Yasujiro Ozu

The End of Summer: Ozu's second-to-last film beautifully blends comedy and tragedy to tell the story of three sisters who are stunned to discover that their aging father has taken up with his former mistress. The Kohayakawa family is thrown into distress when childlike father Manbei takes up with his old mistress, in one of Ozu’s most deftly modulated blendings of comedy and tragedy.

Ozu's last black-and-white film, this is perhaps his darkest and harshest depiction of the disintegration of the family. Ozu regular, Chishu Ryu plays a father living alone with his two daughters. The women discover that their mother, whom they thought dead, is actually living nearby with another man. This shocking information results in despair, destruction and isolation reflecting an extreme pessimism without precedent in Ozu's work.

Ozu’s hilarious Technicolor reworking of his silent I Was Born, But . . . , Good Morning (Ohayô) is the story of two young boys in suburban Tokyo who take a vow of silence after their parents refuse to buy them a television set. Shot from the perspective of the petulant brothers, Good Morning is an enchantingly satirical portrait of family life that gives rise to gags about romance, gossip, and the consumerism of modern Japan.

Tokyo Story follows an aging couple, on their journey from their rural village to visit their two married children in bustling postwar Tokyo. Their reception, however, is disappointing: too busy to entertain them, their children send them off to the hot springs. After Tomi falls ill, she and Shukichi return home; the children, grief sicken, hasten to be with her. From a simple tale unfolds one of the greatest of all Japanese films. (-DVD cover)

Two young brothers become the leaders of a gang of kids in their neighborhood. Their father is an office clerk who tries for advancement by playing up his boss. When the boys visit the boss' house with their father, they discover that their dad has been making a fool of himself to please his boss, who's son is an outwitted member of the boys' gang. The brothers' revolt claiming that hierarchy should be based on ability, not on social background. Ozu's charming film is a social satire that draws from the antics of childhood as well as the tragedy of maturity.

A moving portrait of a middle-aged, middle-class couple who realizes that their arranged relationship is growing stale, this is certainly one of Ozu's most light-hearted films. As he examines the tradition of the arranged marriage, Ozu departs from his traditional style, employing frequent camera movement and showing both internal and external action, including baseball games, car rides and train trips. A subtle and delicate story of rekindled love and optimism.

A kind of sequel to I Was Born, But… It was made when the filming of I Was Born, But… was interrupted when one of the children in that film got hurt. Four boys are graduated from college. Three of them eventually have to ask the fourth, the son of a company president, for jobs. He, in turn, gets one of their girls.

In the late twenties and early thirties, Yasujiro Ozu was working steadily for Shochiku studios, honing his craft on dozens of silent films in various genres, from romantic melodramas to college comedies to gangster pictures—and, of course, movies about families. In these three droll domestic films—Tokyo Chorus, I Was Born, But . . . , and Passing Fancy, presented here with all-new scores by renowned silent-film composer Donald Sosin—Ozu movingly and humorously depicts middle-class struggles and the resentments between children and parents, establishing the emotional and aesthetic delicacy with which he would transform the landscape of cinema."