Flunky, Work Hard

Mikio Naruse’s earliest available film, Flunky, Work Hard is the rare work by the director not to center around female characters. It is a charming, breezy short concerning an impoverished insurance salesman and his scrappy son, whose fisticuffs with the other boys of their village put his father’s livelihood in jeopardy.

No Blood Relation

In No Blood Relation, a gripping early example of Mikio Naruse’s cinematic boldness, featuring a screenplay by Ozu’s famed collaborator Kogo Noda, an actress returns to Tokyo after a successful stint in Hollywood to reclaim—with the help of her gangster brother—the daughter she abandoned years before.