In the mid-fifties in an upper-class girls' school, rows of uniformed maidens learn the virtues of Japanese womanhood, the unhealthy perils of dancing with men, and the risks of associating with communists of either sex. Behind dormitory screens, small revolutions quickly fall prey to the confusion of emotions and the omnipresent shadow of the headmistress in the hallway. Yoshie (Mieko Takamine), a freethinking small-town girl who is only in school to avoid an arranged marriage, is the first casualty of this joyless environment; the film chronicles her deepening distraction, and her growing conviction that she, like other "tragic heroines" of her village, is somehow cursed. Kinoshita captures the emotional terror of modern-day feudalism in a frigid style that contrasts profoundly with the lyricism of his other melodramas. The Garden of Women is something of a Japanese update of Germany's Mä;dchen in Uniform (1931), and like that film, its little authoritarian world is a microcosm of a larger witch-hunt mentality that quietly crushed the souls of women. (JB)