Mikio Naruse's Wife! Be Like a Rose was the first Japanese talking picture shown in New York, and has for years remained one of a handful of important pre-War Japanese films even remotely accessible to non-specialists in the West. Naruse, like Ozu, specialized in the shomin-geki genre of intimate films about everyday domestic problems. Wife! Be Like a Rose is the story of a young woman who sets out to find the father who had abandoned her and her mother in order to live with an entertainer. She finds him content and well-loved by his common-law wife and children.
Through a deceptively simple style, Naruse unfolds a complex message concerning the many viable ways which people find to make life liveable. His economy of expression builds to a powerfully moving climax that Japanese film historian Donald Richie called “one of the triumphs of Japanese sound-film.”