1936-the year of Osaka Elegy and Sisters of the Gion-was a turning point forMizoguchi, when "I was able finally to learn how to show life as I seeit." In an Osaka sparkling with the seductive allure of commercialism,Mizoguchi depicts the humiliations of a switchboard operator after she is seducedby her boss. Isuzu Yamada, Mizoguchi's leading lady through the forties, stars.Osaka Elegy, Joan Mellon writes, was "Mizoguchi's most brilliant pre-warfilm, shot in twenty days and banned after 1940 for 'decadent tendencies,' aeuphemism barely concealing the military government's fear of the radicalism ofMizoguchi's satire of the ruthless, all-pervasive Osaka capitalism. In this filmthe mature Mizoguchi style emerges for the first time as he creates, entirelythrough visual means, a balance between the fate of the heroine Ayako and thecorrupt, degenerate values of Osaka."