I Flunked, But… (Rakudai wa shitakeredo)

Live Musical Accompaniment
Screening on Film

Directed by Ozu Yasujiro.
With Saito Tatsuo, Tanaka Kinuyo, Ryu Chishu.
Japan, 1930, 35mm, black & white, silent, 65 min.
Japanese intertitles with English subtitles.
Print source: Janus Films

Takahashi (Saito Tatsuo) and his friends—one of them played by twenty-four-year-old Ryu Chishu—would rather cheat than study. A botched cheating operation results in the entire cohort flunking the exam. While other students enter the competitive job market, they have to spend an extra term in school. The brisk and brutal humor of I Flunked, But… is economically constructed, requiring only a small set and some simple props (a shirt covered in test answers, sugar cubes, a fake gun, toenail clippers). Like the unemployed graduate in I Graduated, But… who overcomes his shame, Takahashi learns what it means to hold his head up high regardless of academic failure or success. A touching conversation between Takahashi and his girlfriend (Tanaka Kinuyo) about wearing a graduation suit with dignity recalls a similar story from Ozu’s youth: despite being expelled from his school dormitory at age seventeen, Ozu showed up for his graduation in a new uniform, proudly beaming among his peers.
(Description by Kelley Dong)

For more information, please see Harvard Film Archive website.

~Preceded by~

I Graduated, But… (Daigaku wa detakeredo)

Directed by Ozu Yasujiro.
Japan, 1929, 35mm, black & white, silent, 10 min.
Japanese intertitles with English subtitles.
Print source: Janus Films

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