In 1939, probably under pressure from an increasingly watchful military government, Mizoguchi turned away from his “social tendency” films of the mid-'30s to the Meiji period drama, which allowed him to develop a favorite, entirely contemporary theme--female self-sacrifice--under the guise of romantic fiction. Mizoguchi of course transforms the genre into a masterpiece of modern storytelling in The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums, the first and only surviving film of a trilogy he made about Meiji period theater. In a famous quote, he spoke of the appeal of the Meiji Era (1868-1912), to which he was repeatedly drawn throughout his career: “Let us say that a man like me is always tempted by the climate of beauty in this era.”
Based on a fictionalized account of the life of a kabuki actor who owes his artistic development to his lover's encouragement and ultimate self-sacrifice, The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums marks a peak in Mizoguchi's art. Tony Rayns of London's National Film Theatre comments, “Apart from the three scenes on the kabuki stage, the film is constructed in ‘sequence shots,' long, mobile takes that refuse ‘natural' continuities and instead create a delicately artificial mesh of cross-rhythms and modulations.” With about one-quarter the number of shots found in a “normally” edited film, the work is Mizoguchi's first use of the one-shot/one-scene approach to mise-en-scene. The British Film Institute's John Gillett notes, “Here also Mizoguchi revealed a remarkable mastery of the soundtrack, with an audacious use of music and effects: the multifarious noises of the theatre, a brilliantly emphasized sound effect like the locking of a door, the bustle of the streets at night...”