It’s perfectly understandable to have never heard the name Shimizu Hiroshi mentioned in a discussion of the great classical Japanese filmmakers. Despite having directed almost 170 films from 1924 to 1959, and garnering praise from such distinguished colleagues as Mizoguchi Kenji, the prolific Shimizu (1903-1966) remains something of a missing person to American audiences. Stateside festival and academic programmers who have rushed to honor contemporaries Kurosawa Akira, Ozu Yasujirô, Ichikawa Kon and Mizoguchi sometimes overlook Shimizu.
“Hiroshi Shimizu: Notes of an Itinerant Director,” a 10-title retrospective dip into the filmmaker’s expansive oeuvre now playing at the Berkeley Art Museum Pacific Film Archive, aims to address that shortcoming. Curated by the National Archive of Japan and the Japan Foundation, the series shows off a few of Shimizu’s most significant surviving films—the early ones are mostly lost—chosen from a variety of genres.
In a career that brings to mind a Japanese Howard Hawks, the versatile Shimizu seemed equally at home with socially conscious crime stories, blithe urban comedies or the adventures of kids from the wrong side of the tracks. The common denominator being the director’s sympathy for characters struggling to make a living.
His 1948 masterpiece, Children of the Beehive, observes the grim, defeated poverty of post-World War II Japan, in the antics of a band of tough, streetwise boys—all of them war orphans—fending for themselves in and around the devastated city of Hiroshima. Rubble from the A-bomb blast lies everywhere. Shimizu’s “Japanese neo-realism” is a worthy companion piece to The Bicycle Thief, Germany Year Zero and Los Olvidados, especially when it shuns excessive tear-jerking in favor of the energetic humor of its own “dead-end kids.” It screens Aug. 16.
More or less in the same vein are the 1937 Children in the Wind and its 1939 sequel, Four Seasons of Children: Spring/Summer and Autumn/Winter. In the first film a pair of mischievous young brothers, Sampei and Zenta, make the best of a difficult childhood after their father is falsely arrested and loses the family property over a botched business deal. High-spirited Sampei (juvenile actor Yokoyama Jun) repeatedly steals scenes with stunts like floating down a river in a washtub. But take note, Children in the Wind (Aug. 9) is of no relation to Hollywood’s carefree Our Gang shorts; the stakes are altogether too high.
Shimizu’s movies boldly portray pre-World War II Japan as a militaristic, authoritarian society already making war on Manchuria and China. None of that seems to faze the boys or interrupt their schemes. Meanwhile the sequel (Aug. 11), also based on the original novel, tries its best to be gently funny, but runs out of chuckles in the middle of its overly long running time, as Sampei and Zenta seek to remedy their family’s misfortunes.
Popular actor Tanaka Kinuyo—the emblem of wronged womanhood for director Mizoguchi in his weepies The Life of Oharu and Sansho the Bailiff—was romantically involved with Shimizu when she starred in the latter’s wartime home-front romance, Ornamental Hairpin (1941).
Tanaka portrays a demure young woman whose misplaced hairpin accidentally injures the foot of a soldier, Ryû Chishû, years before his famous roles for Ozu, while he’s relaxing in the waters of an onsen hot spring. A grumpy professor and the requisite rowdy kids—by then a Shimizu specialty—as well as the resort’s other guests, provide comic relief. Ornamental Hairpin screens July 19.
Compared to the children’s adventures and romantic meet-cutes, Shimizu’s 1925 silent melodrama, A Hero of Tokyo (July 31), is a whiff of wised-up, citified air pollution. It charts the downfall of an unlucky family whose penniless, widowed mother resorts to working in a hostess bar, thus opening the doors to calamity for her offspring. Everyone in the family, with the exception of a stepson who turns into a crime-fighting newspaper reporter, takes up with either gangsters or prostitutes.
July 19 to Aug. 28 at BAMPFA; for more info on the series, visit bampfa.org.
