Walk Cheerfully

A small-time thief known on the street as Ken the Knife falls for a decent young woman called Yasue. When she finds out what he does she leaves him and says she will not come back until he has built an honest life. Ken tries, and discovers that getting out from under a past is not as simple as it sounds; his old friends will not let go. Yasujirō Ozu was twenty-six when he made this and had been at Shochiku since 1923; it was his fourteenth film and his first open tribute to American crime pictures. He does not copy his sources, he folds his affection for Harold Lloyd and Ernst Lubitsch into his own telling; it is a silent film, and its humour and feeling are surprisingly measured. Minoru Takada plays Ken and Hiroko Kawasaki Yasue.