Yûyake-gumo

Shinji Tanaka's family is poor. They run a fish shop in a side street in a poor section of Tokyo. The young man has dreams of becoming a sailor, and he looks through his binoculars at the harbor and the occasional young woman. But his father falls ill and his family and friends start to fall away. He has to grow up fast.

Keisuke Kinoshita's film of hard times for young people is not among his great pictures, but it is heartfelt. Although the protagonist is Tanaka, like many of his movies, the glue that holds it together is close to the center, but not in it. Yûko Mochizuki as Tanaka's mother is loving, kind, and aware of everything that is going on, despite her soft insistence that everything is fine. The veneer cracks only a couple of times, but she underplays the scenes in such a deft fashion that she is the warmest character in all of Kinoshita's cynical post-war movies.