Mitsuko Mito goes to meet her old boy friend, Eitarô Ozawa. He says he is done with crime, and they should run away together to a distant town, where he has a business opportunity. As they begin their journey together, she sees a newspaper story about a robbery. One man got away, but he was limping. Ozawa is limping...

It's a long journey for the two of them. Miss Mito still has feelings for him, but is he telling her the truth about his wanting to change, or is he just being manipulative? Is the truth somewhere in the middle?

Although the copy I looked at was 67 minutes in length, the IMDb indicates that seventeen minutes were cut. that makes the parts that remain harder to judge. Is the grand sexual imagery -- boats entering inlets, trucks entering tunnels, always followed by a change in attitude significant? It's hard to tell from the score of movies from director Keisuke Kinoshita what this means. He did other women's movies, but this one seems atypical.

It is essentially a two-person show, with both actors nearer the beginning of their careers. Miss Mito entered the movies in 1935 when she was 16. By the time she retired in 1973, she had played in 97 movies, for a great variety of directors, from Shimizu to Inagaki (the SAMURAI trilogy) to Yamamoto. She died in 1981. Ozawa's career began later in his life. He began his career in 1935 at the age of 26. His more than 200 movie roles through almost the end of his life in 1988 included nine with Kinoshita directing.

WOMAN (ONNA). Viewed on Streaming. Music = six (6) stars; subtitles/translations = five (5) stars; video restoration = five (5) stars; cinematography = five (5) stars; audio restoration = four (4) stars; continuity = three (3) stars; script = one (1) star; dubbing/looping = zero (0). Any Japanese film that starts off with a chorus line dancing the rumba while singing in Spanish is likely to make the viewer wonder if the worse is yet to come (unless, perhaps, it is a comedy). The viewer's lowered expectations are fully met with what follows! Director Keisuke Kinoshita (who is also credited with writing the "script") delivers a movie consisting of endless (and random) train shots and the endless/aimless countryside wandering of two misfits (one a conflicted rumba chorus girl, the other her small-time crook boyfriend exploiting her as cover while on the lam from his latest job) spouting repetitive, stream-of-conscience (mostly improvised?) dialog. This is one of the most tedious/boring (and cheapest) post-war entries by a major studio as of the release date. Even an attempt to inject some life into the proceeding with an intended dramatic climax (an obviously staged rural village fire) falls flat. (Like "beating a dead horse.") The film is held together (just barely) only by the stunning attractiveness of actress Mitsuko Mito who has to deal with a rambling, nonsensical script and all-but-absent direction. Cinematography (narrow screen, black and white) includes some stunning ultra close-ups (sometimes only a character's eyes are photographed),but suffers from many scenes being out-of-focus a least in part. Lighting is uneven with most interior shots being too dark to see what is going on. Video restoration has left a few artifacts. Audio restoration is missing-in-action: deterioration noise is noticeable throughout the film (also see below). Music is pretty much continuous and okay. Scene-to-scene continuity can be absent especially for exterior cuts in the countryside. Dubbing/looping is nothing short of an embarrassment during the last third of the film. There is a multi-second delay between when an action occurs and is heard and when a character's lips move and dialog shows up on the soundtrack. Amateur night! (And/or lack of restoration?) Subtitles are close enough, but flash rates are excessive. Singing and signs are translated. Steer clear of this turkey! WILLIAM FLANIGAN, PhD.

This is the story of a man and his girlfriend who are on a road trip together. He is trying to convince her to give up her job and run away with him. She is skeptical of the plan and their future. Can he convince her to stick with him? This may be a movie that was more effective in the place and time it was released. The role of women in Japan went through a number of changes through the twentieth century, and the story of a woman struggling with subservience to her boyfriend was probably very moving back in he 1940's. But it's kind of a problem now as the woman comes across as rather drippy and uninteresting now. This is essentially a two person movie--there may be a total of two or three lines spoken by other people, and since one of the leads is so uninteresting, the movie gets a little draggy at times. Things improve in the second half of the movie when the two lead characters arrive at a town with a lot of other characters (although they don't interact with them much) and the woman finally begins to say what is on her mind. The location shooting is very nice as are the songs that crop up in a couple places. These touches ultimately make Woman worth watching but not essential.