Movie Review : A Sure-Fire Twist in ‘Tora-san Plays Daddy’

As its title suggests, “Tora-san Plays Daddy” (Little Tokyo Cinema 1) pairs the durable series’ hero (Kiyoshi Atsumi) with a kid. To be sure, there are the usual ladies-in-distress for the good-hearted Tora to rescue, but teaming our beloved itinerant peddler with a tot was an inspired idea. Leave it to writer-director Yoji Yamada, that shamelessly skillful heart-tugger who has 38 “Tora-sans” behind him, to evoke memories of Chaplin and little Jackie Coogan.

Of all the places for an abandoned child to wind up in the vast maze that is Tokyo, none could be better than the Toraya Tea Cake Shop in the city’s working-class Shibamata district. This is where solemn little Hideyoshi (Nichiro Ito) ends up, clutching a note from his dead father, who was a pal of Tora’s.

Tora himself is off on one of his endless rounds of peddling trinkets all over the countryside, but his relatives, goodness personified, take the boy in and fuss over him. When Tora shows up, he and the boy begin a lengthy search for his mother, which takes them into a picturesque, off-the-beaten-track Japan.

The “Tora-sans” are invariably leisurely--in the nicest sense of the word--but “Tora-san Plays Daddy” (Times-rated Family) has an exceptionally taut “second act.”

Worn out from the endless traveling, Hideyoshi falls ill at a seaside inn. Another guest, a beautiful young woman (Kumiko Akiyoshi) nursing a broken heart, comes to Tora-san’s aid; in the face of emergency the three lonely people--man, woman and child--form the family unit they all crave and never have had. For Tora-san fans, the sequence is all the more poignant because we know the situation is inevitably temporary.

Yamada and his usual co-writer Yoshitaka Asama have written some wonderful monologues for Atsumi. The best occurs when a cop, interrogating Tora and Hideyoshi, has caused them to miss their train.

In a comic reverie, Tora, as grand a gent as Chaplin’s Little Tramp ever was, tells the policeman that he must arrange accommodations for them--not at just any hotel but a good traditional Japanese inn where a maid will serve sake and, hopefully, be persuaded to stay the night. The cop, heretofore embarrassed and apologetic, bursts out laughing, saying, “Mister, you must be dreaming.” That Tora knows he is, providing that crucial touch with reality amid so much unabashed sentimentality, is why the “Tora-sans” have endured for nearly 20 years.

Juzo Itami’s “A Taxing Woman” continues in Cinema 2.