Credited cast: | |||
Michiyo Kogure | ... | Yuki Shinano | |
Yoshiko Kuga | ... | Hamako Abe | |
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Ken Uehara | ... | Masaya Kikunaka |
Eijirô Yanagi | ... | Naoyuki Shinano | |
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Haruya Katô | ... | Seitaro |
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Yuriko Hamada | ... | Ayako |
Kumeko Urabe | ... | San | |
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Shizue Natsukawa | ... | Osumi |
Sô Yamamura | ... | Tateoka | |
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Bin Komori | ... | Sushi bartender |
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Rei Ishikawa | ... | Sushi bartender |
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Ichirô Sawai | ... | Bellboy |
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Shirô Mizuki | ... | Driver |
Rest of cast listed alphabetically: | |||
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Satoshi Komori | ||
Haruo Tanaka |
Young servant girl Hamako has just started working for her personal heroine, Madame Yuki. Her romanticized view of the Madame is broken immediately, as she is introduced with a list of the Madame's personal problems.
Michiyo Kogure is adored by all who do not know her. She is the beautiful daughter of a nobleman -- his title and lands stripped from him in the post-war era. She has a dashing husband in Eijirô Yanagi -- who is a wastrel who spends his time elsewhere with his gun-chewing mistress, Yuriko Hamada. She and Ken Uehara have a chaste but supportive relationship -- he tells her what she should do but she can't do it. When her father dies, all that is left is the country estate, which she turns into an inn -- her husband wants to take it from her and give it to Miss Hamada to run.
It's a portrait of decayed nobility in a post-war world, where Miss Kogure tries to live up to the standards of a vanished world, where everyone who doesn't know her is caught up in her glamor. Kenji Mizoguchi's movie from a novel by Seiichi Funabashi is a sad and solemn work, with a satiric edge. In works like LIFE OF OHARU, the character's decline is slow, because the heights are low. Here it's a precipitous plunge.