Category: 1941

Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family (1941)

Yasujirō Ozu | 1hr 46min

When the rock at the centre of the Toda family is lost, there is little that remains to hold its fragments together – though the enthusiastic attendance of Shintarō’s 69th birthday celebrations might originally suggest otherwise. Surely his children would loyally support each other after his passing, and they would certainly never try to palm off their now-homeless mother and youngest sister Setsuko, effectively washing their hands of responsibility. For those who comfortably belong to Japan’s upper-class though, family ties are diminished by their lack of interdependence, and Yasujirō Ozu’s filmic foray into the stratosphere of the elite exposes the true weakness in their relationships.

With his focus shifting away from society’s disenfranchised, the personal conflicts in Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family stem more apathy than the insecurity of Ozu’s previous characters, marking a notable departure from the industrial wastelands of The Only Son or the provincial streets of A Story of Floating Weeds. Perhaps this break from rundown locations is partly why its visuals are a little more muted, but it’s tough to criticise his mise-en-scène too much when it still bears the markings of his carefully set interiors. Here, patterned wallpaper forms delicate frames around doorways, while abundant flowers densely crowd out compositions at Shintarō’s funeral, commemorating his life through immoderate displays of wealth.

It is at Shintarō’s birthday party though where we get our first taste of this family’s decay, revealed in pillow shots which follow his initial collapse and move into an empty doctor’s office. There, a grandfather clock rhythmically swings its pendulum with the repetitive, ringing telephone, marking the first of several instances that Ozu calls upon this symbol of time and mortality – not that the Toda children necessarily consider the weight that either bear on their lives. Apparently the cultural tradition of honouring one’s elders only applies to the underprivileged who continue to lean on them, and even after being wracked by Shintarō’s post-mortem debts, still these siblings dedicate the bare minimum to looking after their mother.

When Mrs. Toda and Setsuko move in with the eldest brother Shin’ichiro, disharmony finds fertile ground, eventually sprouting into a confrontation between his wife Kazuko and Setsuko. Quarrels in Ozu films are rarely impassioned, yet resentment simmers in glacial accusations, beginning with Setsuk’s simple request that Kazuko avoid playing piano while she and her mother are sleeping. Kazuko is seemingly happy to oblige, but not without questioning why they didn’t greet the guest they had earlier that day, openly laying out her disdain for all to see.

Perhaps then peace will be found living with the eldest sister Chizuko, but when Setsuko expresses her desire to get a job, she is chastised for even considering the disgraceful notion of joining the working class. Elsewhere in this household, Chizuko’s resistance to disciplining her rebellious son sparks a clash with her mother, and ends in Chizuko sharing perhaps the harshest words of the film.

“Just stay away from my son.”

With this arrangement failing as well, Ayako is next to reluctantly offer her home, so she is relieved indeed when a frustrated Mrs. Toda resolves instead to reside in the family’s only remaining property – a rundown house by the sea. If there is any redemption to be found among the Toda siblings, then it is through the final sibling Shōjirō, whose move to China shortly after his father’s death has largely insulated him from these affairs. Upon his return for the one-year anniversary of Shintarō’s passing, he effectively becomes Ozu’s mouthpiece, scolding each of his siblings for neglecting their gracious mother. His home in China is not ideal given its distance, but it is nevertheless a safe place for his mother to relax and Setsuko to find work, free from judgement.

Rarely does Ozu take so firm a stance on the tension between tradition and modernity as he does in Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family. Shin’ichiro, Chizuko, and Ayako may not be villains, but the shallowness with which they approach their personal responsibilities brands them hypocrites in his eyes, holding the foundations of their privilege in little esteem. Prosperity is evidently not the measure of family bonds in this cutting class critique. Through grief and adversity, the hollowness of their affluence is laid bare, and reverent devotion for one’s roots holds on by a single, resilient thread.

Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel.

