Of all the notable post-war Japanese directors, Mizoguchi had the greatest empathy for women. His stories dramatized the desperation of women negotiating a stratified, sexist society, but his fascination with women's debasement wasn't purely scholarly. He had more than a passing familiarity with Japan's semi-legal underworld of prostitution -- his sister had been sold into "geishadom" to pay off family debts, and he'd been slashed with a razor by a live-in girlfriend/call girl. The appearance of the panpan (a new, particularly Western type of streetwalker that arose in Japan during its impoverished, GI-occupied postwar desperation) fascinated him, and after doing research in the venereal disease ward of a hospital (where a doctor sternly informed him that the ailing women, despite their moral failings, were ultimately victims of "a crime of men") he came up with the story of Fusako (Kinuyo Tanaka, Mizoguchi's perennial star, here masterfully cast against type) and how the deprivations of war - both financial and emotional - grease her slide from respectability into a life of the streets. This film marks one of Tanaka's last screen appearances before taking a formative trip to Hollywood that expanded her horizons. Upon her return, she remade herself as one of Japan's first female directors, telling her own stories about the complicated lives of women.

By Violet LeVoit