Dragnet Girl

Joji Oka contemplates the virtues of (fido) fidelity in Dragnet Girl

Yasujiro Ozu's Dragnet Girl, from 1933 , is most often described as a crime film. yet it is equally a romantic melodrama focused on a love triangle composed of gangster Joji (Joji Oka), his moll Tokiko (Kinuyo Tanaka), and the more traditional Kazuko (Sumiko Mizukubo) who works in a record shop. Joji is an ex-boxer and a very low level gang boss who yearns to go straight, especially after meeting the demure Kazuko. He is entranced by her, but senses that the volatile Tokiko is more his match. They vow to do one more job together and then settle down, but the last job ends up as last jobs usually do. Not a tragic ending though, for a shot of the morning light reaching a flower on the window sill ends this silent picture with a note of possible redemption.   

Dragnet Girl is a film saturated with American culture and its depiction in the crime genre. The locales ape those in found American films: the seedy flophouse lair of the gangster, the boxing gym, the pool hall, the jazz nightclub. The men's suits are all Western style and nearly all the poster art (heralding Jack Dempsey and King Vidor's The Champ) in the film hails from the USA. In the film, these are all harbingers of a future that deviates from traditional national culture. The meek and conformist Kazuko personifies the hardworking values of that culture while Tokiko is portrayed as an amoral chippie and grifter. Tokiko admits that she sees why Joji is attracted to Kazuko, a blushing virgin to her whore, and even plants a kiss on her. Despite its sexual ambiguities though, Dragnet Girl is fairly rigid in its portrayal of the superiority of the traditional as opposed the more modern and Western. Ozu three times gives us low angle shots of characters in opposite styles of garb travelling a parallel course, but never do the twain meet.

Dragnet Girl is notable for its energetic camera movement, particularly its use of tracking shots, that stand in contrast to the placid, more meditative style of Ozu's autumnal years. Ozu presents us a collection of grids and snares that serve to trap his characters or provide them a rare moment of intimacy. Ozu cuts away to reaction shots during the fight scenes, playing up not the violence, but the comic potential of those sequences. The sheer audacity and chock full of nuts potency of the mise en scene is enough to augur a classic auteur, but the scenario has unnecessary moments of repetition in its portrayal of all the angles in the romantic triangle. The cast is superb though, with Ms. Tanaka, just at the start of a brilliant career, the heart and soul of a picture in which she is its cynosure. 

Kinuyo Tanaka