Movie Reviews : Blithe Spirits Pull Off ‘Store Robbery’ Caper

A blithe little caper comedy, “The Great Department Store Robbery” (Little Tokyo Cinema I) owes much to Hollywood and European models, but it’s too corny and sentimental to appeal much beyond older ethnic audiences. On its own terms, it’s a sturdy genre piece, pleasant enough to make you wish that it had aimed for more sophistication.

Its strongest asset is gorgeous Keiko Matsuzaka, Shochiku’s reigning star. Matsuzaka is a real trooper who throws herself wholeheartedly into anything she tackles. She is blessed with a sense of humor as well as beauty, an irresistible combination.

With its traditional caper plot, “The Great Department Store” is a throwback itself. Matsuzaka plays Toyoyo, who’s taken over where her late father, Tokyo’s greatest shoplifter, left off. Toyoyo has that familiar desire, to pull off one last big heist with her father’s old pals. In the meantime she has fallen hard for her neighbor (Koji Yakusho), a struggling cellist for whom she would gladly lift a Stradivarius.

Director Azuma Morisaki has a graceful way both with staging the most complicated break-ins as well as the sleight-of-hand pickpocketing and shoplifting techniques that are the everyday stock and trade of Toyoyo and her cohorts. You can only wish that he and co-writer Masao Kajiura, in adapting a novel by Shoji Yuki, had brought the same light touch to the film’s gags and jokes.

One aspect of the old-fashioned quality of “The Great Department Store Robbery” (Times-rated Family) is downright refreshing: its sense of morality. Indeed, the film’s conclusion would satisfy Hollywood’s old Production Code. As a result, it generates more pathos than you would have thought possible in so frothy a film. Also opening Friday, in the Little Tokyo Cinema 2, are “The Color Purple” and “The Killing Fields,” both with Japanese subtitles.