A powerful Ozu film of social realism and a prelude to Tokyo Story

Yasujiro Ozu's 1957 film Tokyo Twilight (once more, the title gives us little info about the film) is a stop toward his masterwork, Tokyo Story (1960), with many of the same actors and similar themes - generational conflict, father-daughter relationships, sibling relationships, the changing mores of postwar Japan, the breakdown of the urban Japanese family. This film centers on a somewhat well-to-do banker, play by Ryu who stars in dozens of Ozu films, living w/ teenage daughter and whose young married daughter has arrived unexpectedly with infant daughter (somewhat of a reverse from Tokyo Story). As we learn, both daughter have major problems: the married daughter, played by Ozu's usual female lead S Hara, is in the midst of a marital breakup, as her husband - who'd been championed by the father (he dissuaded daughter from another suitor) - is drinking heavily and becoming at times violent. The younger daughter, a part-time student who spends most evenings in mahjong parlors and in dubious bars, finds out that she's pregnant - and of course he sketchy boyfriend gives her the quick brush-off. These plot elements, particularly the struggles of the pregnant daughter to get a legal abortion and some financial aid, present a graphic picture of Japanese urban life, a rare bit of social realism in Japanese films of the 1950s. The film also as some wildly improbable and melodramatic elements as well - notably, the appearance in Tokyo of the man's estranged wife/mother of the two girls - which are emotionally effective, especially in the final sequences as the estranged mother leaves by train for northernmost Japan - but as Ozu matured more in his work these he purged his plots of these extreme elements and let the characters and the setting tell the story in simpler terms. Still, overall, Tokyo Twilight is a powerful, mostly overlooked Ozu work, whose only glaring flaw are the portions of the soundtrack in which Ozu incomprehensibly used an endless loop of what sounds like carnival hurdy-gurdy music, completely at odds with the sad and sensitive unfolding plot.