(Mikio Naruse, Japan 1935, 74 min., 35mm nitrate)
Print source: George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY
Wife! Be Like a Rose! is the translated title of Mikio Naruse’s twenty-fifth film, one of five he made in 1935 and his third talkie. Retitled Kimiko, it opened at New York’s Filmarte Theatre along with a Japanese musical travelogue and ran for one week as the first Japanese sound film commercially released in the US.
Naruse transformed a popular shinpa play (a stylized domestic melodrama featuring lovers thwarted by tradition and class difference) with signature film technique: fluid camerawork and editing, foregrounded compositions, and narratage. Naruse adds droll humor, psychological insight, contemporaneity (e.g., the opening location shots in Marunouchi’s business district and at Tokyo Station), and a grounding in popular culture. In hindsight, the nods to Frank Capra and René Clair gain significance: within five years all but German foreign films were banned as Japan mobilized for war.
In Japan, Wife! Be Like a Rose! was Naruse’s first major critical success, winning the 1935 Kinema Junpō Best Film Award. US critics, however, lacked context for everything Japanese viewers appreciated, and reviews were mixed. Burton Crane of The New York Times succinctly described it as being centered on a wife steeped in old conventions; a husband happily living with a former geisha; and “a modern Japanese daughter’s struggle between loyalties.” American critics applauded Kimiko’s “authenticity” and “picturesque atmosphere,” but criticized its “dreary pace” and production technique as “below the Hollywood average.” “Japanese [are] racially not emotionally demonstrative,” Variety lamented.
Naruse joined Shochiku Studio in 1920, directing twenty-four films between 1930 and 1934. Overshadowed by Ozu and denied opportunities to make sound films, he moved to P.C.L., a pioneer in sound technology and musical entertainment exploiting it. Naruse made ten films at P.C.L. before it merged with Toho, where he remained until his career ended in 1967.
Sources suggest Kimiko was abridged for its New York run. However, this original U.S. release print on 1936 Kodak stock with 0.9%–0.98% shrinkage appears to be complete. It has been in the Eastman Museum’s collection since 1951, acquired from Wesley Greene, a Chicago-affiliated distributor responsible for bringing Naruse’s film to the US. To our knowledge, this is the only surviving nitrate print of this classic film.
– Joanne Bernardi