Tokyo Chorus

Ozu's social conscience family comedy is concerned with the financial and social pressures on insurance company man Okada and his wife and kids after he loses his job for protesting an elderly colleague's dismissal. Ozu plays the story partly for laughs and partly straight: an interesting enterprise in itself, and one that provides a rare glimpse in his work of both social perspective (Okada's travails on the Depression-era Tokyo job market) and comedy, centring on various battles between Okada and his wilful son (Sugawara, one of the brothers in I Was Born, But..., and a star here already). Typically, though, Ozu's chief emphasis is the (mis)fortunes of a family of individuals.