Kenji Mizoguchi

Osaka Elegy

Osaka Elegy

A critical and popular triumph, Osaka Elegy established Mizoguchi as one of Japan’s major filmmakers. The director's often-used leading actress Isuzu Yamada stars as Ayako, a switchboard operator trapped in a compromising, ruinous relationship with her boss to help support her wastrel father. With its fluid cinematography and deft storytelling, Osaka Elegy ushered in a new era of sound melodrama for Mizoguchi.

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Film Info

  • Japan
  • 1936
  • 71 minutes
  • Black & White
  • 1.33:1
  • Japanese

Available In

Collector's Set

Eclipse Series 13: Kenji Mizoguchi’s Fallen Women

Kenji Mizoguchi’s Fallen Women

DVD Box Set

4 Discs

$41.96

Osaka Elegy
Cast
Isuzu Yamada
Ayako Murai
Yoko Umemura
Sumiko Asai
Chiyoko Okura
Sachiko Murai
Shinhachiro Asaka
Hiroshi Murai
Benkei Shiganoya
Sonosuke Asai
Eitarô Shindô
Yoshizo Fujino
Kunio Tamura
Dr. Yoko
Seiichi Takegawa
Junzo Murai
Takashi Shimura
Inspector
Credits
Director
Kenji Mizoguchi
Producer
Masaichi Nagata
Original story
Kenji Mizoguchi
Screenplay
Yoshikata Yoda
Cinematography
Minoru Miki
Editing
Tatsuko Sakane
Music
Koichi Takagi

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Kenji Mizoguchi

Director

Kenji Mizoguchi
Kenji Mizoguchi

Often named as one of Japan’s three most important filmmakers (alongside Akira Kurosawa and Yasujiro Ozu), Kenji Mizoguchi created a cinema rich in technical mastery and social commentary, specifically regarding the place of women in Japanese society. After an upbringing marked by poverty and abuse, Mizoguchi found solace in art, trying his hand at both oil painting and theater set design before, at the age of twenty-two in 1920, enrolling as an assistant director at Nikkatsu studios. By the midthirties, he had developed his craft by directing dozens of movies in a variety of genres, but he would later say that he didn’t consider his career to have truly begun until 1936, with the release of the companion films Osaka Elegy and Sisters of the Gion, about women both professionally and romantically trapped. Japanese film historian Donald Richie called Gion “one of the best Japanese films ever made.” Over the next decade, Mizoguchi made such wildly different tours de force as The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums (1939), The 47 Ronin (1941–42), and Women of the Night (1948), but not until 1952 did he break through internationally, with The Life of Oharu, a poignant tale of a woman’s downward spiral in an unforgiving society. That film paved the road to half a decade of major artistic and financial successes for Mizoguchi, including the masterful ghost story Ugetsu (1953) and the gut-wrenching drama Sansho the Bailiff (1954), both flaunting extraordinarily sophisticated compositions and camera movement. The last film Mizoguchi made before his death at age fifty-eight was Street of Shame (1956), a shattering exposé set in a bordello that directly led to the outlawing of prostitution in Japan. Few filmmakers can claim to have had such impact.

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