Presented here for the first time, a detective comedy by Yasuzo Masumura, the maverick Japanese director celebrated in our popular 1997 and 1999 tributes. This film shows the more playful side of Masumura, yet in the course of a sophisticated comedy about a detective, a novelist, and a beautiful pickpocket thrown together on a train, he manages to satirize almost everything about postwar Japan: capitalism, class, high art and low, and relations between the sexes. The eponymous thief is none other than Machiko Kyo (Rashomon, Gate of Hell) here playing a coy criminal who uses her fishnet stockings to distract her victims, something Bresson's pickpocket never thought of. Nor is her motivation any mystery; besides enjoying the pleasure of pursuit, she is on a mission to vindicate her deceased father, falsely accused of being a wartime spy. The film's interesting lineage includes the 1926 original by Yutuka Abe; the 1952 remake by Abe's disciple Kon Ichikawa, cowritten with his wife, Natto Wada; and this film, based on their script and directed by Ichikawa's famous pupil.