Morning for the Osone Family is a complete 180 reversal from a film like
The Living Magoroku. The film has the same sensibility of discordant propaganda monologuing throughout that you find in the first two films of this set. On the other hand, some of that monologuing feels really good to hear after watching the other films in this set and the kurosawa set. It's refreshing to get dissent, finally, and Kinoshita often sets it up that the female characters finally boil over in outrage while they are trampled on by the military uncle. So it's just as egregiously didactic as the earlier films--perhaps more so--but it feels so good to hear that I didn't even really mind it.
What did drive me crazy throughout the film was the bizarre sets. The film is set inside a western style house in Japan, and the scaling of the sets is wildly off in so many ways. This visually disrupted me throughout the film as the characters open doors that are ten feet tall, or look through doorways that seem six feet wide, with walls that extend twenty or more feet up (the few points of the film when an unfortunate lower angle is chosen you can see where they built on to the sets to make them taller so you don't see the top of the set wall as there are no cielings). Since the whole film is set within the Osone family house, you eventually get used to it, but it just looks 'wrong' in a lot of subtle ways.
The film opens at Christmas, with the Osone family singing Silent Night. This immediately cues us into the idea that this is a westernized Japanese family, perhaps even a christian family. The discussion that follows indicates the family is a left leaning group of intellectuals, the patriarch had lived and studied in France and his wife attended college as well. Their eldest son is a writer, and his just published an examination of the history and culture that brought Japan into this current war, he was careful not to make it sound critical, but he wanted to portray how they got there. Their middle son is a talented painter, and their daughter is intelligent and independent and their youngest son is a boy of fourteen or fifteen eager to join the war effort.
Christmas is disrupted by the twin events of the daughter's fiance being forced to leave (and breaking off their engagement since he didn't want to leave her a war widow) and the eldest son being arrested, sentenced and imprisoned as a political prisoner.
Next, enter the military, here symbolized by the nasty uncle who assumes the mantle of patriarchy for the family after the arrest of the son--in fact I took away the impression that I was meant to think that the uncle was responsible for the son's arrest, the film never explicitly says this, but the uncle seems to imply that he was proud to be responsible for that in one scene.
The uncle berates the painter brother for being a useless artist and immediately has him enlisted in the army and shipped away. He then puts the daughter directly under his thumb by employing her in his office--something she doesn't want because she doesn't want the special extravagant treatment the army lavishes on itself (there are several didactic moments in the film that directly criticize the army for the way they lived in high style and finery during the war at the expense of the civilians suffering and privation, and while this is probably true to some extent, the degree claimed here seems off). He also dissolves her engagement, then tries to marry her off, using her as the coin of graft in a business deal he was trying to grease along.
Then the aunt and uncle move in and take over the house literally rather than just metaphorically. Through it all suffers the mother, giving an extraordinary performance throughout the film--ultimately climaxing in a absurdly satisfying cathartic monologue attacking the uncle at the war's end. It reminded me of those absolutely wonderful speeches from women who are mad as hell and not going to take it anymore found at the end of the best films from the Silent Naruse set. it's just a great moment to finally get the satisfaction of saying what cannot be said given the cultural strictures in place.
naturally the middle son dies in Hiroshima, but of tuberculosis (I felt like the brief line about tuberculosis might be a sop to the american censors and the original intent might have been to have him die from fallout after the Hiroshima bomb).
The youngest son is recruited into the airforce, with the uncle enthusiastically granting permission for him to enlist before he's of age, over the mother's dissent, and naturally, akin to Ford's The World Moves On, the son dies on the final day of fighting. and since he was recruited into the airforce, it's implied he was one of the wasted lives flying kamikaze, essentially.
The film ends with the political dissident son being freed and the family staring together into the distance, vowing to rebuild a new Japan--of course MacArthur's fetish for royalty and militay prevented a Nuremberg esque accounting in Japan, and the election of a Republican Congress in the United States in 1948 resulted in them putting all their old friends (war criminals) that had run the zaibatsu's back into power, so ultimately men like the uncle were soon to be restored with no accountability for the war, but at the time Kinoshita made this film he had no idea that two years later people like the Osone family would again be crushed out of existance, as in the war. So the hope was warrented at the end of this film, but it's bitter to see knowing how badly things were about to turn for them.