“In 1936 Mizoguchi made his most brilliant pre-war film, Osaka Elegy (Naniwa Hika), shot in 20 days and banned after 1940 for ‘decadent tendencies,' a euphemism barely concealing the military government's fear of the radicalism of Mizoguchi's satire of the ruthless, all-pervasive Osaka capitalism. In this film the mature Mizoguchi style emerges for the first time as he creates, entirely through visual means, a balance between the fate of the heroine Ayako and the corrupt, degenerate values of Osaka. The plot concerns the seduction of Ayako, a switchboard operator, by her boss....” --Joan Mellen, “The Waves at Genji's Door.”
“The film sparkles with the seductive allure of decadence from the first shot of the commercial city lights to the western-style art-deco sets....” --Sheldon Renan