The Neighbour's Wife and Mine
About The Neighbour's Wife and Mine
Playwright Shinsaku Shibano, behind on a script and short of money, moves his family into a rented house outside the noise of Tokyo. His children, his wife, and his own stalling stop the writing, and a jazz band rehearses next door. The neighbor's wife, the same woman who broke up a street quarrel of his, asks him in. The song "Age of Speed" sends him home to finish the play. The last scene sets the family against the farmers around them.
Cast & crew
More about The Neighbour's Wife and Mine
Heinosuke Gosho directed and Akira Fushimi wrote it. It is Japan's first feature-length film to use sound throughout, and the earliest Japanese sound feature that survives. Shochiku produced it.
Themes
In film history
It is the earliest surviving Japanese feature made entirely with sound.
Technique
It was the first Japanese feature to carry a full sound track.
Music
A jazz band next door rehearses a song about the "Age of Speed," which Shibano uses to finish his script.
Preservation
It is the earliest Japanese sound feature known to survive.
Notes
- Atsushi Watanabe plays Shibano, Kinuyo Tanaka his wife, and Satoko Date the neighbor Takiko Yamakawa.
- Mitsuko Ichimura plays their daughter.
- It won the 1931 Kinema Junpo Award for Best Film.
- The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive showed it in 1990, and the Museum of Modern Art showed it in 2015 in a series on early Japanese sound films.
- In 2020 the British Film Institute put it on a year-by-year list of Japanese films.
Awards
- Kinema Junpo Award for Best Film (1931)
Scenes
- Shibano falls into the women's side of a bathhouse.
- The neighbor invites him in to hear the band.
- The "Age of Speed" lyric sends him back to the desk.
