Ozu held out against making talkies longer than any other major Japanese director: his first full sound film, The Only Son (Hitori musuko), was released in 1936. Rather touchingly, Ozu’s intransigence was not out of aesthetic fidelity to the silent cinema, but was the result of a promise made to his cameraman, Hideo Mohara, who was developing his own sound-on-film system. Ozu had assured Mohara that he would not make a sound film with any other system.
But by 1935 Ozu was obliged to accept that a pre-recorded musical score would be attached to this late silent, along with some sound effects. Moreover, the influence of the talkies, which by that time constituted nearly half of Japanese film production, is widely apparent in this film, which Ozu stated that Shochiku “made me make … just as though it were sound”. The film makes frequent use of “offscreen sound”, with the lines of dialogue in the intertitles not always spoken by the character shown onscreen. This technique is highly unusual in silent cinema, and still makes demands on the spectator.
The film’s realism is characteristic of Ozu, and it is one of his most downbeat films. Made after several years in which Japan’s social harmony and economic prosperity had been rendered precarious by the worldwide Great Depression, it offers an unsparing portrait of poverty in Japan’s capital. A decade before the equivalent term was borrowed in Italy, Japanese critics used the term “neo-realismo” to describe the film’s approach; and indeed, Tadao Sato has compared the film to Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (Ladri di biciclette). Nevertheless, Ozu’s formalism is also remarkable, as witness the striking shots of chimneys, telegraph poles, and large wooden spools in the opening scenes. For David Bordwell, the film “brings style into prominence through repetitive patterning and parametric variation”.
Takeshi Sakamoto (1899-1974) reprises the role of proletarian father Kihachi, a character on whom he had played variations in Passing Fancy (Dekigokoro, 1933) and A Story of Floating Weeds (Ukigusa monogatari, 1934), while one of Kihachi’s two sons is played by Ozu’s regular child star, Tokkan-Kozo (real name Tomio Aoki, 1923-2004). The film placed ninth in the Kinema Junpo Best Ten critics’ poll of the year.

Alexander Jacoby, Johan Nordström