Quick take: The Lady Vanishes

Befitting its name, Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes is light as a feather. Though it's more comedy than suspense, its mystery keeps the story compelling while the script and performances provide comic relief. The film starts in a fictional Northern European country as a mixed group of tourists are waylaid at a small mountain inn and then scramble to get on a train that will take the British passengers toward home. Then the eponymous lady disappears, and no one is quite who we thought they were.

Of course, we've seen that kind of premise a million times, and this is a 70-year-old movie made on a tiny set with projected scenery outside the windows. The ancient sound is as good as it could be, given this is a Criterion Collection DVD, but it's still impossible to hear all the lines. Yet there's enough to think and laugh about in four out of five lines that the fifth would just be icing on the cake. The barely veiled references to European politics in the lead-up to World War II, which are explained further in the DVD extras, are fascinating.

This isn't just a droll little English film. It's laugh-out-loud funny. And Hitchcock makes it all look easy.

"All the leaves are burnt sienna ...."

Criterion does Chungking Express!

Review: An Autumn Afternoon

When I pointed out the new Criterion edition of Ozu's An Autumn Afternoon at our local video store last night, my friend asked me what it was about. I hadn't seen it in about 15 years, but with a late-period Ozu film, you have an excellent chance of being right if you simply say, "It's about a father and his daughter, who's getting old enough to get married."

Made in 1962, this was Ozu's last film, and it's even more about his favorite subject than his other late works, if that's possible. The plot, concerning Shuhei Hirayama (Chishu Ryu), a modestly successful executive, and daughter Michiko (Shima Iwashita), winds gently through the movie's 112 minutes. But An Autumn Afternoon is mostly just a meditation on the theme of aging and family relations. Old age and youth, and despair and hope, bounce off each other in a series of connected encounters. Hirayama's newlywed son argues with his wife about money, a middle-aged friend brags about his young wife, and a younger middle-aged man who served under Hirayama's command in the Navy reminisces with him. Hirayama encounters one of his own elders, too, a former middle-school teacher who's down on his luck. A small reunion in his honor leaves everyone, in subtle ways, closer to the grave.

All this builds up to something, but not through the clockwork of a typical plot. In Ozu's world, tradition is the force that overshadows everything, but each event feels driven by characters rather than by a march toward some predetermined destination. An Autumn Afternoon is even less plot-driven than most Ozu films, giving us a series of mirrored events that simply reflect on its themes. Though it seems to drift along, it's compelling because of the growing sense of approaching separation, sleep, physical decline, and death.

All this plays out against the backdrop of a thriving Japanese city in the delectable light of long fall afternoons. The "pillow shots" that Ozu used as buffers between scenes reached as high an artistic level here as they ever did. The images of smokestacks, office towers, and modern apartment buildings portray the churning prosperity of postwar life. The cheery soundtrack, which plays even throughout many dialog scenes -- Ozu always asked his usual composer, Kojun Saito, to write in the style of "home music," a kind of generic background music popular with Japanese families, according to biographer Donald Richie -- contributes to this feeling. Yet the screenplay, and even a few pillow shots of barrels of industrial waste, undercuts that optimism in interesting ways.

All those images are in full splendor on the Criterion disc, a clean and vibrant transfer. Ozu was an adventurous and inventive filmmaker, embracing first sound and later color, though the latter only for his last few films. As in Good Morning, his use of color is extravagant, with many bright red and yellow set props and even a hot-pink apron in one scene.

No single film can sum up Ozu's work, but this release of An Autumn Afternoon -- and I'm not even considering the commentary -- is a good introduction to his late period.