49th Parallel (1941)

Michael Powell | 2hr 3min

The fight that the western world puts up again Nazi Germany in 49th Parallel is not led by individual heroes or organised military units. It takes a communal sense of justice, democracy, and moral fortitude among everyday civilians to not only pick off the six Nazi submariners who have been stranded in Canada, but to also thoroughly undermine the narrow-minded, hateful ideology which guides their actions. With the United States still being considered neutral territory in 1941, the Niagara Falls border crossing is their destination, and so all Lieutenant Hirth and his men need to do is keep their heads down for the journey south. If these fugitives are to successfully find sanctuary though, then it isn’t just a victory for them – it is an alarming affirmation of fascist indomitability.

The fact that this is one of the few Michael Powell films to be shot in black-and-white rather than Technicolor does not mean he is any less confident with his chosen aesthetic. While other works of his such as Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes possess a similarly haunting wickedness, they are also far more fantastical than 49th Parallel, whose grim severity simply would not be suited to the same stylistic vibrance. In small scenes of contained drama, cinematographer Freddie Young instead captures Powell’s rich blocking and rigorous military formations with a deep focus lens, remarkably uninfluenced by his contemporary Orson Welles who was making Citizen Kane at the exact same time.

Michael Powell was primarily celebrated for the lush beauty of his Technicolor cinematography, but this visual style would have not suited the bleak austerity of 49th Parallel, capturing grim compositions of soldiers and civilians in severe black-and-white.

Even more impressive is the grand visual scale which Powell quite comfortably inhabits, executing spectacular stunts of exploding sea vessels and crashing planes, and flying his camera over vast coastlines in extraordinary aerial shots. When the Nazi fugitives make it to Winnipeg, he confronts them with a rainy city of neon signs and busy streets where bulletins call for their capture, though it is more often the expansive alpine terrains where these ill-prepared men are mentally worn down. Dressed in suits and fine shoes, they traverse sprawling pine forests, hike up barren mountain ranges, and follow raging rivers in the hope of finding some sort of civilisation again, yet the North American wilderness is not kind to these foreigners. With long shots as sweeping as these, it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that Young’s work here thoroughly prepared him for his incredible landscape photography in Lawrence of Arabia twenty-one years later, especially since the editor on 49th Parallel is David Lean himself.

Thrilling spectacle in the opening act of 49th Parallel, crashing planes and exploding sea vessels to set up the large scale of the narrative to come.
Aerial shots of the Canadian wilderness, revealing the enormous scope of Powell’s narrative spanning hundreds of miles.
Harsh mountain scenery consuming suited men ill-equipped for their environment – a deeply ingrained mismatch between characters and setting.

Underscoring the incongruency of the Nazis’ survival in Canada even more than the natural environment though is the people they encounter, each of whom possess some liberal value which they view as weakness through their dogmatic perspectives. Powell gathers an impressive cast in his ensemble here, including Laurence Olivier as a jovial trapper whose optimistic trust sees him shot and killed, and Leslie Howard as an English novelist who camps by a lake to mentally separate himself from the war. He is thoughtful and sensitive, shrewdly analysing the repetitive rhetoric used by fascists to manipulate the minds of susceptible listeners, and yet Hirth is nevertheless quick to label him a soft, degenerate coward who would rather talk than fight.

Lawrence Olivier’s brief cameo as a jovial Canadian trapper is worth savouring, as Powell pits his naive optimism against the opportunism of the Nazis.
Leslie Howard’s English novelist offers the film’s sharpest indictment of Nazi ideology and rhetoric, embodying a sensitive sophistication that Hirth and his men disparage as weak.

49th Parallel may be a piece of wartime propaganda, but it is tough to deny the astuteness of its humanitarian arguments, especially when the fugitives are welcomed into a Hutterite farming community that houses German refugees. Anton Walbrook plays their leader Peter, an amiable man who views himself as a servant of his people, rather than the other way round – a shocking discovery for these fascists who are so used to heiling their Führer. Their blind belief that this community is a cover for Nazi sympathisers would almost be comical if Hirth’s impassioned speech inviting them to join him wasn’t met with such damning, disgusted silence, followed by a solemn response from Peter that further reveals how distant these humble Christians are from the monsters of their homeland.

“You think we hate you, but we don’t. It is against our faith to hate. We only hate the power of evil that is spreading over the world. You and your Hitler are like the microbes of some filthy disease, filled with a longing to multiply yourselves until you destroy everything healthy in the world. No. We are not your brothers.”

