Good Morning (1959)
May 12, 1959
Comedy, Family, Drama
1h 34m
Important things are hard to say.
A lighthearted take on director Yasujiro Ozu’s perennial theme of the challenges of intergenerational relationships, Good Morning tells the story of two young boys who stop speaking in protest after their parents refuse to buy a television set. Ozu weaves a wealth of subtle gags through a family portrait as rich as those of his dramatic films, mocking the foibles of the adult world through the eyes of his child protagonists. Shot in stunning color and set in a suburb of Tokyo where housewives gossip about the neighbors’ new washing machine and unemployed husbands look for work as door-to-door salesmen, this charming comedy refashions Ozu’s own silent classic I Was Born, But . . . to gently satirize consumerism in postwar Japan.
Where to watch 
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Cast & Crew
- Director
- Yasujirō Ozu
Heiichiro Fukui Keiji Sada
Setsuko Arita Yoshiko Kuga
Keitaro Hayashi Chishū Ryū
Tamiko Hayashi Kuniko Miyake
Kikue Haraguchi Haruko Sugimura
Minoru Hayashi Kōji Shitara
Isamu Hayashi Masahiko Shimazu
Midori Maruyama Kyōko Izumi
Recommendations
Keywords
- japan
- parent child relationship
- brotherhood
- protest
- inflation
- consumerism
- gossip
- noisy neighbor
- post war japan
- neighborhood
- criterion
- japanese family
- door to door salesman
- family dynamics
- mischievous children
- town gossip
- television set
- boys
- small talk
- missing money
- silence
- child outsmarts adult
- generational divide
- farting