"Kinoshita's best films often reflect his sense of the ridiculous," write Anderson and Richie in The Japanese Film. "The essential incongruity of a situation rarely escapes him." Carmen, the country girl turned city stripper who "lives for her art," is the consummate example of Kinoshita's satire, which is directed not at Carmen but at the society of philistines who continually attack her: the mistrusting peasants she encounters in Carmen Comes Home, the harridan mother in Carmen's Pure Love (see October 8) who keeps an Imperial flag in her Shinto shrine and forces her children to endure a daily dose of the national anthem. The Carmen films revealed Hideko Takamine-so often Kinoshita's quintessential tragic heroine-to be an accomplished comedienne, her portrayal of Carmen at once endearing and barbed. "In his films, Kinoshita has created a comic rogues' gallery, the personages of which live in the mind long after the films themselves have disappeared" (Anderson and Richie).