The stupid arrogance of the Nazis is revealed in Hirth’s attempted alliance with the Hutterite community, defiantly ignorant to the fact that many of them are refugees.

It is not these words alone which moves one of the fugitives to ally himself with the Hutterites, but Vogel’s brief experience of working as their baker and finding heartfelt acceptance among their ranks is enough for him to decide to stay permanently. We can only imagine what his reformation might have looked like had he been allowed to follow his own enlightened path though, as Hirth coldly executes him for treachery before departing with the remaining party.

The readiness of Nazis to abandon their own companions is plain to see all throughout Powell’s narrative, defining its very structure as their group gradually diminishes one-by-one in a similar fashion to Agatha Christie’s murder mystery And Then There Were None. Through plane accidents, executions, arrests, and physical assaults, each fugitive is stopped in their tracks, while the others continue their relentless march south to the Canada-United States border where they might finally be safe. The danger around them increases tenfold once they start drawing attention in the media, but so too does the subsequent news from back home praising them as national heroes spur them on, right up until Hirth is left as the sole survivor struggling to the finish line.

Like Agatha Christi’s novel And Then There Were None, Powell picks off his characters one by one, giving 49th Parallel a rigorous formal structure.

It is there on a freight train heading past Niagara Falls into New York that the German lieutenant encounters Andy, another stowaway similarly keeping a low profile due to his desertion of the Canadian army. “You’re a deserter because you have a legitimate grievance against your democratic government,” Hirth acclaims, but this disloyal soldier does not take so kindly to the Nazi once he learns of his true identity.

“You can’t even begin to understand democracy. We own the right to be fed up with anything we damn please and say so out loud when we feel like it. And when things go wrong, we can take it. We can dish it out too.”

True to Andy’s patriotic sentiments, it is exactly Hirth’s underestimation of the power that democracy vests in ordinary citizens which brings about his downfall. That the deciding moment of his victory rests on the shoulders of a lowly Canadian deserter and a US Customs inspector makes for a tremendous formal pay-off to this narrative, which has consistently underscored the ability of trappers, farmers, and writers alike to weaken fascism’s forward advance. Sacrifices must be made in the struggle, and yet Powell’s wartime fable effectively cloaks these in glory, vigorously rousing the then-neutral United States of 1941 to take up arms against Nazi Germany with egalitarian pride and honour.

It is not a concerted military effort that stop the Nazis in their tracks, but rather the democratic actions of ordinary civilians, right up to Hirth’s attempt to cross the Canada-United States border as the last man standing.

49th Parallel is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel, and is available to purchase on Amazon.

Sullivan’s Travels (1941)

Preston Sturges | 1hr 30min

Preston Sturges was known more for his sharp turns of phrase, pacey editing, and unrelenting slapstick than his mise-en-scène, but Sullivan’s Travels combines all of his usual trademarks with surprising flashes of visual beauty. These mostly appear in the final act when Sullivan winds up in a chain gang and the entire movie takes a far darker turn, but even before this point it works wonderfully as a quick-witted satire of Hollywood liberalism and privilege.

Sturges opens the film in media res, at what appears to be the climax of an entirely different movie.

“You see the symbolism of it? Capital and Labor destroy each other. It teaches a moral lesson. It has social significance.”

Sullivan is inspired. He wants to make a real movie about real issues, confronting problems that the average American faces every day.

An image of poverty that the wealthy imagine it to be – a rucksack and a baggy coat. Hilariously clueless, but formally setting up the hard-hitting third act well.

“But with a little sex,” his producers continue to insist. Therein lies the problem. If there was ever a studio that could authentically bring rough living conditions to the screen, it isn’t the one Sullivan works for, and Sullivan certainly shouldn’t be the one helming that project. The Italian neorealism movement would prove a few years later that cinema can absolutely treat this sort of subject matter with compassion and authenticity, but those movies were being made by filmmakers with firsthand experience. To Sullivan, stepping into the shoes of the impoverished would serve to assuage some of his class guilt, and he might make a tidy profit out of it on the side. Adding “a little sex” is the studio’s push to romanticise the subject matter, making it conventionally appealing for their audiences who just want a laugh.

