Different Angle Query on Japanese Film Remakes

[Michael McCaskey]

Dear Minaguchi-san,

Thank you for your new information on Stella Dallas, and for raising the Ozu point. According to Sato Tadao, in both Eiga shisoshi and Nihon eiga shi, Ozu engaged in at least the "remakes" below, but Sato only gives the titles, and little more information--I followed up in more detail to check each out a bit more:

(1)
Ozu Yasujiro’s 1933 film Dekigokoro, “Passing Fancy,” is about the trials and tribulations in a family where the father becomes involved with another woman, and this is resented by his son. This film is supposed to have been inspired by King Vidor’s The Champ, a 1931 American film about a boxer who encounters a woman his son becomes jealous of – until the son finds out the woman is actually his mother.

(2)
Ozu’s 1934 Ukigusa Monogatari, is the story of a father, a traveling actor, who has a reunion with his illegitimate son after many years of separation, in a town where the acting troupe is on tour. The son thinks the man is his uncle, but a female performer in the troupe, emotionally attached to the father, becomes resentful of this newly revived relationship, and sets out to try to undermine it. Ozu later remade this 1934 silent film, in a 1959 version in color with sound, shortening the title to Ukigusa.

Ozu’s Ukigusa plot is supposed to have been based on that of The Barker, a 1928 American film directed by George Fitzmaurice, who had directed Rudolph Valentino in Son of the Sheik in 1926, and later directed Greta Garbo in Mata Hari in 1931. In The Barker, a carnival barker encounters his long-lost son, but the barker’s current girlfriend becomes resentful when she discovers the barker has had another family, and the barker tries to conceal his relationship with her from his son. She then tries to seduce the son as a sort of revenge. The Barker was remade in 1933, as Hoopla, with Clara Bow, and again in 1945 as The Diamond Horseshoe, starring Betty Grable. The Barker surfaced once again, as an early US TV drama, in the 1952 Broadway Television Theater series, under its original title.

(3)
Ozu made a 1936 film, Hitori Musuko (Only Son), his first sound film, about a self-sacrificing mother who sends her son off to Tokyo, and works hard to support him so he can have a better life than she has. The son has his own ideas of what success is, however, and he and his mother clash when she feels he has disappointed her, even marrying without consulting her first. (http://www.shochiku.co.jp/video/dvd/2003/da0269_5.html, accessed July 8, 2006).
This Ozu picture is said to have been inspired by Leo McCarey’s Make Way for Tomorrow, though it’s hard to see how — there must be a different US picture related to this one, but apparently Make Way for Tomorrow is actually where Ozu got the idea for 

(4) Tokyo Story, where two old people also have a sad time traveling.

(5)
Ozu’s Chichi Ariki, “There Was a Father,” a 1942 film about a self-sacrificing widowed father, a teacher, devoted to bettering his own son’s life, was based on the 1927 American film Sorrell and Son, about a British father who devotes himself to putting his son through medical school. This film was directed and scripted by Herbert Brenon, who had made the first film version of The Great Gatsby the year before. Sorrell and Son began as a very popular novel by the British writer Warwick Deeping, and in 1933 it was remade in Britain as a sound film.

If I've made any mistakes, please let me know so I can make corrections.

It seems unusual that Sato focused so much on these Ozu films as remakes. He gives few other specific remake examples by anyone else. I checked these all from other angles, and they all do seem to be verified remakes. I have two books on Ozu, but they say nothing about these remakes, so I'm getting other books on Ozu as well, including the one about Ozu by Sato.

I have also followed Aaron Gerow's very good suggestion, and put in an interlibrary loan request for the Yamamoto Kikuo book, which seems to be over 600 pages, so I should be able to find more numerous remake examples by many other directors verified there. I had not planned to write so much about early Japanese remakes of foreign films, but it seems I need to find out about and write about more of them.

With Many Thanks To All,

Michael McCaskey




----- Original Message -----
From: kiseko minaguchi <kiko at main.teikyo-u.ac.jp>
Date: Monday, July 10, 2006 9:19 pm
Subject: Re: Different Angle Query on Japanese Film Remakes

> I would say Ozu's films have many which got inspiration from 
> Hollywood 
> films, which he intensively saw while stationed abroad. Concerning 
> women's 
> films, I mentioned much about the Japanese remaking of Stella Dallas
> in my book CINEMA MATERNITY (sairyusha 2005. language: Japanese)
> Minaguchi
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> ??? : "Aaron Gerow" <gerowaaron at sbcglobal.net>
> ?? : <KineJapan at lists.acs.ohio-state.edu>
> ???? : 2006?7?7? 14:33
> ?? : Re: Different Angle Query on Japanese Film Remakes
> 
> 
> >
> > On 2006.7.6, at 10:14  AM, Michael McCaskey wrote:
> >
> >> I also am trying to find some information, as historical 
> background, on 
> >> any significant pre-1940 Japanese remakes of any US or European 
> films. 
> >> There must have been some, I would think.
> >
> > The main source, if it has not already been mentioned, is 
> Yamamoto Kikuo's 
> > Nihon eiga ni okeru gaikoku eiga no eikyo (Waseda Shuppanbu, 
> 1983). It 
> > concentrates on the prewar and, since it focuses on contemporary 
> reports 
> > of influence, mentions many films that don't even exist today.
> >
> >
> > Aaron Gerow
> > Assistant Professor
> > Film Studies Program/East Asian Languages and Literatures
> > Yale University
> > 53 Wall Street, Room 316
> > PO Box 208363
> > New Haven, CT 06520-8363
> > USA
> > Phone: 1-203-432-7082
> > Fax: 1-203-432-6764
> > e-mail: aaron.gerow at yale.edu
> > 
> 
>