Smiling Through.(Tokyo Chorus, I Was Born, But... and All About Eve)(Video recording review)

The Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu's wry humor, on view in Criterion's new boxed set "Silent Ozu--Three Family Comedies," reaches deep: he approaches sentimental domestic themes as microcosms of great social issues. "Tokyo Chorus," from 1931, deals with the Depression, which hit Japan hard, and its story turns on money matters. Okajima (Tokihiko Okada), a salaryman at an insurance company, joins his colleagues as they stand in line to receive a cash bonus, and, in a remarkable set piece of ribald choreography, they slip off to the men's room one by one to sneak an anxious peek at their rewards. Catastrophe results when Okajima argues with his boss, but Ozu stages it as a madcap pantomime of exquisite comic precision. Though the payment of hospital bills is a question of life and death, Ozu, with piercing political irony, puts equal weight on the mock tragedies of a boy's craving for a bicycle and a wife's concern for her social status.

In "I Was Born, But . . ." (1932), a great precursor of Francois Truffaut's films with children, Ozu tells the story of two young boys whose upwardly mobile father moves the family to the suburbs of Tokyo and who have ...