Family Therapy: Two by Ingmar Bergman, Part 1

A few weeks ago I wrote a post on Ingmar Bergman's Cries and Whispers (1972), in which I discussed Bergman's emphasis in that film on the family dynamics among the three sisters who are its main characters. Before the decade was over, Bergman would make two other films that, taken together with Cries and Whispers, form what could be considered a trilogy in which he examines how various members of the family relate to one other: Scenes from a Marriage (1973) and Autumn Sonata (1978).

Whereas Cries and Whispers concentrated on sibling relations, Scenes from a Marriage deals, as the title indicates, with relations between husband and wife. Originally made as a six-hour long mini-series for Swedish television, it was later edited by Bergman into a 167-minute movie, the version I watched, and released in the US in 1974. (Because it was first shown on television, it was ruled ineligible for the Academy Awards.) The film opens with a scene that is ambiguous: A man and woman—clearly identifiable as Erland Josephson and Liv Ullmann, two actors who had appeared in a number of Bergman's films—are sitting on a sofa in what appears to be an upper middle-class living room being interviewed. At first it is uncertain whether they are characters in the movie or the actors who play them discussing their characters, as in Bergman's The Passion of Anna (1969).


Within a few minutes, though, it is clear that these actors were from the beginning in character. The couple being interviewed for a magazine profile are Marianne (Ullmann) and Johan (Josephson). She is a lawyer in her thirties; he is a university professor of experimental psychology in his forties. They have been married for ten years and have two daughters. The interview is in part a clever way of succinctly presenting the background of these people and sketching their personality traits (or as we later find out, the self-images they present to each other and the world) and the way they relate to each other. Johan seems confident and more or less in control of the relationship, while she seems more reserved and behaves deferentially toward him. The image of their marriage they present to the interviewer is one of stability, of two complementary personalities who have achieved a relationship of contented equilibrium.

This scene is followed by a strangely contrasting one. Marianne and Johan are entertaining their friends Katarina (Bibi Andersson) and Peter (Jan Malmsjö), and all are seated at the table in the dining room. The profile of the couple has been published, and Johan reads it aloud, sarcastically ridiculing the idealized picture of the couple it presents, as Marianne smiles and nods in agreement. Yet what he reads accurately reflects the image they presented to the interviewer, and it is clear from their expressions that the couple are secretly pleased with the result.

This kind of irony—possible only with the most masterful actors, those capable of suggesting simultaneous contradictory emotions—hearkens back to Bergman's Persona (1966), with its theme that we all wear masks that conceal our inner selves and that in a sense we are all actors giving a performance for the world at large and for each other. In the dinner scene, taken in conjunction with the opening scene of the interview, Bergman implies that this is also true of married couples, as they present a united front to the world. And, as we will discover in the course of the movie, he further implies that this is true within the marriage itself, in the way the two people in a marriage tend to hold something of themselves back from each other.

The irony of the scene does not end here, though. Later in the meal it becomes apparent that the marriage of Katarina and Peter is in serious trouble, and as Marianne and Johan look on in obvious discomfort, their friends begin tearing into each other with an escalating viciousness reminiscent of George and Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The subjects of contention are those typical of bourgeois marriages everywhere: fidelity, money, careers, goals that have begun to diverge, waning sexual interest in each other. The irony of the situation is that even though we won't learn it for a while, these are exactly the areas of dispute that will arise later when cracks begin to develop in Marianne and Johan's seemingly ideal marriage.

When Johan announces out of the blue that he has been having an affair with a graduate student he is advising (how many times have you heard of that situation?) and is leaving Marianne to take up a new teaching post in the US, their calcified marriage begins to crumble. The rest of the movie traces the evolution of relations between Marianne and Johan over the course of the next several years—from a bitter separation, trenchant post mortems about the reasons for the end of the marriage, divorce, the collapse of Johan's career plans, disputes over maintenance and child support, to the eventual remarriage of both. So chaotic is the trajectory of their relations that at one point while all this is happening, Johan asks aloud, "Are we living in utter confusion?"

The movie ends ten years after it began, in a sense coming full circle. Marianne and Johan, involved in unhappy marriages to others, are now secret lovers sneaking away for a tryst at the country vacation home where Johan first confessed his affair to Marianne and told her that their marriage was over. Earlier in the movie, Johan told Marianne that they were like children trying to make sense of the adult world. The intervening ten years since we were introduced to them in that gripping first scene have been difficult for both, but at the end of the movie they seem at last to have grown up.

