Tora-san, Our Lovable Tramp

Tora-san, Our Lovable Tramp (1969) is the Yoji Yamada comedy you can watch online on iFILM — the film that launched the longest-running movie series ever made. Torajiro, a wandering peddler everyone calls Tora-san, comes home after twenty years on the road.

Warm-hearted and hot-tempered, Tora-san crashes back into the lives of his uncle, aunt and younger sister Sakura in Tokyo's Shibamata district. He means well and wrecks everything: his clumsy manners at a formal marriage meeting blow up Sakura's engagement to a respectable suitor. He repents, rushes to fix it, and botches it all over again. Under the slapstick runs a quieter ache — a man with no home, welcome everywhere until the first quarrel.

Kiyoshi Atsumi would play Tora-san forty-eight times, with new entries arriving almost yearly until 1995, earning a Guinness record for the longest film series starring one actor. This opening chapter is a gentle, bittersweet comedy about family and belonging, and the right place to start. Stream Tora-san, Our Lovable Tramp (1969) online on iFILM.