Review of Tokyo Chorus

This early silent film from Ozu, while not up to the masterpieces of the Japanese director during the 1950s and the 1960s is worth seeing. It deals with the beginning of the Great Depression in Japan, and is an odd but pleasing mixture of slapstick humor with social commentary. A young hothead guy loses his job in an insurance company after arguing with the boss after the unfair firing of an older employee. While he earlier has stated that "Hoover's economics have not reached Japan", he finds himself suddenly unemployed, and he has to make ends meet with demeaning jobs in order to sustain not only his living but that of his long suffering wife and their three young children. At the end, a ray of hope appears, as he gets a job as a high school teacher in a small town - a step down presumably from his early job at the insurance company but better than his awful months enduring as an unemployed or semi employed man holding to crappy jobs. I don't know of any other movie from the era - from Japan or elsewhere - that tackles the Depression and the awful situation of being unemployed as this movie does. Naturally, for a movie that is almost 80 years old, there are parts of it that are a bit dated (and the copy I saw was far from ideal, with a number of scratches on it), but it has aged better than probably 95% of its contemporary movies. Something about Japanese movies of all ages is how they seem to stand the test of time, they have really aged better than movies from other countries and tackle themes that other national cinemas took decades to tackle. Bonus point for fans of Japanese cinema: the infant daughter (whose sudden illness is an important part of the plot) is played by Hideko Takamine, a great Japanese actress that during the 1950s shone as a regular in the movies of the great director Mikio Naruse (she also appeared in some movies of Ozu during that time). She's still alive, according to the IMDb, in her mid 80s, though she has been absent from movies for decades.