Mr Thank You (1936)

“Mr Thank You” is the popular nice young man who drives the bus for the residents of a no doubt charming but evidently dirt-poor rural backwater (poor enough that not everyone can even afford the bus), so called because of the way he constantly thanks the various pedestrians and animals who move out of the middle of the road to let him pass, and the film is basically about him driving an assortment of people down a mountain. If I thought Japanese Girls struggled to fill its slender running time, this one should feel like even more of a stretch, considering what I’ve described above would barely be called a “plot” by many. And yet it works; Shimizu seems to have been fond of location shooting and travelling shots, and that’s pretty much what the film is about, set almost entirely on a bus passing through some marvellous-looking landscape (alas that he couldn’t film it in colour). It’s interesting, because the film is obviously very much a product of its time, enough so that Shimizu gets to pull off an amusing joke about the talkies finally making headway in Japanese cinemas despite his passengers not even knowing what they are, but also because the main narrative thread (if you can call it that) relates to a young girl being taken by her mother to pack her off to Tokyo to work as a prostitute, and a scene with a Korean road worker offers a dig at Japanese racism so subtle that if, like me, you don’t actually realise she’s Korean until you read the DVD liner notes you might not even recognise it. But there’s also something kind of timeless to it, maybe because the road movie form (and this must be one of the first examples of a road movie) hasn’t really changed that much since the mid-30s; it’s not hard to envisage this being remade now without too many structural changes. Thin in narrative terms, yes, but possessing a good deal of charm. I liked this.