“Taki - the kind of woman that Colette would have understood - is a grande artiste. Star attraction of a small travelling show, leading a life both uprooted and aimless, she is nevertheless contented, if lonely. She is also completely good-hearted. She helps a couple hopelessly in love escape, she gives money to a woman she knows is worthless, she even helps out the villainous manager for whom she works. No matter what happens she can always sit back, smile, and say: ‘Well, at least I did the right thing.' Accidentally, she meets a coach-driver (shown in the most delicate and inventive of flashbacks) and when she learns that she was inadvertently the cause of his losing his job, decides to do the right thing. Since she lost him one job she must find him another; she decides to support him, to send him to law school in Tokyo. In one of Mizoguchi's most sensitive seduction scenes, she makes him accept, and then seduces him in a forthright, straightforward yet completely decorous manner. She also falls in love - hopelessly and finally.” --Donald Richie

The following is the longer unpublished original note:

“Taki - the kind of woman that Colette would have understood - is a grande artiste. Star attraction of a small travelling show, leading a life both uprooted and aimless, she is nevertheless contented, if lonely. She is also completely good-hearted. She helps a couple hopelessly in love escape, she gives money to a woman she knows is worthless, she even helps out the villainous manager for whom she works. No matter what happens she can always sit back, smile, and say: ‘Well, at least I did the right thing.' Accidentally, she meets a coach-driver (shown in the most delicate and inventive of flashbacks) and when she learns that she was inadvertently the cause of his losing his job, decides to do the right thing. Since she lost him one job she must find him another; she decides to support him, to send him to law school in Tokyo. In one of Mizoguchi's most sensitive seduction scenes, she makes him accept, and then seduces him in a forthright, straightforward yet completely decorous manner. She also falls in love - hopelessly and finally.” --Donald Richie.
“One of Mizoguchi's greatest prewar successes and apparently his earliest surviving complete work: apart from the 20-minute fragment of Tokyo March, no copies of the approximately 50 films produced in his first decade as a director are known to exist. This film, too, was believed lost until 1958 when it was reconstructed from separate fragments. There are lapses in the continuity of this composite print, yet Taki No Shiraito is worthy of note as, in Richie's words, ‘one of his best controlled, most economical, most justly paced films.' Based on a famous novel by Izumi Kyoka, the film features two of the biggest stars of the day, Takako Irie and Tokihiko Okada, and several of its scenes prefigure important moments in the later Life of O-Haru and Chikamatsu Monogatari.” --Peter Scarlet