Noriko (Setsuko Hara) is the only child of 56-year-old widower Shukichi Somiya (Chishu Ryu). The two contently live together, Noriko happily looking after her father's needs, though Aya (Yumeji Tsukioka), Noriko's divorced friend from high school, urges her to find a husband, especially since Noriko's the only one among their friends not yet married. (The war and illness put such plans on hold.) Shukichi's sister, Masa (Haruko Sugimura), also believes it's time for Noriko to get married, and presses him to let her act as a go-between and set up a meeting with prospective husband Satake, a respected chemist.

For his part, Shukichi believes his daughter might find happiness with protegee Hattori (Jun Usami), whose company Noriko clearly enjoys. It seems like an obvious match, but when Shukichi's mentions it to Noriko she bursts out laughing: he's already engaged and they're merely good friends. Noriko again expresses her desire to keep things the way they are, but how much longer can she resist the pressures from her friends, relatives, and eventually her own father?

The cliche is that Yasujiro Ozu and Akira Kurosawa are at opposite ends of the Japanese cinema spectrum, Kurosawa being the "most-Westernized," Ozu the most purely "Japanese." Though Ozu's signature style was and is all his own, the two filmmakers weren't all that different in other respects. Like Kurosawa, one of the most impressive things about Ozu here is his ability to trim all the fat, to boil everything down to a form that's deceptively simple and unadorned yet monumentally expressive.

Minor Spoilers Ahead

There are many impressive scenes that accomplish this. There's a long, silent close-up of Setsuko Hara (then 29 and at the peak of her great beauty) with no dialogue at all, yet one reads in her face the innermost concerns about her life and her father's future. Near the end there's a similar close-up of Chishu Ryu (only 45 but already playing old men), home alone and silently peeling an apple with a pocketknife. And it's entirely clear what's going on in his heart and mind, too.

Throughout the film characters come and go through a sliding door that makes a loud doorbell-type ring each time. The reason for this becomes clear at the very end. After finally marrying off his daughter, Shukichi comes home from the wedding late that night and there's that doorbell - but now no one's around to hear that he's returned home.

Conversely, Ozu cleverly tells us about a prospective husband, Satake, a chemist who looks just like Gary Cooper (in Pride of the Yankees). A meeting is an arranged and a wedding eventually takes place, the film ending the night of the reception - and yet through all this we never once meet the groom because it's simply not necessary.

The film is all about setting things right, putting things in their proper place as things and people should be. The film opens with Noriko and Masa attending a traditional tea ceremony, as extreme an exercise in formality anywhere in the world.

As with all good foreign films of this vintage, it's captivating to look at postwar life captured in the film's exteriors. Ozu (like Kurosawa) loved shooting trains, and a long train ride from Kita-Kamakura to Tokyo is filmed in exquisite detail, and probably was photographed aboard a regularly-scheduled run. There are amazing shots of Tokyo's Ginza early in its reconstruction (contrasting a largely unchanged Kyoto) with reminders - though not criticism, especially - of the Occupation in the form of a giant sign advertising Coca-Cola and road signs incongruously in English.

If the film makes a statement about encroaching American influence comes in the presentation of best friend Aya, whose very westernized home (where she bakes a cake, something uncommon in Japanese kitchens even today), clothes and hairstyle and makeup contrast the very traditional Noriko...

Parting Thoughts: Though some might accuse Late Spring of embracing (or criticizing) singularly Japanese traditions of marriage and family that have little relevance in the west, in fact like all of Ozu's best films Late Spring deals with universal concerns about the sad but inevitable break-up between parents and their children.