Because it was originally made for television, Scenes from a Marriage uses the conventional TV aspect ratio of 1:33 : 1. Structured around six episodic "chapters," the movie consists largely of dialogue rather than action and is shot mostly in the talking-heads close-up style typical of the small screen. The strictures of this format had major effects on the movie. For one thing, they required Bergman to write a screenplay in which dialogue does practically everything—conveys information, illuminates character traits, and explains the progression of his main characters through the phases of the transformative changes they undergo. The dialogue must be clear, focused, naturalistic and literal. It must be an exact fit for both the characters and the actors who portray them. Bergman accomplishes this with absolute mastery.

The limitations imposed by this format also required Bergman to simplify his style. If the chief means of showing the nature of Marianne and Johan's relationship is through their conversations, then the visual novelty and stylistic flourishes we associate with Bergman's previous work would only be distractions. Bergman reduces his visual style to essentials, resulting in one of the most stylistically minimalist films he ever made. Yet the film is never boring, so strong are the writing and acting, and so unfailingly apposite are the choices Bergman makes from his relatively basic visual palette.

Because of the heavy reliance on dialogue and the extensive use of close-ups, the movie could only succeed if the actors playing Marianne and Johan convincingly merge with their characters. I am specifically referring to Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson, who appear in every scene, occasionally alone but almost always together. (Other actors in the cast appear in no more than one sequence.) These actors must carry a movie that even in its edited version runs nearly three hours, and they do so brilliantly, right from that opening interview sequence, which portends one of the greatest strengths of the movie: In the first couple of minutes we see the actors settle into their roles and become the characters, and they never let up for the remainder of the film.

This must have been especially challenging for Ullmann, who had played lead roles in five Bergman films in the previous seven years and was therefore quite recognizable to those familiar with the director's work. The role of Marianne was the most conventional character she had at the time played for Bergman—a contemporary professional, a complacent middle-class wife and mother untroubled by personal demons—yet she disappears into the role, carrying the viewer along with her on her unanticipated journey. As Marianne, she sees the world she blithely took for granted disintegrate and experiences the most intense and disturbing emotions of her life when she leaves behind the sheltered existence she led with Johan. After she learns to let go of her bitterness toward Johan and forgive him, she is able to become more confident, mature, and independent, and more open about her sexuality. She finds a real identity outside her marriage and emerges a stronger and more resilient woman.

Like Ullmann, Josephson had also appeared in several of Bergman's films, but in smaller and less prominent roles. Bergman had the rare knack of creating highly individualized female characters and placing them in stories in which they dominate the narrative and are the most memorable people in the movie, particularly in his later career, say from Persona (1966) on. Scenes from a Marriage, however, is essentially a two-character movie in which the main male and female characters are given equal weight. With so much responsibility for the success of the movie resting on his performance, Josephson clearly proves himself up to the challenge of sharing the screen with such a strong and distinctly defined presence as Ullmann's Marianne. Like her, Josephson's Johan is an utterly ordinary man, not the writer, musician, or painter who is so often the chief male character in Bergman's movies. And unlike the spiritual and artistic torments of those characters, Johan's problems and insecurities are the ordinary ones common to middle-class, middle-aged men everywhere.

A few years older than his wife, he has reached the point in his life at which he begins to question the worth of his accomplishments and to aspire to something more ambitious, something he believes will be more significant and satisfying. He sees the means of this personal and psychological fulfillment in career advancement and a renewed sex life with a younger wife. (Since the birth of their second daughter, his sex life with Marianne has been minimal.) That he is later unsuccessful in achieving these things eventually makes him question his decision to divorce Marianne and move on. Yet like Marianne, in spite of his confusion and suffering—or is it really because of it?—he seems by the end of the movie to have grown. Johan has lost much of his self-centered arrogance and discontent with the course of his life, becoming more humble and more accepting of the way his life has turned out.

Perhaps the most important change among all those they have undergone, though, is that both Marianne and Johan have adjusted their expectations about love to a more realistic level. "We love each other in an earthly, imperfect way," Johan tells Marianne at the end of the film, and it is hard to find fault with that painfully acquired insight.

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In 2003 Bergman, who died in 2007, made a movie for Swedish television (his last work) titled Saraband that involves Marianne visiting Johan at his country home some 30 years later. As in Scenes from a Marriage, Marianne and Johan are played by Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson.

