Japanese Girls at the Harbour (1933)

The titular Japanese girls are Dora and Sunako from Yokohama, who grow up together but whose lives take, shall we say, different roads thanks to Henry, a nice young Japanese boy with a good traditional Japanese name, whom the two girls both love. Dora winds up marrying Henry and settling into a life of domestic bliss. Sunako, on the other hand, winds up shooting a third girl Henry’s with and flees Yokohama after this violent fit of passion for a life of  prostitution. When she returns to Yokohama, we may assume things will not go altogether well. Hiroshi Shimizu is starting to receive acclaim as a forgotten master after decades of obscurity; I don’t think this film—whose narrative is not a million miles away from the Mizoguchi films we recently considered—supports that claim by itself, though we’ll see how the rest of the box goes. But by itself it offers various points of interest. The Japanese and other Asian film industries were slower on the uptake with sound cinema than most other countries; although talkies were first produced there in 1931 (I think), they didn’t really take over until about 1936/37. Hence why we still have this silent film from 1933, albeit one by a director who’d already made his talkie debut (Shimizu must be in a rare if not unique position there)… but it’s a silent that almost looks like it should’ve been a sound film (or like a talkie with the soundtrack removed and intertitles inserted), and I don’t think I’ve ever got that impression from any other silent film except Dreyer’s Passion. And the credits to this silent film curiously mention two songs which obviously aren’t part of the film as it exists; was it originally meant to be accompanied by a Vitaphone-style soundtrack or something? Whatever, the end result is nice enough but not earth-shattering, and it barely stands up even to a brief 71-minute runtime. Still, it’ll be interesting to see how the rest of the box goes…