Yasujiro Ozu

Dragnet Girl

Dragnet Girl

This formally accomplished and psychologically complex gangster tale pivots on the growing attraction between Joji, a hardened career criminal, and Kazuko, the sweet-natured older sister of a newly initiated young hoodlum—a relationship that provokes the jealousy of Joji’s otherwise patient moll, Tokiko. With effortlessly cool performances and visual inventiveness, Dragnet Girl is a bravura work from Yasujiro Ozu.

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Film Info

  • Japan
  • 1933
  • 100 minutes
  • Black & White
  • 1.33:1
  • Japanese

Available In

Collector's Set

Eclipse Series 42: Silent Ozu—Three Crime Dramas

Silent Ozu—Three Crime Dramas

DVD Box Set

3 Discs

$35.96

Dragnet Girl
Cast
Joji Oka
Joji
Kinuyo Tanaka
Tokiko
Hideo Mitsui
Lefty Hiroshi
Sumiko Mizukubo
Kazuko
Yumeko Oushi
Misako
Yoshio Takayama
Senko
Koji Kaga
Misawa
Yasuo Nanjo
Okazaki
Credits
Director
Yasujiro Ozu
Story
James Maki (a.k.a. Yasujiro Ozu)
Screenplay
Tadao Ikeda
Director of photography
Hideo Mohara
Editors
Kazuo Ishikawa
Editors
Minoru Kuribayashi
Art direction
Yoneichi Wakita

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Eclipse Series 42: Silent Ozu—Three Crime Dramas
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Atypical in style and subject, Yasujiro Ozu’s early crime dramas show a

future master brilliantly experimenting with camera and editing.

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Essays — Apr 24, 2015
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Ozu in the Underworld, with a New Live Score

One of Yasujiro Ozu’s lesser-known genre films, Dragnet Girl screens with an electronic score by the band Coupler next Tuesday in New York.

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The Signature Style of Yasujiro Ozu
The Signature Style of Yasujiro Ozu
With his singular and unwavering style, Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu disregarded the established rules of cinema and created a visual language all his own. Precise compositions, contemplative pacing, low camera angles, and elliptical storytelling a…
Short Takes — Dec 11, 2015

Explore

Yasujiro Ozu

Director

Yasujiro Ozu
Yasujiro Ozu

Yasujiro Ozu has often been called the “most Japanese” of Japan’s great directors. From 1927, the year of his debut for Shochiku studios, to 1962, when, a year before his death at age sixty, he made his final film, Ozu consistently explored the rhythms and tensions of a country trying to reconcile modern and traditional values, especially as played out in relations between the generations. Though he is best known for his sobering 1953 masterpiece Tokyo Story, the apex of his portrayals of the changing Japanese family, Ozu began his career in the thirties, in a more comedic, though still socially astute, mode, with such films as I Was Born, But . . . and Dragnet Girl. He then gradually mastered the domestic drama during the war years and afterward, employing both physical humor, as in Good Morning, and distilled drama, as in Late Spring, Early Summer, and Floating Weeds. Though Ozu was discovered relatively late in the Western world, his trademark rigorous style—static shots, often from the vantage point of someone sitting low on a tatami mat; patient pacing; moments of transcendence as represented by the isolated beauty of everyday objects—has been enormously influential among directors seeking a cinema of economy and poetry.

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