What Made Her Do It?

Arsaib

10Nov11

A huge commercial success upon release (it eventually became the biggest hit in the history of the silent Japanese cinema, running for an unprecedented five week at theaters in Tokyo's Asakusa district, where it was especially popular with students and working-class audiences), this quintessential, and inherently left-leaning, Shingeki-derived 'keiko eiga' or 'tendency film' does appear to be too ideologically-inclined at times, yet paradoxically it largely generates its emotional vivacity and pathos from shopworn rhetorical gestures and thematic tropes, thus only heightening the ironic nature of the title. The film was considered to be lost until an incomplete print was discovered in Russia in the mid-nineties. Director Suzuki went on to do propagandistic work for the Japanese army, though he is also credited with a relatively progressive film featuring the Chinese.