More of Hollywood's Greatest Character Actors and Actresses

Of all the posts that have appeared at The Movie Projector, the hands-down favorite in terms of the number of times viewed is the one titled "Hollywood's Greatest Character Actors and Actresses" from October 2008. In that post I listed my top ten character actors and top ten character actresses from the Golden Age of Hollywood, the studio era, roughly from the early 1930s through the early 1960s. The post appeared on IMDb's "Hit List" and elicited a record 65 comments (the usual mix of the thoughtful and pertinent, the cranky and irrelevant). Even today it is still visited by people, many from outside the US, using search engines to find information about those great character actors and actresses of the American studio era. This is clearly a subject of enduring interest.

So I have decided to post a follow-up with 25 more of the great character actors and actresses of that time. For some reason, this area seems to be dominated by men, perhaps because the movies have always placed such an emphasis on idealized female beauty and youth, so this time I'm listing fifteen male actors and ten female: no gender discrimination is intended. As before, I have used an asterisk to indicate a signature performance for each.

I should clarify some of the criteria I considered when compiling this list, which are the same ones I used for my original post on the subject. Of course, I could only include actors with whose careers I am familiar. There are many character actors of whom I am aware, but unless I have seen them in enough pictures to have a knowledgeable overview of their careers, I could not consider them for inclusion. I considered only actors whose careers lasted a number of years and who appeared in several noteworthy roles. Like many of the character actors of the studio era, some of these people had careers that lasted for decades in movies and then continued for a number of years more on television.

The term "character actor" as I use it is a pretty broad one. Generally, the people I refer to as character actors specialized in one type of character for practically their entire career. Even though I tended to choose for the signature performance one that seemed the exemplar of that character type, I sometimes chose instead a role that went against type for the simple reason that this was the performance that really stood out for me. Not everyone on the list, however, specialized in a type. Some, such as Walter Huston and Raymond Massey, paradoxically seemed worthy of inclusion precisely because they showed amazing versatility and successfully played such a range of character types.

Some of those on the list played the occasional lead, but I concentrated on performers who for the bulk of their careers worked in supporting roles. In the studio era it was not uncommon for actors to begin as leading players and in middle age shift to supporting parts. A good example of this is Herbert Marshall, whom I included.

Conversely, Clifton Webb began playing supporting parts—his debut role as Waldo Lydecker in Laura (1944) is exactly the kind I had in mind when I began this post—but soon graduated to leads and played these for most of his career, so that even though his early roles made him seem a candidate for inclusion, and even though his later lead roles were also in a sense character parts, his unusual career trajectory in the end made me feel he wasn't really right for this list. The same was true of Lee Marvin, also seriously considered for inclusion. For the first ten years or so of his career—culminating with his performance as one of the meanest villains ever to appear on the screen in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)—he was exactly the kind of actor appropriate for this list. Then he won his Oscar for Cat Ballou (1965) and spent the next 20 years as a major star playing leads. Claire Trevor, on the other hand, is a good example of a performer who from time to time played the lead—in Murder, My Sweet or Born to Kill, for example—but whose real forte was playing supporting parts of a certain type.

This list, even taken in conjunction with its predecessor, is by no means intended to be inclusive. It would be possible to compile a list of character actors that numbered in the hundreds, so important were these people to the Hollywood studios that churned out literally hundreds of movies a year in their heyday. In fact, one person who responded to the original post has done exactly that at his site King Spud's Movie & TV Pages. Finally, this is a strictly personal list. I'm sure that every reader of this post will have favorites that I haven't included in either of my two lists. Here they are, then, in alphabetical order:

FIFTEEN MORE CLASSIC CHARACTER ACTORS

• Edward Arnold. With his bulky build and deep, authoritative voice, he could bluster and be pompous like no one else. Frank Capra used that bluster for both comic effect (You Can't Take It with You) and menace (Meet John Doe). *Easy Living (1937), as the comically frustrated millionaire who in a rage throws his spendthrift wife's fur coat out the window of their penthouse.
  
• Charles Bickford. A serious actor who was usually an honorable man of strong character, typically the colleague, boss, or friend of the leading player. *Johnny Belinda (1948), as deaf-mute Jane Wyman's stern but ultimately understanding and supportive farmer-father.
  
• Eric Blore. The prim but easily flustered butler/valet with the British accent and the bemused look in his eyes in so many movies, whose skill at the double-take was the equal of Cary Grant's. He appeared in five of the Astaire-Rogers musicals. *Top Hat (1935), as—what else?—a rather impudent valet.
  
• Jack Carson. A 6' 2" bull of a man, he was an expert at playing the flippant but harmless and often slightly dim second lead, the tough-looking guy with a soft center. He did venture occasionally into dramatic parts, even appearing as Paul Newman's ineffectual older brother in the movie version of Tennessee Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. *A Star Is Born (1954), one of his serious roles, as the unforgiving studio publicist who is Norman Maine's nemesis.
  
