MOVIE REVIEW : ‘FINAL TAKE’: A SALUTE TO THE JAPANESE CINEMA

Yoji Yamada’s “Final Take” (at the Little Tokyo Cinema and the Monica 4-Plex) is an affectionate, multilayered salute to the vintage Japanese cinema and its makers.

It is set in an end-of-innocence era, the early ‘30s, when talkies were at last replacing silent pictures in Japan--and when the government, with its invasion of Manchuria, was commencing the military aggression that led to Pearl Harbor. It is a wonderfully entertaining large-scale saga, marred but not seriously damaged by a streak of sentimentality.

Its foreground story is as much about an idealistic assistant director (Kiichi Nakai) as about the hard climb to stardom of a pretty movie theater candy vendor (Narimi Arimori). (The two seem headed for romance by the fade-out.) Except for its setting--Shochiku’s old Kamata Studios--and the company’s longtime head, the legendary Shiro Kido, the film is fictional, but clearly a composite of actual persons and events. Surely the heroine’s name, Koharu Tanaka, is an homage to the late Kinuyo Tanaka--subject of the recent film biography “Actress”--and the studio’s finest, most serious director is a carbon of the rigorous Yasujiro Ozu.

Like “Actress,” “Final Take” is rich in studio atmosphere, and it is amazing to hear Kido exclaim “Forget about art! We’re in this to make money!” when under his long regime his studio’s artistic achievements are arguably without parallel in the history of the cinema.

Actually, Nakai’s Kenjiro Shimada is of greater interest than Arimori’s Tanaka, who is a conventionally appealing figure of luck and pluck. Shimada has seen his screenplay, a brave love story about a prostitute and a poor farmer, become the inspiration for a zany laugh-riot comedy--this is one of the film’s many inspired sequences. Shimada also has a leftist friend, wanted by the police, who transforms him with his respect for popular entertainment and its possibilities.

Yamada and his writers certainly share these sentiments, and in that light, Yamada casts his Tora-san series regulars in supporting or bit parts. This is all well and good, except in the crucial casting of Kiyoshi Atsumi (Tora himself) as Tanaka’s father, a stage bit player now drowning his disappointments in drink. Atsumi is terrific in a scene in which he teaches his daughter how to build an entire character around a one-line part. But his performance becomes too much that of a star turn of escalating pathos by a famous and beloved comedian. In Atsumi’s character and fate Yamada emulates some key vintage Japanese heart-tuggers, but the effect is overly sentimental and even at odds with Yamada’s more detached view of daily studio life. “Final Take” (Times-rated Mature because of its little interest to children) has much appeal but is too indulgent of Atsumi, Yamada’s longtime colleague.

Note: “Death Shadows,” Hideo Gosha’s splendid samurai film, moves to Little Tokyo Cinema 2 today.

‘FINAL TAKE’

A Shochiku presentation. Executive producer Toru Okuyama. Chief producer Yoshitaro Nomura. Co-producers Shigemi Sugisaki, Nobutoshi Masumoto, Kiyoshi Shimazu. Director Yoji Yamada. Screenplay Hisashi Inoue, Taichi Yamada, Yoshitaka Asama, Yoji Yamada. Camera Tetsuo Takaba. Music Naozumi Yamamoto. Art director Mitsuo Dekawa. With Narimi Arimori, Kiyoshi Atsumi, Kiichi Nakai, Chieko Baisho, Keiko Matsuzaka, Kei Suma, Itoku Kishibe, Chishu Ryu. In Japanese, with English subtitles.

Running time: 1 hour, 57 minutes.

Times-rated: Mature.