David and I are back with another episode of The Eclipse Viewer, the podcast dedicated to the Criterion Collection’s Eclipse Series of DVDs.

In this episode we discuss three of the great Yasujiro Ozu’s first films, packaged in Eclipse Series 42: Silent Ozu — Three Crime Dramas: Walk Cheerfully (1930), That Night’s Wife (1930), and Dragnet Girl (1933). Sometimes it’s only worth going through a director’s early work as a mere curiosity (for example, I don’t think there’s much value in most (not all, but most) of Hitchcock’s silent films), but that is not the case here. These are tremendously crafted, wonderfully subtle and evocative films in their own right.

Please find the podcast, the shownotes, and plenty of links over at CriterionCast here.

In the next episode of The Eclipse Viewer, to kind of tie in with Criterion’s forthcoming release of Fassbinder’s The Merchant of Four Seasons, David and I will be discussing Eclipse Series 39: Early Fassbinder, featuring these five films: Love Is Colder than Death (1969), Katzelmacher (1969), Gods of the Plague (1969), The American Soldier (1970), and Beware of a Holy Whore (1970).

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