Thursday, June 10, 2010

ONE WONDERFUL SUNDAY (1947)

A man and his girlfriend are poor as shit and spend their one day together, Sunday, walking around being poor as shit and being depressed and then being really happy. The End.

"Though this film won me a prize for the best director of the year I don't think I made it nearly freely enough. I had a lot of things to say and I got them all mixed up - it certainly is not my favorite film." - Akira Kurosawa.

I couldn't agree with you more Akira. I like human dramas of this type (Vidor's THE CROWD comes to mind), but I didn't care for ONE WONDERFUL SUNDAY at all. Visually it's fine, nothing special, but it works. Actually a few of the shots are really nice, most notable the train at the beginning. The biggest problem I had was the script. It's jumbled up and it gives no real reason for the happy ending. They're still poor as shit and yea, suddenly the dude has some self-respect (as shown by in the opening scene he picked up a half smoked cigarette off the sidewalk and smokes it, in the final scene he sees a half-smoked cigarette on the sidewalk and he smashes it out with his foot), but you ain't going to pay your fucking bills with self-respect and dreams. I don't know maybe I missed something, maybe it was some kind of allegory for post-war Japan . I don't know.