A Public Prosecutor and a Teacher: What a Coincidence

The likelihood is incredibly great that director Yoon Dae-Ryong and his co-writer Kim Chun-Kwang must've seen the 1940 movie Tuition since their own A Public Prosecutor and a Teacher so closely follows the hard-times plot of its predecessor. But whereas the older flick focuses primarily on one poor young boy's constant struggle to get a decent education despite his ailing grandmother and his missing parents, its 1948 successor is ultimately about that down-on-his-luck student's sympathetic teacher who ends up moving out of town, getting married, then harboring an escaped criminal with disastrous results. Featuring a voiceover by a byeonsa with a quavering voice, this update with its narrative expansion defies expectations by packing in twice as much plot despite running a significantly shorter amount of time.

The impact of these changes is so dramatic that it seems ridiculous to compare the two despite a few scenes that are almost mirror replicas of the original. Because in the end, A Public Prosecutor and a Teacher is more pure melodrama, right down to the poses many of its characters periodically assume at times of great crisis: a look to the heavens at a time of mercy; hands raise to the face at a moment of terror; the collapsing on the ground when suffering pangs of hunger. This is not a criticism as such touches are part of the pleasure of A Public Prosecutor... In a world when vengeful husbands fall on knives and abandoned children wander around at night, nothing less than a bitten knuckle will do to convey the tension.