Japanese cinema’s equivalent of ROME OPEN CITY, this harsh study of prostitution in postwar Osaka is shocking even now. In one of her best roles, the formidable Kinuyo Tanaka plays a war widow who takes a job as a secretary to survive and is harassed into becoming her boss’s mistress. To free herself from what is essentially concubinage, she becomes a prostitute and quickly rises to become the reigning madam in Osaka’s red-light district. When she contracts syphilis, she declares that she will contaminate as many men as possible to take revenge for her humiliation. “My favourite Japanese film of all time. . . . The most Rossellinian film of Mizoguchi” (Alain Bergala).