Early in his career, Japanese filmmaker Yasujirō Ozu regularly channelled the snappy verve of American commercial cinema, name-checking Ernst Lubitsch and Harold Lloyd and fashioning transpacific translations of gangster films and melodramas. (In the fanciful world of silent Ozu, everyone is a cinephile with a Hollywood sweet tooth, with posters for Our Dancing Daughters and The Champ hanging in office buildings and apartments.) Even A Story of Floating Weeds, an understated and seemingly culturally-specific account of a kabuki ensemble touring the Japanese countryside, was inspired by the 1928 carnival drama The Barker from American studio First National. In Ozu’s version, Kihachi (Takeshi Sakamoto) leads a band of actors eking out sustenance and little more, cheerfully trouping through provincial theaters with leaky roofs. When they arrive by train at a quiet town in the mountains, Kihachi seeks out Otsune (Chôko Iida), the mother of the son he fathered on a tour many years ago. The son, Shinkichi (Kôji Mitsui), believes that Kihachi is his long-absent but fun-loving uncle, good for a fishing lesson and nothing more. When Kihachi’s lover Otaka (Emiko Yagumo), a fellow actor, learns of his clandestine meetings with Otsune, she orchestrates a plot to smoke out his secret passions. This simple, beautifully spare narrative demonstrated Ozu’s evolving craftsmanship and pointed the way towards a more idiosyncratic style that left familiar genre tropes, Hollywood or otherwise, far behind. The sturdy perfection of Ozu’s new style was confirmed a quarter century later when he remade the film as Floating Weeds, which, despite the addition of sound, color, and a seaside locale, repeated many of the same shots, gestures, and jokes with undiminished impact.