Otoko wa tsurai yo: Torajiro gambare!

This is the 20th film in the Otoko wa tsurai yo -franchise. If you thought they were gonna do something special for this occasion, you thought wrong. Yamada and the gang don't really like messing with the formula...

Torajiro returns home and finds, that a young family friend Ryosuke (Nakamura Masatoshi) has moved in. At first the two don't get along - there's the usual fight - but after drinking together, Tora assumes the role of an older brother. He finds out that the young man is painfully shy, but has a crush on a cute waitress. Since Tora-san is an expert in matters of love, good advice is bound to follow...

This is a relaxed entry where the central focus is on new characters. The main "madonna" (Fujimura Shiho) doesn't show up in quite a while. There were a few funny bits, like Tora's description of a perfect date ("go see a Japanese comedy") and the first meeting between Tora and Ryusuke. If there remains any point to making qualitative comparisons between these films, I preferred entries 18 and 19 to this one, but then, even this is nowhere near the dullest of the bunch.

This one started strong but lost me a little in the second half. I've seen Yoji Yamada's superior The Yellow Handkerchief, which came out the same year, so maybe he was more occupied with that.

Still, if anything stuck out to me, it was that this felt like a sadder Tora-san film than usual. The dream at the start where he longs for a better life, and then the funny but also a little sad idea that he's better at helping other people in their love lives than his own we're both a bit depressing, as was a character being driven almost to suicide at one point.

But Tora himself keeps on fighting, and looking ahead, he'll do so for another 28 films it seems.