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Flunky, Work Hard! (Mikio Naruse, 1931)
🕑 Added 2021-02-04 23:32:32 +0000 UTC
Without really meaning to, I began this month's Naruse project with the director's oldest surviving film. To say I was blindsided by Flunky, Work Hard! would be a bit of an understatement. It's always interesting to see how directors' basic stylistic tools evolve from silent to sound cinema. Ozu's silents are a good example. Aside from some slightly more gesticular acting, the silents slide imperceptibly into the sound films, Ozu's basic method almost fully formed from the jump.
At first Flunky, Work Hard! seems like a riff on the rhythms and wry comedy of Ozu's I Was Born, But... It features a salaryman father, Mr. Okabe (Isamu Yamaguchi) struggling to succeed in business, while his son Susumu (Seiichi Kato) is working out his own issues with the local kids his age. The parallelism between father and son is a bit different here, since the father, an insurance salesman, is preoccupied with besting a rival (Tokio Seki), and becomes involved in his son's problems only later.
But then, things turn on a dime, and the final ten or so minutes of Naruse's film become a cautionary tale about parental neglect. While Okabe is tending to the children of a prospective client, his own son is nearly killed. In fact, the overtly tacked-on final scene, in which Susumu regains consciousness, signals to the viewer that Naruse was possibly capitulating to producers who demanded a happy ending.
And in the midst of the scene of the parents and Susumu's bedside, Naruse gives us a sudden, radical shift in visual style. As Okabe offers his unresponsive son a toy airplane, the father's point of view is overtaken by a quick flash of nondiegetic visuals: quick fades, superimpositions, images-within-images. It's like a mini avant-garde breakdown, using techniques comparable to Kinugasa's A Page of Madness which was made just five years earlier.
By the way, Flunky, Work Hard! is only 30 minutes long. It's a pretty busy half hour.