• Henry Daniell. With his grim features and unsmiling expression, he seemed born to play the cold villain, which he did in movies and later on television for nearly 35 years. He was the villain in three of the Basil Rathbone-Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes movies, including a memorable Professor Moriarty in The Woman in Green (1945). *Camille (1937), as the Baron de Varville, Greta Garbo's possessive sugar daddy, insanely jealous of her attachment to young Armand.
  
• James Gleason. He was the epitome of the plain-talking, salt-of-the-earth, forever middle-aged working man—a cop, a cab driver, a milkman—a sort of male version of Thelma Ritter, in countless movies and television shows. *Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941), as the resurrected prize fighter's bewildered manager.
  
• Edmund Gwenn. He was sometimes a scoundrel—as Katharine Hepburn's criminal father in Sylvia Scarlett, for example—but more often the kindly older gent. He even got in on the science fiction craze of the early 1950s, playing an entomologist in the giant-ant movie Them! *Miracle on 34th Street (1947), in the role of a lifetime as the earnest Kris Kringle in this Christmas classic, which won him an Oscar as best supporting actor.
  
• Edward Everett Horton. An excitable fast-talker and another expert at the double-take. Nobody could convey flustered befuddlement or suspicion that he was the butt of the joke (which he often was) or deliver a smug wisecrack the way he could. In the 1930s he seemed ubiquitous, appearing in no fewer than 12 movies in 1934, 11 in 1935, and 10 in 1937. *Lost Horizon (1937), as the nervous wreck Alexander P. Lovett, a paleontologist who unexpectedly finds fulfillment in Shangri-La.
  
• Walter Huston. An actor of great range who didn't often do comedy (although his deadpan performance in And Then There Were None was hilarious) but always seemed to be having a great time whenever he was on screen. *The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), as an irascible gold prospector, the performance that got him an Oscar for best supporting actor (really a lead performance—he has about the same amount of screen time as top-billed Humphrey Bogart).
  
• Herbert Marshall. In the early 1930s he played suave leading men, most notably in Lubitsch's classic Trouble in Paradise (1932), or suffered nobly as the husband of strong leading women like Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, or Norma Shearer. For the last 25 years of his career he played the same suave, gentlemanly type in supporting parts in movies or on television. *Foreign Correspondent (1940), in which his noble exterior conceals treachery, when as the head of a pacifist group he is unmasked as a Nazi spy. Even so, he ends up dying nobly!
• Raymond Massey. Educated at Oxford University, he was actually Canadian by birth and later became an American citizen. Before playing Dr. Gillespie on television's Dr. Kildare in the early 1960s, he made movies for 30 years, mostly in the US but also occasionally in England. He tended toward roles of great gravity; even his part in Frank Capra's Arsenic and Old Lace was a serious one. His oratorical speaking voice and diction made him a favorite as lawyers, doctors, military officers, and government officials. And he played Abraham Lincoln numerous times on television and on the stage as well as in the movies, receiving an Oscar nomination for Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1940). *East of Eden (1955), as James Dean's rejecting father, a patriarch of Biblical scale, a subtle performance of impressive authority and restraint.
  
• Adolphe Menjou. Beginning in 1914, he appeared in 150 movies and television episodes, specializing in histrionic egomaniacs (he was the original Walter Burns in the 1931 version of The Front Page and the motormouthed lawyer Billy Flynn in 1942's Roxie Hart, the role Richard Gere played in its musical version, Chicago), scoundrels, and cads. *Paths of Glory (1957), as the Machiavellian World War I general who engineers the sacrificial execution of the two enlisted men in Stanley Kubrick's devastating anti-war movie, a role given extra irony by the fact that Menjou was one of the most vociferous right-wingers in McCarthy-era Hollywood.
  
• Thomas Mitchell. In his 25-year long career he played mostly meek nice guys with an occasional foray into darker roles. The peak year of his career was 1939, when he appeared in no less than five of that notable year's best movies: as Cary Grant's best friend in Howard Hawks's Only Angel Have Wings, Scarlett O'Hara's father in Gone With the Wind, king of the beggars in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, a cynical newsman in Frank Capra's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and one of the passengers in John Ford's Stagecoach. *Stagecoach (1939), as the kind-hearted alcoholic Doc Boone, the performance that earned him an Oscar as best supporting actor.
  
