The Actress and the Poet / Joyu to shijin (1935)

One of Japan’s earliest available sound films, The Actress and the Poet starts as an experiment in sound recording: we hear a train, followed by a woman screaming.* It teases us with a promise of high melodrama but instead it quickly turns out to be a quintessential shomin-geki.

The screaming woman is an actress rehearsing for a play. The play is a “modern” European-style play about a couple who quarrel leading to his attempt to kill her. After a while, the actress and her husband, a minor poet, begin to argue over his invitation to a friend to stay in their house. Before they know what is happening, they find themselves repeating the same lines in their real-life quarrel. When the actress realizes this, she decides that, even though she earns the real money in the family, he is still the husband and she should treat him as such. They make it up, and all is well again.

In an American version of this story, he would of course have been something of a bumbler. That of course has been the basic premise of American TV sit-coms for pretty much forever, where Mom lets Dad think he is the boss but behind his back or by gentle suggestion actually solves all the family problems. But we have rarely if ever dealt on TV or film with the question of who actually earns the paycheck, and when we do, it is usually as an excuse for broad comedy like Mr. Mom. The subtext has always been that the smart woman knows she can run everything if she just lets him believe he is in charge.

In The Actress and the Poet, the man is very clearly a house-husband, cleaning, shopping, keeping up with the neighbors, even asking his wife for money. However, there are no children and the husband is no bumbler; he’s just a writer whose work is not as lucrative as his wife’s. But other than that, it could easily have been an American film comedy at any time through the eighties at least, and a sit-com even today.

They live next door to another couple that argues constantly. There the husband provides and the wife stays home, but their arguments are about his failure to properly provide. He is an insurance salesman who isn’t selling much, so it is quite a coup when he sells a policy to a young couple who move into the street. That all blows up in his face, however, when the young couple turn out not to be married and commit double suicide. Why that means a big financial loss for him personally is not clear, but apparently it does. No one seems to much care about the suicides themselves, perhaps because they were strangers; all the family arguments are about how he threatened their security by selling to a couple he didn’t check out properly (though he only did so because his wife nagged him into doing it on the very day they moved in.)

The interesting visual twist is that the couples who act “modern” — that is, they argue quite publicly and are engaged in modern professions — dress completely in traditional dress.

The new neighbors

The young couple who move into the neighborhood dress in a completely European manner but are in fact the most traditionally Japanese couple in the neighborhood, right down to the love suicide. It is a reminder that you can’t always judge “modernity” or “western-ness” from dress or household decoration. It is usually a good clue, but it is not an infallible indicator.

Released at about the same time as Wife! Be Like a Rose, this is apparently Naruse’s first sound film. Also featuring Sachiko Chiba as the actress, it makes a nice companion piece for her portrayal of the “modern woman” in that movie. The comedy is gentle, as in most shomin-geki, but often charming.

Sachiko Chiba

The secondary plot, however, while treated equally gently, is a bit less attractive, since the double suicide seems to be taken for granted without any explanation or sympathy.

As you can see from the screen captures, I found this on YouTube, where the resolution is not particularly great. Nevertheless, it is still clear enough to be quite entertaining.

• My wife never developed the passion for these movies that I did, so she usually just hears them from the other room. When I asked her why she wasn’t interested, she commented that for her, Japanese movies were just strange noises interrupted by women screaming. That seems to me an awfully unfair generalization, but I did laugh when this movie, the earliest sound film I saw before I found The Neighbor’s Wife and Mine, opened with a scream.