SILVER

[KAZE NO NAKA NO MENDORI] [風の中の牝鶏]
With its screenplay completed in 1947, THE MOON HAS RISEN was meant to be Yasujirō Ozu's second film after World War II, but due to a number of production issues — not least the inability to film its story in war-ravaged Tokyo — the project was scrapped for A HEN IN THE WIND, a more immediate comment on the conditions of Japan's reconstruction period. This rare melodramatic turn from the director follows a mother (Kinuyo Tanaka) who, while waiting for her husband (Shūji Sano) to return from war, resorts to one night of sex work to pay her sick child's medical bills. The Ozu's delicate humanism is no less apparent in this genre, but perhaps the driving force of the film's deep emotional impact is Tanaka, whose elegant and staggeringly honest performance gives clear expression to the domestic troubles faced by Japan's family unit in the postwar era. (Note courtesy of Film at Lincoln Center.) DIR/SCR Yasujirō Ozu; SCR Ryōsuke Saitō; PROD Mitsuzō Kubo. Japan, 1948, b&w, 84 min. In Japanese with English subtitles. NOT RATED

AFI Member passes accepted.