• Charles Ruggles. He specialized in eccentric characters in nearly 100 movies and more than 60 television episodes. He seemed to have been born funny, one of those actors who could bring a smile to your face the moment you saw him. *Ruggles of Red Gap (1935), as the nouveau riche hick from Washington state, the husband of socially ambitious Mary Boland (with whom he made 14 movies in the 1930s), who wins butler Charles Laughton in a card game in Paris and insists on treating him as a social equal.
  
• Roland Young. Like Eric Blore, Henry Daniell, Edmund Gwenn, and Herbert Marshall, he was British-born and never completely lost his accent. He was adept at playing rascals, usually but not always of the lovable variety, including a memorably unctuous Uriah Heep in George Cukor's David Copperfield (1935). *Topper (1937), as the staid, henpecked banker who is taught by a pair of meddlesome ghosts (Cary Grant and Constance Bennett) to loosen up, defy his bossy wife, and enjoy life.
  

TEN MORE CLASSIC CHARACTER ACTRESSES

• Billie Burke. Most famous for being the wife of showman Florenz Ziegfeld and for playing the good witch Glinda in The Wizard of Oz, for two decades she specialized in dithering, unflappable upper-class matrons trying with comic tenacity to uphold social standards. *Dinner at Eight (1933), as the high society wife of a shipping magnate trying to keep up appearances and maintain her composure as she organizes a dinner party for British royalty that is beset with comical disasters.
  
• Jean Hagen. In the late 1940s and early 1950s she played a series of not-too-bright floozies before moving to television, where she was the wife of Danny Thomas in his first TV series and appeared in many other TV episodes, including an especially memorable episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents called "Enough Rope for Two." *Singin' in the Rain (1952), the role of her career as Lina Lamont, the squeaky-voiced silent movie siren trying to make the transition to sound films with hilarious results.
  
• Jesse Royce Landis. Crossing her arms, pursing her lips, rolling her eyes, and delivering arch wisecracks, she played a memorable series of unmaternal mothers to stars like Susan Hayward, Grace Kelly, Anthony Perkins, and even Cary Grant (who was barely seven years younger). *To Catch a Thief (1955), as chic Grace Kelly's down-to-earth mother, who schemes to get her flirtatious daughter married to ex-cat burglar Cary Grant while helping him clear himself of false criminal charges.
  
• Aline MacMahon. Another expert at the arch wisecrack in her 1930s comic roles. As she aged, she continued working in carefully selected, more serious parts until 1975 and was especially good as the relief worker helping displaced children in post-World War II Europe in Fred Zinneman's The Search (1948). *Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933), as Trixie, the comic one of the three showgirls of the title, who boldly uses her slyness, intelligence, and sexiness to snare a middle-aged Boston millionaire.
  
• Mercedes McCambridge. Like Joseph Cotten and Agnes Moorehead, she was a member of Orson Welles' Mercury Theater group. Her distinctively low, raspy voice (she suffered from chronic bronchitis most of her life) made her a popular radio performer in the 1940s and got her the part of the voice of the demon in The Exorcist (which she had to sue to get credit for). She often played assertive career women or abrasive spinsters in movies and on television, but no matter what the role, she always projected forcefulness and seriousness. *Johnny Guitar (1954), unforgettable as Joan Crawford's butch nemesis, a vengeful Fury leading a vigilante mob out to get retribution for the killing of her brother.
  
• Hattie McDaniel. In studio-era Hollywood, African Americans were pretty much limited to playing servants, but at least Hattie McDaniel managed to do so with dignity, a genuinely warm personality, and as much independence as she could squeeze from the role. She's best remembered as Mammy in Gone With the Wind, but my favorite performance of hers is in another Selznick blockbuster. *Since You Went Away (1944), as Claudette Colbert's housekeeper. When she presents a birthday cake to Joseph Cotten, he asks how she managed to make it with rationing restrictions. "I tried something new this year," she answers with a twinkle in her eyes. "I bought it."
  
• Elizabeth Patterson. When I was growing up, I knew her as Mrs. Trumbull, Lucy's neighbor and occasional babysitter on I Love Lucy. Little did I suspect that the petite actress already had more than 100 movie roles to her credit dating back to 1926, when she was already 51 years old. She was the quintessential genteel but plucky elderly woman. *Intruder in the Dust (1949), in which she single-handedly holds off a Mississippi lynch mob trying to get to an African American man falsely accused of murder by sitting all night in the doorway of the local jail with a shotgun on her lap.
  
• May Robson. Born in Australia, she played mothers, aunts, grandmothers, and housekeepers in nearly 50 movies in her heyday decade, the 1930s, when she was in her seventies. *Lady for a Day (1933), Frank Capra's first great success, based on a story by Damon Runyon, as Apple Annie, the penniless apple seller who connives with gangster Dave the Dude and his cronies to stage a charade to convince her naive daughter that she is the society matron she has pretended to be in her letters.
  
