Stills

Tokyo GA (1985)

The Lady and the Beard (1931)

Pavements (2024)

Bad Seed (1934)

The Pleasure Garden (1925)

First films as directors in this lot by Alfred Hitchcock and Billy Wilder, the former’s The Pleasure Garden slightly pre-figuring the great The Wind (1928) in the pictured scene where guilt and terror spill over into a superimposed, ghostly image. It’s effective but not really the focus here. Wilder’s Bad Seed recalls the great People on Sunday (1930), for which he wrote the screenplay, in a scene towards the middle in which the gang of car thieves take the afternoon off to go for a swim. The spoilt rich kid of the title is driven to crime when his father sells his car right before he needs it to impress a woman on a date. It’s daft, funny and sometimes tragic, with such an energy. Wikipedia has a quote which might explain why:

We didn't use a soundstage. Most of the interiors were shot in a converted auto shop, even the living room set, and we did the automobile chases without transparencies, live, on the streets. It was exhausting. The camera was mounted on the back of a truck or in a car. We were constantly improvising . . . We were doing nouvelle vague a quarter of a century before they invented a fancy name for it.

Meanwhile, The Lady and the Beard is a hoot, based largely around the fact that beards were scarce in Japan, and (apparently) hilarious to eligible young ladies and prospective employers alike. Abraham Lincoln is the inspiration for it, but our hero has to shave it off in order to get a job in a restaurant. Not before it gets tittered at an awful lot, though. I’d been looking for an alternative way in to Yasujirō Ozu before making my way back to the later films, and this turned out to be a great place to start. Tokyo GA is pleasingly miscellaneous, being partly a search for Ozu’s Tokyo twenty years after his death: it features a touching, illuminating interview with the cameraman who shot most of his films, and a visit to his grave. But it also has many scenes which have nothing to do with him, such as this one, where young people gather in a park one drizzly day to dance to Blondie’s ‘Call Me’ and other western tunes.