Tanizaki’s celebrated novel Ashikari (also known as The Reed Cutter) proved hard to adapt in 1951 because it centres on a scandalous ménage à trois, and Mizoguchi declared himself dissatisfied with the result. But the film boasts another excellent performance from Tanaka Kinuyo, and it brings a certain wit to its account of the emotional manoeuvring between the three main characters. Oyu is a young widow with a child, flattered by attention from Shinnosuke but unable to marry him because social propriety dictates that she should remain faithful to her late husband. So Shinnosuke seeks out and marries Oyu’s sister Oshizu instead and the three begin living together. This was Mizoguchi’s first film with the great cinematographer Miyagawa Kazuo, who went on to shoot all but one of Mizoguchi’s last eight films at the Daiei company, and he succeeds in giving the images the quality of a half-remembered idyll.