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What Did the Lady Forget?
(Shukujo wa Nani o Wasuretaka)

Screening on Film
Directed by Yasujiro Ozu.
With Sumiko Kurishima, Tatsuo Saito, Michiko Kuwano.
Japan, 1937, 35mm, black & white, 73 min.
Japanese with English subtitles.

This mordant comedy has gained a reputation as top-flight Ozu. A professor of medicine and his bossy society wife play host to their niece, the brash daughter of an Osaka merchant who thinks she can teach Tokyo a thing or two about modern fun. The hen-pecked husband is scheduled for a golfing weekend but decides instead to seek refuge in a student’s house and hide out from the women. A biting Lubitsch-style satire, What Did the Lady Forget? mocks the many foibles of the Japanese bourgeoisie, including its obsession with cleanliness, its eclectic bric-a-brac, its acquisitive conception of tradition, and its social bluntness.

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