Ani to sono imōto (AKA A Brother and His Younger Sister AKA 兄とその妹) (1939) (English Subtitles)

8

Directed by Shimazu Yasujirō (島津保次郎)
Written by Shimazu Yasujirō
Cinematography by Ubukata Toshio (生方敏夫)
Music by Saotome Hikaru (早乙女光)

Starring:
Saburi Shin (佐分利信), Miyake Kuniko (三宅邦子), Kuwano Michiko (桑野通子), Uehara Ken (上原謙), Kawamura Reikichi (河村黎吉), Mizushima Ryōtarō (水島亮太郎), Sakamoto Takeshi (坂本武), Ryū Chishū (笠智衆), Nara Shin’yō (奈良真養), Kobayashi Tokuji (小林十九二), Arai Jun (新井淳), Tōyama Fumio (遠山文雄), Ōtsuka Kimiyo (大塚君代), Kusakata Tsuruko/Kusaka Tazuko (草香田鶴子), Fujiwara Kaneko (藤原加弥子), Kozakura Masako (小桜昌子), Sugai Ichirō (菅井一郎)

Synopsis:
A man who works late hours at a deadening job lives together with his wife and his younger sister. The younger sister is a modern girl who is starting to receive romantic attention from one of her co-workers.

Review by Museum of Modern Art:
Together with Yasujirō Ozu, Yasujirō Shimazu was a pioneer of the genre for which Shochiku would become most famous, shomin-geki, comical and bittersweet tales of the lower-middle class that delighted Japanese moviegoers by making their seemingly ordinary lives worthy of the big screen. Shimazu’s best films, as Alexander Jacoby observes, “employed a subtle social criticism…. [A]nd An Older Brother and His Younger Sister, probably his masterpiece, displayed clear feminist sympathies in its treatment of the heroine’s rejection of a marriage proposal and satirized the unfriendly world of Tokyo business.”