Late Spring
Synopsis
Noriko is 27 years old and is still living with her father Somiya, a widower. Noriko just recovered from an illness she developed in the war, and now the important question pops up: when will Noriko start thinking about marriage? Everybody who is important in her life tries to talk her into it: her father, her aunt, a girlfriend. But Noriko doesn't want to get married, she seems extremely happy with her life. She wants to stay with her father to take care of him. After all, she knows best of his manners and peculiarities. But Noriko's aunt doesn't want to give up. She arranges a partner for her and thinks of a plan that will convince Noriko her father can be left alone.
Production Budget Analysis
The production budget for Late Spring (1949) has not been publicly disclosed.
CAST: Chishū Ryū, Setsuko Hara, Yumeji Tsukioka, Haruko Sugimura, Hōhi Aoki, Jun Usami DIRECTOR: Yasujirō Ozu CINEMATOGRAPHY: Yûharu Atsuta MUSIC: Senji Ito PRODUCTION: Shochiku
Box Office Performance
Theatrical box office data is not publicly available for Late Spring (1949). This may indicate a limited release, direct-to-streaming, or a release predating modern box office tracking.
Profitability Assessment
Insufficient publicly available data to assess profitability.
INDUSTRY IMPACT
AWARDS & RECOGNITION
Summary: 5 wins total
CRITICAL RECEPTION
New Yorker Films released the film in North America on July 21, 1972. Of the New York-based critics of the time, six (Stuart Byron of The Village Voice, Charles Michener of Newsweek, Vincent Canby of The New York Times, Archer Winsten of The New York Post, Judith Crist of The Today Show and Stanley Kauffmann of The New Republic) gave the work a favorable review, and one (John Simon of New York) gave it a "mixed" review.
Canby observed that "the difficulty with Ozu is not in appreciating his films... [but] in describing an Ozu work in a way that doesn't diminish it, that doesn't reduce it to an inventory of his austere techniques, and that accurately reflects the unsentimental humanism of this discipline." He called the characters played by Ryu and Hara "immensely affecting—gentle, loving, amused, thinking and feeling beings,"
In Variety, Robert B. Frederick also had high praise for the work. "Although made in 1949," he wrote, "this infrequently-seen example of the cinematic mastery of the late Yasujirō Ozu... compares more than favorably with any major Japanese film... A heartwarming and very worthy cinematic effort."
Modern genre critics equally reviewed the film positively, giving the film an aggregate score of 100% on the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes from 25 reviews. Kurosawa biographer Stuart Galbraith IV, reviewing the Criterion Collection DVD, called the work "archetypal postwar Ozu" and "a masterful distillation of themes its director would return to again and again...
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