The Downfall of Osen
“One of Mizoguchi's favorite novelists was the now little-read Izumi Kyoka. Twice before, in 1929 with Nihon-Bashi and in 1933 with Taki No Shiraito, he had scored great successes with adaptations of works by this writer, whose books gave him the opportunity to create the kind of memorable screen portraits of women which would find their fullest realization in the masterpieces of his final years. Orizuru Osen (literally, “Osen of the Paper Cranes,” objects whose recurrent appearance in the heroine's hands symbolizes both her hopeful persistence and its very fragility) was based on Kyoka's ‘Baishoku Kamonanban' (literally, ‘Duck-noodle Prostitutes'). ‘We had to change the title,' Mizoguchi remarked years later, ‘because it was a little too obscene.' Osen, a character not unlike Taki in the earlier film, saves the life of a younger man, an almost literally spineless wretch whose studies she contrives to pay for. Eventually she is forced into prostitution in order to continue her support; accused of theft by one of her customers, she is dragged off to prison. Years pass; now a successful doctor, the young man is called to attend a woman stricken on a train. It is, of course, Osen, but she appears mad, unable to recognize him. Finally, crying out, ‘You bastard - you man!', she slashes at him with a knife as, in dramatic superimposition, visions of the other men who have abused her fill the room. Orizuru Osen, in the director's own view, ‘failed to evoke the quality of the original work,' but it contains a number of visually striking sequences, far more fluid and mobile camerawork than the earlier film, and a performance by Isuzu Yamada, Mizoguchi's favorite actress of this period.
“This print of the director's final silent film has been supplied with a musical score and a narration by the benshi Suisei Matsui.” --Peter Scarlet