is a 1931 Japanese

silent Silent may mean any of the following: People with the name * Silent George, George Stone (outfielder) (1876–1945), American Major League Baseball outfielder and batting champion * Brandon Silent (born 1973), South African former footballer * C ...

comedy drama film directed by

Mikio Naruse was a Japanese filmmaker who directed 89 films spanning the period 1930 to 1967. Naruse is known for imbuing his films with a bleak and pessimistic outlook. He made primarily shomin-geki ("common people drama") films with female protagonists, ...

, and the first surviving film by the director. Naruse biographer Catherine Russell called it a combination "of nansensu comedy,

tendency film is a genre of socially conscious, left-leaning films produced in Japan during the 1920s and 1930s. Tendency films reflected a perceived leftward shift in Japanese society in the aftermath of the 1927 Shōwa financial crisis. Japan's left-wing li ...

, and

shoshimin-eiga , literally "petty bourgeois film" or "lower middle class film", is a genre of Japanese realist films which focus on the everyday lives of ordinary or middle class people. An alternate term for the is the pseudo-Japanese word , literally "commo ...

with a particularly flamboyant method of decoupage".

Plot

Insurance salesman Okabe is scolded by his wife for their shortage of money and always being behind with their rental payments. He promises that the situation will better soon, as he is about to sell an insurance policy to Mrs. Toda, a wealthy neighbour. At Mrs. Toda's house, he gets into an argument with Nakamura, a competing salesman. As a result, Mrs. Toda throws both of them out. Meanwhile, Okabe's son Susumu gets into a fight with the neighbour's kids, including Mrs. Toda's son, for not letting him play with their toy airplane. Okabe, afraid that Mrs. Toda might sue him, scolds Susumu and comforts her son, taking him home. Mrs. Toda, who has heard that a child was hit by a train, is relieved by the sight of Okabe and her son and agrees to buy an insurance from him. Okabe decides to surprise Susumu and buys a toy airplane for him. Back home he learns that it was his own son who was hit by the train, and runs to the hospital. Susumu is in a critical condition, but finally recovers.

Cast

*Isamu Yamaguchi as Okabe *Tomoko Naniwa as Okabe's wife *Seiichi Kato as Susumu, Okabe's son *Shizue Akiyama as Mrs. Toda *Tokio Seki as Nakamura *Hideo Sugawara

Release

''Flunky, Work Hard!'' premiered in Japan on August 8, 1931. It was shown in the U.S. as part of a 25 films Naruse retrospective in 1985, organised by the Kawakita Memorial Film Institute and film scholar

Audie Bock Audie Elizabeth Bock (born October 15, 1946) is an American film scholar and politician who served in the California State Assembly from 1999 to 2000, and was elected to the Sarasota County, Florida Soil and Water Conservation District in 2018. ...

Notes

References

External links

* * * * {{Mikio Naruse 1931 films 1931 drama films 1931 comedy films 1931 short films Japanese black-and-white films 1931 comedy-drama films Japanese comedy-drama films 1930s Japanese-language films Japanese silent short films Films directed by Mikio Naruse Shochiku films Silent comedy films