Chichi Ariki (aka There Was A Father) (1942)

After a schoolboy drowns under his watch, a school teacher (Chishu Ryu) feels responsible and quits his vocation preferring instead to devote himself to the raising and welfare of his son (Haruhiko Tsuda as a child, Shuji Sano as an adult). There have been many films about mother love and devoted mothers (STELLA DALLAS, IMITATION OF LIFE, MILDRED PIERCE etc.) but very few films about a father's devotion to their children. Family has almost always been at the focus of the films of Yasujiro Ozu but here I'm not quite sure what Ozu's intentions are. The father appears to have his son's best interests at heart but whenever the son reaches out to the father, he seems to push the son away. He instills in his son a good work ethic as well as a sense of right and wrong but there's a chasm, a distance, between the two that the son appears to want to repair while the father either ignores it or is unaware that, in fact, it exists. Perhaps it's a cultural thing. The Japanese aren't a huggy-feely people. Still, in the film's final scene, Ozu seems to indicate that the son will not follow in his father's footsteps but become a major part of his son's (who has yet to be born) life. A perfect film for the upcoming Father's Day.