Vermilion and Green

Ken Uehara works for a cloth manufacturer, and he has three women in love with him: his boss’s daughter, a lady publisher, and a servant at the hotel where they are all staying. Uehara has no redeeming features beside being handsome. In fact, he’s bewildered by the attention and the jealousy that the women exhibit to him about the others, as well as the other subplots in this movie.As am I. It’s one of those works of fiction where the audience must accept the premise, and go on from there. Yet it is the details of the way these lives interconnect that strains matters past credibility for me. The publisher, for example, is the mistress of the mill owner. The connects, somehow, with another plot in which a young man is accused of stealing money from his daughter and pehaps, rape, even though she was seen kissing him earlier that evening. Meanwhle, the servant runs into the mill owner at the race track.It’s a small world, it’s true, but is Osaka, where this movie is set, as small as all that? Or am I dealing with aspects of Japanese story telling that are stil foreign to me? Yasujirô Shimazu directs with his usual skilled competence, although I suspect he was growing tired of this sort of movie. Other well remembered performers appear, including Shin Saburi and Mieko Takamine. But it looks like it should have been a comedy, with the bewildered Uehara dealing with an unlikely and outlandish situation. Maybe it was, and I just don’t get the jokes.