Movie Reviews : ‘Tora-san’ No. 44 Offers Reprieve for Theater

Leave it to Tora-san, the feckless hero of the longest-running series in world film history, to effect a temporary reprieve of the Little Tokyo Cinema, which closed at the end of October, 1990.

Los Angeles’ last remaining Japanese-language theater, which opened in the Yaohan Plaza at 3rd and Alameda streets in 1987, was to have been replaced by a Chinese restaurant. When that didn’t happen, the theater’s former manager Moto Yokoyama decided to try an occasional booking of an unsubtitled Japanese film. The response was sufficiently encouraging for him to book the subtitled “Tora-san Confesses” on weekends through March, with screenings at 11:30 a.m. and 2 p.m.

No. 44 in the series which began in 1969 is a charmer, full of the sentiment, humor and compassion that made the Tora-san movies always the most popular attraction at the Little Tokyo Cinema--and its predecessor, the old Kokusai Theater on Crenshaw Boulevard.

This time series creator, writer-director Yoji Yamada and his long-time co-writer Yoshitaka Asama have Tora (Kiyoshi Atsumi), that occasionally irascible but fundamentally lovable itinerant peddler, doing his usual Mary Worth routine in behalf of his own nephew (Hidetaka Yoshioka). The nephew is now in college, and his girlfriend (Kumiko Goto), is seriously upset over the prospect of her mother’s remarriage.

No matter how far the often feckless Tora may wander, hawking cheap goods at festivals in picturesque towns and small cities all over Japan, he has a firm, loving anchor with his endlessly forgiving relatives back in Tokyo.

His elderly aunt (Chieko Misaki) and uncle (Masami Shimojo) and his sister (Chieko Baisho) run a tea-cake shop, which is one of many establishments that line a narrow lane connecting a train station to an ancient temple in the northernmost portion of Tokyo. The tea cake shop may be a standing set at Shochiku Studios, but the lane actually exists, in one of the few Tokyo neighborhoods unchanged by time. Tora’s relatives with their solid family life and their small business in a friendly neighborhood represent a way of life that is rapidly disappearing in all the major cities of the world.

The eccentric, funny but wise and kindly Tora always knows how to solve everybody else’s emotional problems yet can never quite land a woman himself or, when he does, bring himself to settle down with her. Yamada has never been afraid of sentimentality, but his view of life is in fact bittersweet, suffused as always with a sense of mortality and, in the case of Tora, a sense that his freedom is accompanied always by an essential loneliness.

‘Tora-san Confesses’

Kiyoshi Atsumi: Tora-san

Hidetaka Yoshioka: Mitsuo

Kumiko Goto Izumi: Oikawa

Chieko Baisho: Sakura

A Shochiku Films Ltd. presentation. Executive producer, producer, director Yoji Yamada. Producer Kazuyoshi Okuyama. Executive producer Kiyoshi Shimazu. Screenplay by Yamada, Yoshitaka Asama. Cinematographers Tetsuo Takaba, Mitsufumi Hanada. Editor Iwao Ishii. Music Naozumi Yamamoto. Art director Mitsuo Degawa. Sound Isao Suzuki. Running time: 1 hour, 39 minutes. In Japanese, with English subtitles.

MPAA-rated Family (suitable for all ages).