• Claire Trevor. Born in Brooklyn, she used her accent to great effect playing the prostitutes, gun molls, and other hard-boiled dames with a heart of gold that made her famous. That she was so well-known for playing disreputable types added credibility to her roles as the more posh femme fatale she played in film noirs of the 1940s before returning to type and winning a supporting actress Oscar as the alcoholic mistress of a gangster in Key Largo (1948). *Stagecoach (1939), as the sensitive and pathetic prostitute Dallas, ashamed at being shunned by the rest of the passengers except for the alcoholic Doc Boone and the naive young Ringo Kid (John Wayne), who offers her redemption and hope in the form of non-judgmental love.
• Shelley Winters. She won two supporting actress Oscars for playing vulgar, shrewish frumps but was equally effective when playing against type. In The Night of the Hunter (1955), Charles Laughton cast her as the credulous widow targeted by psycho Robert Mitchum, and she was unexpectedly sympathetic playing the victim for once rather than a self-centered harpy. *Lolita (1962). Stanley Kubrick recognized in her vulgarity an unplumbed talent for broad comedy, and she was just plain hilarious as Lolita's mother, the pretentious social climber Charlotte Haze.

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Regret, Hope, and Acceptance: Ozu's Last Three Films

In the 1950s the glory of Japanese cinema was discovered by Westerners. Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon received the Golden Lion, the top prize, at the Venice Film Festival in 1951 and the next year a special Oscar as the best foreign language film released in the US in 1951. Kenji Mizoguchi's Ugetsu received the Silver Lion at Venice in 1953, and the next year his Sansho the Bailiff shared the Silver Lion with Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai. Yet the great contemporary of Kurosawa and Mizoguchi, Yasujiro Ozu (1903-1963), who directed 54 movies, remained largely unknown outside of Japan until the 1970s.

Since then Ozu has developed an ardent following. But he is a curious director, one who typically inspires not love or hate, but rather either love or indifference. One reason for this is his totally unique style. D. W. Griffith, the man universally considered the progenitor of the ways of using the language of film to tell stories, was not studied in Japan as a model as he was elsewhere in the world. Thus Ozu developed his own personal ways of telling stories on film, ways that changed little in the 35 years he made movies. As Roger Ebert puts it: "Ozu fashioned his style by himself, and never changed it, and to see his films is to be inside a completely alternative cinematic language."

Ozu leaves many viewers indifferent because his movies can seem so similar to one another. Probably the main reason for this apparent similarity is his highly idiosyncratic and unvarying style. He rarely tried to push his own self-defined visual boundaries, seeking instead to polish his existing artistic vision with each new film. Another reason is that like many of the great directors, he acquired a repertory of actors, using the same favored performers over and over. And he confined himself to similar, quite limited situations and themes in film after film. In fact, he remade several of his early films later in his career.

"There is an easy joke that no one can tell one Ozu film from another," writes David Thomson, "but is that a failing or a virtue?" The answer to that question depends on the individual viewer's reaction to Ozu's style. What some viewers see as repetition, others see as unity and continuity. For admirers like myself (and I'm a latecomer to Ozu, having seen my first Ozu movie just a little over a year ago), it is a virtue: I love his movies, and to see another Ozu is for me like having another helping of a favorite delicacy. Watching one Ozu movie after another is a bit like reading the complete novels of Jane Austen or listening to a set of concerti grossi by Handel or Corelli. On the surface they may seem awfully similar, but look closer and beneath the surface you will find subtle variations that lend each iteration its own distinctive character.

Between 1960 and 1962 Ozu made his last three films, works that David Thomson calls "late masterpieces, still lifes of hope and yearning." Late Autumn (1960), a reworking of Ozu's 1949 film Late Spring, opens at a temple where a group of middle-aged men have gathered for the ritual observance of the anniversary of the death of their former classmate and work colleague. Also present are the widow and daughter. The gossipy and slightly tipsy men observe that the daughter is now of marriageable age and that the widow, who married young and still looks quite youthful, would seem a prime candidate for remarriage. (She is played by Setsuko Hara, who appeared in many of Ozu's films, including the one on which this one is based, and was especially memorable as the daughter-in-law in Tokyo Story.) The men soon devote themselves to matchmaking for the pair, choosing for the mother one of their own group, a widower. The problem with the scheme is that the daughter is strongly resistant to leaving her mother, and her headstrong attitude causes a great deal of conflict with her mother, who is constantly trying to persuade her daughter to find a suitable man and marry. In the end the men's scheme comes to nothing. The daughter ends up marrying a coworker after the mother indicates she will marry the widower friend of her late husband. At the last moment she changes her mind, preferring her independence and teaching career to remarriage.

