A quickie, both in that it was made in eight days and that it lasts only 47 minutes, this Depression melodrama nevertheless represents a remarkable moment in Ozu's films. The story involves a young woman who works two jobs to support herself and put her younger brother through college. When the boy finds that his sister has prostituted herself for his sake, tragedy ensues. Reminiscent, in its theme of women's sacrifice, of the social realist films that Mizoguchi began making at this time, still it has at least one diversion from the tragedy (a clip from a Lubitsch film) and is enormously compelling stylistically. After its premiere revival in New York, J. Hoberman included Woman of Tokyo among his 10 best films of 1982, calling it "a subtle riot of discordant formal devices. The eye-line matches are as weird as the spatial jumps are bizarre...The crucial scene is dominated by a giant close-up of a teapot, and the ending is a breathtaking wrench of perspective from individual tragedy to matter-of-fact social breakdown. Ozu never made another film like this one, and neither has anyone else."