The Lady And The Beard (1931) ***

Yasujiro Ozu's eccentric comedy of manners about a bearded kendo master who falls in love with an office girl. He shaves his beard (after protesting memorably that "all great men have beards!" including Lincoln, Darwin and Marx), puts on a suit and learns the Western ways of wooing a woman, attracting a haughty aristocrat and a gangster floozy in the process. The three very different women represent three feminine responses to the Western modernization of Japan, with the office girl being the ideal (conversant in Western ways while wrapped fetchingly in a kimono).