A slapstick interlude placed with purpose and precision.

Sullivan’s Travels is also a direct response to early Hollywood comedies that abandoned humour in favour of serious, hard-hitting messages. Sturges’ approach is a complex balancing act of conflicting tones which many directors might struggle to pull off, but this is his specialty. He dances around the real darkness at the heart of the story for the first two acts, playing in the realm of slapstick comedy, irony, and meta-humour. Sullivan’s first attempt to understand the poor is really just him walking around with a rucksack and tattered coat, followed closely by a bus of security, food caterers, and a legal team. As he attempts to shake them off and the bus speeds after him, Sturges has fun sending everyone in it into a tizzy, falling over at all angles, one man even putting his head right through its ceiling. Then Veronica Lake is introduced, and the film delivers its most direct acknowledgement of its own genre conventions.

“How does the girl fit in the picture?”
“There’s always a girl in the picture?”

Credited only as “the woman”, she is there to serve the exact function stated in the text. She tags along, because it is what the film requires of her. But as an actress, Veronica Lake isn’t just filling a part. With her husky voice and plucky attitude she channels all of her charm and glamour into the role, stealing every second of screen time from her co-stars. She serves to underline the part of movies that audiences keep coming back for – that “little bit of sex”.

Joel McCrea and Veronica Lake in two of their best performances, a perfect screwball couple.

So when Sullivan is suddenly assaulted, beaten unconscious, and sentenced to serve time in a chain gang, it is understandable why Lake is pushed to the background. It is a shocking narrative twist, but not entirely unexpected given how much time has been spent with Sullivan wondering it is like to live in poverty. In an earlier montage when he sleeps in a homeless shelter, he worries that his boots which contain his identification have been stolen, setting up the actual theft that takes place during this major plot shift. Now, he is stuck without a name or path back home.

The scene in which he is stalked by the homeless man looking for money is a stunner. Almost entirely silent, it is heavily expressionistic in the light and shadows that are thrown across the train tracks. He skulks behind staircases and trains puffing out steam in the dead of night, perfectly leading us into the darkest section of the film. We realise that all the comedy that has come before this point has merely been distracting us from the actual darkness at its heart, because suddenly all of that humour is gone. Without his status or identity to fall back on, Sullivan is no longer shielded from the dirtiness, violence, and roughness of “real” life.

Sturges’ camera suddenly becomes a lot more active in this final act. He isn’t trying to make this a truthful depiction of poverty, as his own screenplay has already made the argument for why Hollywood cinema isn’t suited to that. Instead he just wants to treat it sensitively, letting a sort of poignancy emerge that acts as a substitute for authenticity. The prisoners of Sullivan’s chain gang are welcomed to a Southern Black church, and Sturges makes the choice to frame the prisoners in gorgeous silhouette walking towards it, as the churchgoers sing a soulful rendition of “Let My People Go”. Inside the aisle symmetrically divides the church in two, and we gaze right down the middle at the prisoners’ feet moving towards us, chains clanking as they walk. It may be the slowest scene of any Sturges film, but this change of pace also marks the change in Sullivan’s character as he becomes more pensive.

An ambitious narrative taking a sudden dark turn. Sturges has never been so solemn, and he pulls it off with aplomb.

Dour atmospheres can’t last forever in Sturges films though. He gives us just enough moodiness so that when the comedy arrives again in the form of a classic Sturges montage, we eagerly embrace it. Newspaper headlines, studio producers running around barging into rooms, making phone calls, and getting on planes – Sullivan makes his way back to the glamourous city of Hollywood with a fresh outlook on life. Maybe the superficiality of the movies he makes is disconnected from reality, but so what? Disconnecting someone from reality might be the best thing you could do for someone whose reality is pretty terrible. Sturges’ real passion was screwball comedies, but as a comment on the limits of Hollywood moviemaking, this certainly seems like his most personal work.

Sullivan’s Travels is currently available to rent or buy on iTunes, YouTube, and Google Play.

