The film generally regarded as Japan’s first true musical was also the first film fully produced by the pioneering studio P.C.L., a company founded specifically to take advantage of emergent sound technology. After a number of films in which the company had provided sound technology for other studios, Tipsy Life was the first film to be made entirely in house. P.C.L. worked in collaboration with a brewer’s firm, Dai Nihon Biru, who met the production costs of the film in full, and whose products are featured in the film in an example of the sophisticated and modern merchandising which was characteristic of the studio’s early work. The film is partially set in a beer hall, and its story concerns a beer seller at a train station and her relationship with a music student trying to create a hit song. While the “Kinema Junpo” reviewer was critical of the disconnected narrative, he praised the film’s novelty. Director Sotoji Kimura had already worked on a sound film with Kawa muko no seishun (Youth Across the River, 1933), a proletarian story for which P.C.L. had supplied the sound. It was thus natural that they should turn to him to direct their first full-scale production. Star Sachiko Chiba was also cast on the basis of her appearance in Tomu Uchida’s film Sakebu Ajia (Asia Cries Out, 1932), for which P.C.L. had provided the sound, and was to become a company stalwart, and the studio’s first real star, appearing in such films as Tsuma yo bara no yo ni (Wife! Be Like a Rose!).

Alexander Jacoby and Johan Nordström