her accept the gift and promise to live a little...

...But Liza Minnelli in bed...

...If only the print shown at the New Yorker Theater were better, and if the subtitles were not riddled with lacunae...

...by the time the sons, daughter and daughter-in-law arrive, the old woman is in a coma...

...Chishu Ryu, a strikingly handsome and sensitive-looking man, plays the father (as he does in other Ozu films) with a face that can change imperceptibly from an obliging, helpful smile to an expression of slightly ironic resignation that is still a half-smile...

...But we remain unenlightened about the connection: Is Nazism a product of the decadence, or is the decadence an attempt to escape from, and so a product of, Nazism...

...So, too, the old lady had said of her children, "Let's think that they are better than most," and her husband, with that subtle yet ingenuous smile of his, answered, "They're certainly above average...

...The father's reactions to his wife's death are quietly heartrending...

...In the garish hotel at Atami Hot Springs, the old folks are kept awake by the roisterers downstairs...

...But, unlike those three, he did not go in for exoticism, historicism, the grand or spectacular manner...

...Kyoko blurts out without really raising her voice...

...Exteriors are reduced to a few basic, sometimes recurrent, establishing or mood shots...

...We are aware throughout of kind actions rising above the greyness of everyday existence like beautiful dawns...

...One is between Kyoko and Noriko: The schoolmistress berates her sister and brothers, and wonders why they can't be as good as Noriko...

...It is a calmly shattering comment on both children and grandchildren...

...if it is true, and even the best must become tarnished with time, that may be sadder yet...

...When they review the injustices of life, Noriko speaks gently of harsh things...

...in fact, they come up with all sorts of stoic acceptance and parental glossing over, yet underneath a great unstated sadness can be felt...

...They lie in then-beds sleepless but uncomplaining, only their fans swish and swat nervously and snappishly, and the shot is held a little longer than the viewer can comfortably bear...

...She cannot even sing Kander and Ebb's admittedly inferior songs...

...The latter assures her that it is all a question of age...

...But the film's irredeemable disaster is its Sally Bowles: changing her into an American was bad enough...

...Michael York does well enough by Brian, as the Isherwood figure is now called, though this essentially uninteresting actor is saved by the passivity of the role...

...When the old man is widowed, Ozu frames his shots of him in such a way that we are always conscious of the empty space just before or behind him, where his wife used to be seated...

...Still, Joel Grey is wonderfully sinister as the M.C., Jay Allen's script manages to get a fair amount of decadence into a script that had to earn a PG rating, and the cross-cutting is sometimes brilliant, especially in that bravura scene that shuttles between Sally and Brian in bed, and Sally on stage singing about her bliss...

...The basic connection between the decadence of a sleazy Berlin night club in the early '30s and the rise of Nazism, though continually hinted at, and sometimes leeringly rubbed in, is never truly demonstrated...

...He and his rather colorless wife represent the ordinary person at his most neutral...

...He repeats something his late wife had said to the young woman??that someone so young and fine should not remain faithful to a husband eight years dead, especially one who wasn't all that deserving...

...Then there is Noriko, widow of a son lost in the war, who in contrast to the son and daughter and their spouses does wonders of self-effacing generosity for the old folks...

...only rarely is a point made too obvious through dawdling or repetitiousness...

...Bob Fosse's film, handsomely photographed by Geoffrey Unsworth (the cinematographer of, among other films, 2001), is much the best reincarnation of these stories, although still less good than they...

...Noriko sweetly puts up her mother-in-law, but the old man has to go out drinking with two old friends, former Onomichi-ans, who do not have a bed for him either...

...Details speak clearly but unobtrusively...

...we also realize how transient and doomed these good deeds are, how beleaguered and confounded...

...he registers intensity of thought and feeling with a furrow of the brow and a sort of sunken-in gaze that are acting at its most economic and eloquent...

...he preferred instead to work with everyday people in unspectacular, contemporary situations...

...Like the rest of Ozu's oeuvre, it is neither comedy nor tragedy...

...Almost always the dialogue functions with this suggestion-laden spareness??imageless prose haikus, as it were, whose few words resonate far and deep...

...She cannot even move right??in this case, like a sexy cabaret artiste and thriving nymphomaniac...

...To get the parents out of the way and cut down on expenses, the son and daughter hustle them off to an inexpensive seaside resort, where rowdy revelers make sleep impossible...

...A married daughter, a beautician, typifies the crass and stingy sides of ordinariness, still short of real badness...

...Like them, she is one of the truly good, without seeming idealized or dull...

...Nevertheless, we know that their thoughts will visit with each other...

...And was there no political-economic crisis that begat them both...

...That turnipy nose overhanging a forward-gaping mouth and hastily retreating chin, that bulbous cranium with eyes as big (and as inexpressive) as saucers...

...It is so far away...

...his progeny has turned out at least passable...

...Noriko smiles her sweeping, absolute smile and says, very softly, "Yes, it is...

...Outside the window are the gracefully flared rooftops of Onomichi, and along the waterway ships are gliding past one another like people that pass in the night...

...at his mother's funeral, young Keizio may seem to suffer most intensely, yet he alone does not wear the traditional mourning garb...

...if you want to hear real songmanship, listen to Greta Keller doing "Heimat" by way of intermittent background music...

...But the devastating climaxes of the whole long film are two conversations between the good people...

...Their unworldliness and willingness to settle for crumbs verges on being irritating...

...And given a matching figure??desperately uplifted breasts, waist indistinguishable from hips??you just cannot play Sally Bowles...

...then he adds unenthusiastically, "I like my children better...

...The doors in the Tokyo houses move noisily, have warning bells attached to them...

...One of the older children is a doctor, who turns out less successful and well-off than his parents had assumed...

...If this is not true, the self-depreciation of one of the truly just is unbearably sad...

...The...

...Isn't life disappointing...

...In how many films have you seen plain good people??neither saints nor fools nor heroes??effectively portrayed...

...Cabaret does not even do full justice to personal relationships...

...And the supporting cast is as perfect as the principals, with a particularly astonishing performance from Setsuko Hara as Noriko: I cannot remember another instance of homeliness so transformed by inner beauty...

...Fosse has choreographed and shot the musical numbers as well as could be, and has done respectably by the rest of the material...

...They do not permit themselves severe censure...

...Ozu was a giant, like Kurosawa and, to a lesser extent, Ichikawa...

...But all this falls into place only much later when, after many letdowns at the hands of her children, the old lady remarks to her husband that some grandparents like their grandchildren better than their children...

...The second conversation is between the father and Noriko...