How Green Was My Valley (1941)

John Ford | 1hr 58min

In transplanting his usual explorations of tradition and community from America’s old West into a rural Welsh village, John Ford finds a nostalgic beauty in the Victorian-era working class ideals of ‘How Green Was My Valley’. The saccharine adoration of the “olden days” comes with the territory of Ford’s films, though as usual it is also not so straightforward. As tight-knit as this fictional coal-mining town is, judgement and gossip run rife when someone steps outside its boundaries, and there is a hypocrisy to the small-mindedness of many villagers.
 
Nevertheless, the narration of an older, wiser version of our protagonist, Huw, reminisces on the idyllic peace of his childhood in this community, and the strength of the bonds between neighbours which got him through the roughest times. In Ford’s wide establishing shots of the town, people move and act in unison, singing, working, praying, drinking, and playing games like a single, cohesive mass. When they celebrate, the air is filled with hats being waved and tossed; when they hear the mine’s emergency whistle, they rush towards the site in common concern for their neighbours; and when one person is sick, the entire village walks down the main road in quiet solemnity to wish them well.

A magnificent set from John Ford, from the uniformity between each house to the coal mine sitting atop it all. Within this space, crowds move in unison, Ford staging them as a single, unified community.

The townscape itself is an impressive set, with smoking columns, wooden structures, and triangular roofs rising up in uniform patterns from the modest, primitive village below. Gnarled trees with twisted branches line the edges of Ford’s frames, simultaneously confining the environments within which these characters interact with each other, and unifying the townsfolk in these quaint, natural spaces.

The trees are a significant part of Ford’s scenery, obstructing frames and wrapping around characters in shots like these.

It is once the tranquillity and closeness of this blue-collar community is set up that Ford starts to reveal the forces chipping away its prosperity bit-by-bit. The first major threat is the wage cuts of the coal miners, with the ensuing strike only settling after many of them are made redundant. The industrial revolution is well underway by this point, and managers all over the United Kingdom are realising the expendability of loyal employees who demand more money than less experienced labourers.

Paralleling the significant cultural shifts of 19th century South Wales are changes taking place within Huw’s own family. Realising the poor outlook of the industry, Huw’s father, Gwilym, pushes him away from the manual work which formed the bedrock of the Morgan family’s modest success, and down the path of formal education. Even in this polished, refined environment, Huw continues to absorb the rough, confrontational values of his village, engaging in fights with peers who ridicule him.
 
Meanwhile, Huw’s sister marries a wealthy man and moves away, one of his brothers dies in a mining accident, two others lose their jobs, and the friendly local preacher who forms the spiritual backbone of the village is driven away by the vicious gossip of his own parishioners. In a climactic final church service, he confronts those responsible for the private attacks on his reputation, addressing their selfish imitations of faith which actively erode the community’s open-hearted ideals.

“Why do you dress your hypocrisy in black and parade before your God on Sunday? From love? No. For you’ve shown your hearts are too withered to receive the love of your divine Father.”

The perils of a tight-knit community – these people are as equally capable of ostracisation as they are of warmth and support. The symmetry and formal cohesion of compositions such as these are among Ford’s best.

While so many forces eat away at Huw’s innocence, he continues to persevere in his faith right up until the final, most devastating personal blow. When Gwilym doesn’t return from a cave in at the mine, Huw goes down below to investigate, journeying through the dark depths of the mine in much the same way as his father. Upon completing his mission, he rides the elevator back to the surface with his father’s body, mirroring his rise up into the role of family patriarch, and thereby effectively marking his complete loss of innocence.
 
We learn through Huw’s narration that he has spent the vast majority of his life trying to recapture the kinship that he once shared with his town, and it is only now, decades later, that he is finally leaving. “How green was my valley,” he laments, mourning the loss of an era that saw neighbours share each other’s losses and wins as a community. John Ford’s adoration of bygone eras may be considered twee or sentimental, but it doesn’t make his portrait of an idyllic childhood in Victorian-era rural Wales any less charming.

The loss of Huw’s father marked by his own physical ascension up from the mines and into the role of family patriarch, his lost of innocence complete.

‘How Green Was My Valley’ is available to rent or buy on iTunes, YouTube, Google Play, and Amazon Prime Video.