In this film, Ozu ventured outside his habitual terrain, in setting and genre. Normally he concentrated on the everyday rituals of the average family, on the rifts and rapprochements between parents and children as they swing between resistance and conformity to social pressures on matters of wide public concern – changes in marriage, education and employment patterns, shifts in morals and manners. In this film he focused on the troubled relationship between a gangster and his moll (who is also a member of the typing pool in a business company during the day). Not noted for his interest in sex and violence, let alone heterosexual relationships, Ozu would seem to be out of his depth. But he characteristically charms us with injections of humour, with visual rhymes and with homages to Hollywood, as well as demonstrating that he could extend his repertoire of imagery beyond washing lines, telegraph poles and kettles.

The film is set in the port city of Yokohama which, like most port cities, was noted for the prevalence of prostitution and vice, and its generally low moral standards, due to the large number of visiting sailors and overseas residents. As in Hollywood gangster films, the gangsters and their dames are sharply dressed in flashy attire and habituate a boxing club, a night club, a pool room and the street. Instead of washing on the line, telegraph poles, kettles and vases, Ozu uses hats, guns, billiard cues, punching bags, items of jewellery, records, suitcases and a coffee pot as recurrent visual motifs. The coffee pot is repeatedly featured in the scenes set in the apartment shared by the gangster and his moll. Rows of typewriters and a row of hats on pegs are repeatedly featured in the scenes set in the office where the heroine, Tokiko, works as a typist. Her competition, the stereotypical good girl, who is distressed about her student brother drifting into crime, works in a record shop, where the RCA trademark dog is repeatedly featured as a motif. The sets and cinematography were reputedly influenced by Sternberg and Hollywood gangster movies of the early 30s. There is certainly an emphasis on glass surfaces and light and shadow, and a busy mise-en-scene, all of which are unusual in Ozu.

We can situate the film as an example of the Shochiku contemporary studio’s experimentation with genre diversification and Hollywood conventions in its first decade and a half. While the Nikkatsu company were more influenced by the local theatre, in choice of scripts, casting and performance style, the Kamata studio of Shochiku prided itself on its modernity and Hollywood borrowings. The directors there were great fans of American comedy and Ozu initially trained as a director of slapstick (the so-called nonsense genre). Under Shiro Kido, the head of the studio, the Kamata team eventually developed a distinctive genre of family sit-com (called the shomin geki or home drama) that concentrated on the everyday problems of family life and that, not unlike Chaplin’s cinema, combined pathos and humour. Some of Naruse’s early movies made at the Shochiku Kamata studio betray an uncomfortable mixture of melodrama, slapstick and social realism, but the studio stalwarts (Shimazu, Shimizu, Gosho and Ozu) soon mastered the art of welding them seamlessly together with what became known as “the Kamata touch” - a charmingly light, affecting, modern touch. Until the new sound studio was built at Ofuna in mid decade, they continued to produce largely silent movies, even though they had produced a successful sound movie already in 1931, in order to service their large number of exhibition outlets which were not equipped for sound.

In the same year as Dragnet Girl, Hiroshi Shimizu, Ozu’s colleague at Shochiku, also produced a film set in Yokohama, with a similar romantic triangle involving two girls (one respectable, the other disreputable) in love with the same guy. But the Shimizu film is not a gangster movie; it is a fully fledged romantic melodrama. Ozu’s film is a genre exercise and he seems to have recognized his limitations by immediately reverting to his real forte – the everyday life of ordinary people – in his next film. In Passing Fancy (Dekigokoro), he displayed an emotionally stronger engagement with the endearing personality, trials and tribulations of a thick-headed loser, a single father, as he details his humorous and pathetic attempts to court a young lady and look after his scruffy son (played by the same boy who played the younger son in I was Born But…). This latter film won the Kinema Jumpo critical award for Best Japanese Film of the year. Though lacking the tight narrative and formal construction of Dragnet Girl, there is an emotional engagement with the two central characters of father and son in Passing Fancy - and a poignancy in their relationship - that is lacking in the central relationship between the lovers of Dragnet Girl, despite the spirited performance of Kinuyo Tanaka in the lead role.

The film provides an opportunity to view this star actress in one of her early roles. In the early 1930s, Tanaka was a Kamata studio actress, playing leading roles for Gosho, Shimizu and Ozu.  She had featured in the role of the young wife in the studio’s first sound film, The Neighbour’s Wife and Mine (Gosho 1931) and in several previous Ozu movies. In the postwar era, she was the star of almost all of Mizoguchi’s movies. As the gun-toting tough heroine of Dragnet Girl, she not only harbours a heart of gold (as conventionally do most fallen women of opera, fiction and movies); she also turns out to have the moral fibre, resolute determination and reformist zeal of a Salvation Army crusader – even if she has to shoot her man in the foot to teach him his lesson.  

Freda Freiberg