Side-stepping the military government’s demands for patriotic, morale-boosting subjects, Mizoguchi opted for a story about a kabuki theatre actor in the Meiji era. Kikunosuke is expelled from the Onoe family of kabuki stars because of his selfish and arrogant behaviour, and only the maid Otoku has the courage to tell him to his face that his performances are mediocre. Persuading him to work hard on his craft, she supports him while he joins a traveling theatre group. But by the time he’s ready to return to Osaka, she has sacrificed her own health … Based on fact, the story had already been adapted as a stage melodrama but Mizoguchi and Yoda turned it into a sublime meditation on artistry and the space between performance and life. This film marked the highest point of Mizoguchi’s aesthetic experiments with long takes and sequence shots and is one of his greatest.