User reviews

The fun stuff here are children/ teens in conflict and affection with each other and their parents. It's also interesting to see the rare picture of parents exploiting their children. There are large dollops of humour and characteristics of family life that anyone would recognise and appreciate. Like all Naruse, the film work and editing are admirable. The script, too, is credible and of interest. However, it's a little difficult to care for some reason. I think there are too many children - 9 - and the film print is probably even greyer than it was to begin with. Both characterisation and the drama are limited and sibling rivalry and generational conflict are timeworn themes. Still, not all bad by any means and worth watching.

Musei Tokugawa and Noriko Honma are the parents of five children. They are poor, life is hard, and, as the title indicates, everyone works to bring in enough to barely get along. But a crisis is upon them. The eldest son, Akira Ubukata, is in a dead-end job. He wants to quit, go away, and become an electrician. Can the family survive without the money he brings in?

Mikio Naruse's film about the working poor is an early example of the sort of movie he would do after the war. While Ozu would concentrate on well-to-do families in which the problem is how to convince the good daughter to get married, Naruse would offer films about how families work. Here, with lesser-known actors than he would come to work with, he draws good performances and poignant situations.

Aptly titled melodrama, the plot is about one of five sons who wants to quit a dead-end job and go back to school, plan beyond day-to-day life. But if he does, the economics of the household tumble down. What might have been a wildly histrionic film, and Naruse has displayed a hand for such, is somewhat tempered by the fact that the strict father basically means well and is honestly troubled, on the other hand the son is a responsible youth who wants to be able to care for both aging parents and a wife.

The problem remains however, that Naruse had been on-again, off-again trying to address in other films; the film is about this situation and efforts to resolve it. It's one layer passionately acted, rather forcibly unpacked, and has no deeper insight.