Street Without End / Kagirinaki hodo (1934)

Sugiko in the pancake house

A young waitress leaves her work one day to go meet the young man with whom she has fallen in love so that they can be married. On the way, she is hit by a car* and never shows up for the meeting. Aha! we say — Love Affair / An Affair to Remember. But this is Tokyo in 1934, not RKO in 1939, and Mikio Naruse is not Leo McCarey, so things do not turn out so sentimentally (or romantically, depending on your personal feeling).

Sugiko is a very “modern” young but lower-class woman, working to support herself not in a bar but in, of all things, a pancake house, where some of the customers seem a bit confused about how to eat the food they are served. There she meets the young man who asks her to marry him, but she also is offered a screen test by the movie talent scouts who frequent the place. When she is hit by a car, the driver Hiroshi takes her to the hospital in a taxi and her young man sees her in the other man’s arms and thinks the worst. He promptly goes back home to his family and the arranged marriage he was trying to escape, and there is no later happy reunion. Instead, after getting to know her better, Hiroshi asks Sugiko to marry him and she agrees, at least in part because she has a younger brother to support.

Only later does she realize that she has jumped from the frying pan into the fire, for Hiroshi’s mother and sister are snobs of the first order.

Proposing with a view of Mt. Fuji

The happy couple alone together

Mother- and Sister-in-law

No matter what Sugiko does, she does it wrong. This is very much a class issue, not a conflict between modern and traditional womanhood. The woman Hiroshi’s mother had arranged for him to marry wears western clothes, her skirts showing rather more leg than expected in the fashions of the time, and is such an active young woman Hiroshi calls her a tomboy. Sugiko, by contrast, is the perfect traditional wife, but she would be perfect only in a poorer household.

Eventually, she realizes Hiroshi does not have the strength to protect himself from them, much less protect her, so she leaves him so that they both can “think about their future.” He drives his car off the road and she returns to see him in the hospital, but in the most modern move of all, she simply says goodbye, and then leaves.

Sugiko’s determination

It’s not quite Nora slamming the door, but it is remarkable. Not only does Sugiko determine to return to making her own way in the world, but she and Naruse (and his writers) also reject any hint of romance or sentimentality along the way. There is no deathbed reunion, no tearful farewell, no promise of new understanding and welcome from the rest of the family. It falls into that strong Japanese tradition of realism where, even with the best of intentions, no one really gets a happy ending.

Sugiko’s fellow waitress takes the men up on the movie offer and realizes that even though it was quite a legitimate offer, the movie business is not all it seems to be. She does marry her boyfriend the struggling artist after he gets a job painting scenery, but that’s the closest we get to a romantic ending.

This is Naruse’s last silent movie,** and he takes a different approach than usual for him.  There are still tracking shots and some of the quick dolly-in moves for dramatic emphasis, but only occasionally. Otherwise, he makes what seem to be hundreds of different set-ups and cuts. Three decades later Oshima would become famous for as many as a thousand cuts in Violence at Noon. I’m not willing to go through and count the different set-ups and cuts here, but there are enough of them to stand comparison. Once Naruse started working with sound, the showy camerawork and editing of his silent features would gradually disappear until he became the great technician with no visible technique in his more famous films of the fifties.

There are stories that Naruse was in effect forced to make this movie by the studio head, but that is hard to believe based on the nature of the film itself. It does not look like the work of someone just going through the motions. Of the major directors of gendai-geki whose work has survived from this era, Naruse seems to have been the  most aware of the problems of class for his women without being in any way an obviously political film-maker. In that sense, this is much more typical of his over-all interests than are his early surviving sound films made at another studio.

• * Perhaps it is purely a matter of the random way I’ve been going through my notes to start the blog, but Naruse seems to have made a remarkably high proportion of movies in which the plot hinges on a car accident.
• ** There is a brief scene in which the boyfriend pretends to be a director on an empty set he has just finished painting. Note how comparatively small the silent camera is and more significantly, how low the camera is placed, barely chest high for the operator and, since the actors are on a built up stage, barely reaching their waist when they are standing. This was something of a default position for Japanese movies long before Ozu made it his trademark, but we rarely get a “behind-the-scenes” look at the placement in practice.  And it is also interesting since Naruse actually uses this position only rarely in this particular film — he may have simply sneaked a shot of another director’s set.