RAFTER ROMANCE (1933)
Written by H.W. Hanemann and Sam Mintz Directed by William A. Seiter

Would-be artist Jack Bacon (Norman Foster), in order to afford his rent, sublets his room by night to working girl Mary Carroll (Ginger Rogers) while he is away working as a night watchman. The two develop a mutual dislike for each other in abstentia, playing dirty tricks that eventually backfire when they meet and fall in love without knowing of their already extant relationship. A charming little light comedy with Rogers, an appealing comic actress who I’ve not seen often enough, and Foster, who began as an actor, transitioned into directing (the Mr. Moto films), and finished his long career in front of the cameras once again for Orson Welles’ legendary THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND. Laura Hope Crews plays a drunken society dame who tries to become Foster’s arts patron; her character is a stereotype but she plays her skillfully. As a pre-code film, its fairly tame until one scene where Ginger strips off her rain drenched sweater, initially appearing topless, when in fact she’s wearing a halter top invisible from behind. Still pretty sexy, though. One of a package of RKO films whose rights devolved to Merian C. Cooper, vanished for 50 years, and were recently restored by TCM, which is where I watched this good print.

SANSHIRO SUGATA PART 2 (1945)
Written and directed by Akira Kurosawa

In his essential book, “The Films of Akira Kurosawa”, Donald Ritchie agrees with the director’s own negative assessment of this, his third film as director. I must respectfully disagree with both of them. SANSHIRO 2 is certainly minor Kurosawa, but “minor” doesn’t necessarily equal “bad”. PART 2 is unessential, but it is nevertheless vastly entertaining, well made, and humorous, with nicely staged fight scenes and engaging performances, especially from Susumu Fujita in the title role. Sugata is a kind, moral, decent man who just happens to fight like hell, all of which points are proven multiple times during the film’s fast-paced 82 minutes. PART 2 opens some years after the original. Sugata rescues a young rickshaw driver from a brutal beating delivered by an American sailor. He later meets this same sailor in the boxing ring when, after much soul searching, Sugata defends the practice of Judo against the degenerate Western skill of boxing. He also has a clan of karate experts challenging him, ultimately accepting to battle one of them on a snow swept mountainside in a climactic battle that once again shows how important weather was to Kurosawa (his long-time script supervisor’s memoir is, in fact, titled “Waiting for the Weather”). The one sour note struck by the film is its depiction of Westerners (and the Japanese who aspire to Western status) as ugly, loud, stupid, greedy and, biggest sin of all, unskilled as fighters. Unfortunately, this film has not survived the years very well; I have seen films by Georges Melies in better condition. I suppose we should be grateful it has survived at all, having been made with such anti-American sentiment during the last year of WWII.  (Seen on IFC, also available from Criterion.)

— Robert Deveau, The Doomed Farmer