Mother and daughter in Late Autumn

In The End of Summer (1961), which takes place during a heat wave, an elderly widower, the owner of a sake factory, lives with his daughter and her husband, who manages the factory. A younger daughter and the widow of his late son are unmarried, and finding them husbands occupies the minds of the other members of the family. The father is a stubborn rascal who insists on ruling the family and making all the decisions about the business. His son-in-law constantly tries to convince him that small family-run sake breweries are no longer profitable in postwar Japan and that he should sell out to a larger company, but his father-in-law refuses even to consider this. He has also begun secretly seeing his former mistress and her vapid teenaged daughter, whom he believes is his and whose main interest in him is to wheedle him into buying her a fur coat. (Others are skeptical of his paternity; apparently the mistress had quite a reputation for promiscuity.) The daughter with whom he lives, a shrewish control freak given to self-dramatization, is constantly criticizing her father and is outraged when she discovers he has resumed relations with his former mistress. The family gets a scare when the father has a heart attack, but he seems to recover, then suddenly dies of another heart attack after sneaking off to the dog races in the sweltering heat with his mistress. As the funeral procession crosses a footbridge on the way to the crematorium on a small island, two peasants gathering reeds on the bank of the river remark impassively that someone must have died, while smoke pours from the smokestack of the crematorium in the background.

The funeral procession crossing the footbridge

Ozu's final movie, An Autumn Afternoon (1962), again concerns a middle-aged father, Shuhei Hirayama (Chishu Ryu, who also appeared in several of Ozu's movies and was so memorable as the elderly father in Tokyo Story), a widower trying to marry off his grown daughter, who like the daughter in Late Autumn is devoted to her widowed parent and doesn't want to leave. When he and his two school chums arrange a reunion with their now-retired middle-school teacher, whom they have nicknamed The Gourd, they get a shock. The man is a depressed alcoholic who owns a shabby noodle shop in a run-down part of town with his middle-aged unmarried daughter. In one especially poignant sequence, Hirayama takes the drunken ex-teacher to his daughter in the shop, and leaves them sitting next to each other. The father nods off; the daughter glances at him for a moment, her face crumples, and she buries her face in her hands and quietly weeps. When the teacher confesses to Hirayama his regret for ruining his daughter's life and warns Hirayama not to do the same, Hirayama becomes determined to find his daughter a husband and persuade her to marry. In the end he succeeds. On the way home from the wedding he stops in a bar for a drink and another patron, seeing the expression on his face, jokingly asks, "Where have you come from? A funeral?" "Something like that," Hirayama answers.

Hirayama (right) and his school chums

Ozu's last three films deal with closely related and sometimes overlapping subjects and themes that seem to have preoccupied him for much of his career. All three deal with matchmaking as either the main plot or a major subplot, so much so that it sometimes seems as though one is watching the ruminations of a Japanese Jane Austen. Parents seem almost obsessive about marrying off their daughters, while the children, like modern young people in traditional cultures everywhere, resist arranged marriages, seeing the practice as an outmoded vestige of the days when young people had no life outside the family home. But as in Austen, this preoccupation with matchmaking is about more than just a suitable marriage. It is about the desire for stability and for securing one's place in life, and the hope of parents to assure these things for their children.

Like so much in Ozu's movies, this attitude of the older generation toward marriage suggests an underlying anxiety about the inevitability of change and the realization that life is always moving on. In the last three movies we are always aware of the difference between the old and the new, the traditional and the postwar modern, the past and the present. The middle-aged characters cling to the past and to their cultural traditions and resist change. Mothers wear traditional clothing and stay at home caring for the family, while their daughters wear Western clothing and makeup and work in offices. Fathers remain closely bonded to men they went to middle school with 40 years earlier, or try to resume romantic relationships that ended decades ago. Sons and daughters ignore their parents' desire that they selflessly conform to traditional values, following instead independent courses of action that for them signify modernity.

In his last film, An Autumn Afternoon, Ozu seems especially to dwell on the corrosive changes in postwar Japanese culture. The predominant color in the movie is gray. "People have become so cold since the war," The Gourd observes to Hirayama. The responsible and conservative Hirayama's married son is an immature, self-centered spendthrift who lives in a dreary modern concrete apartment block and whose greatest ambition is to own a set of expensive golf clubs. One of the most distinctive features of Ozu's style—what has been referred to as "pillow shots" or "curtain shots"—also reflects this postwar malaise.

Ozu's pillow shots are brief montages, usually of outdoor scenes, that signal transitions in place or time, but not necessarily in the conventional way of establishing a precise change of setting or the passage of a precise amount of time. They are instead an abstract series of images that indicate events or time progressing in a general rather than in a specific sense. These interludes are normally peaceful and sedate, with a haunting, self-contained beauty of their own. But in An Autumn Afternoon, Ozu's pillow shots show postwar industrial Japan in all its blighted disfigurement: the skyline riven by stark power poles, snaking utility lines, and the smokestacks of factories spewing toxic smoke; the landscape littered with unsightly sheet metal fences, piles of rubble, barbed wire, and rusty barrels. These pillow shots are not without their own grim beauty, but it is the grimness that lingers, not the beauty.

A stark pillow shot in An Autumn Afternoon

In his last three films, Ozu takes his lifelong interest in the subject of generational conflict and by focusing more closely on the older generation makes the theme of the inevitability of aging and death that he explored so poignantly in his best-known work, Tokyo Story (1953), the central element of these movies. And he makes it clear that the proper response to this inevitability is not unseemly resistance or self-pity, but stoical acceptance of the situation. In Late Autumn, the middle-aged couple who decide in the end not to get married after all retain their dignity by taking the sensible course. In An Autumn Afternoon, Hirayama can finally face his old age with equanimity, knowing that he has chosen not to selfishly keep his daughter from pursuing her own happiness. By contrast, in The End of Summer, the defiant sake brewer makes a fool of himself and dies ignobly, while in An Autumn Afternoon, the alcoholic ex-teacher's morbidity and regret make him seem merely pathetic.

As in all of Ozu's films, the action in his last three movies takes place largely indoors—in the rooms and hallways of houses, in the corridors or offices of workplaces, in restaurants, noodle shops, or American-style bars. In film after film, we see what appear to be the same rooms in the same houses, the same offices, the same corridors. The overhead light fixtures, the wall coverings, the colors and furnishings may change, but the spaces seem the same in each movie. And they are photographed in the same style and lighted in the same way, the flat lighting with no obvious light source and few shadows giving these spaces a timeless and insular feel.

Because nearly all of the action takes place indoors, when the film does move outside, the effect is all the stronger. The sequence in Late Autumn where the mother and daughter take a last holiday together before the daughter's marriage and walk quietly beside a mountain lake, the funeral procession to the crematorium in The End of Summer, the opening shots of An Autumn Afternoon showing the factory in Yokohama that Hirayama manages—each of these sequences is rendered more forceful by its complete tonal contrast to the enclosed interior settings that dominate the rest of the film.

Each shot is meticulously composed. Right angles predominate: Ozu favors horizontal and vertical lines, squares and rectangles; he only occasionally uses diagonals, and hardly ever curves or circles. His compositions have a classic sense of order, balance, and symmetry, with great attention to form and pattern in the arrangement of people and objects within the frame. His actors are usually photographed facing the camera, facing away from the camera, or in profile. They are most often photographed seated. When they do move, they tend to move directly toward the camera or away from it, or across the frame. That Ozu prefers not to move the camera, to hold his shots so long, and to use flat cuts gives his compositions an especially painterly quality.

This painterly way of filming creates an overall air of stillness in Ozu's films. Yet the serenity of his surfaces masks currents of emotional turmoil just beneath the surface, and this is the source of conflict in his films. This is a turmoil not of agitation, but of controlled disturbance, for in Ozu's world there is no place for turbulent emotions. This is an outwardly placid world where grace and restraint are prized above all else, where even strong-willed people perceive the difference between strength of resolve and unseemly stubbornness and behave accordingly. If they don't, they become objects of gentle pity or derision. Ozu's films achieve their quietly moving emotional impact not through big dramatic moments, but through the cumulative effect of many small moments. His movies are canvases painted with small, delicate brushstrokes: a facial expression, a brief glance, a gesture, a boat or train passing in the background.

Ozu's cinema is one not of action, but of contemplation, and in his last three films his object of contemplation is the end of life. In these films Ozu suggests that ultimately we must let go of regrets for the past and of hopes for controlling the future and simply accept what the melancholic Gourd tells Hirayama in An Autumn Afternoon: "In the end we spend our lives alone . . . all alone."

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The website Ozu-san.com is devoted to the life and films of Yasujiro Ozu. All the images above come from this site.

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