In a tiny mountain village where the children are taught to dance to a dirge-like town anthem, comes news that Hideko Takamine is coming home for a visit, since her theater is closed for a week, and bringing her friend, Toshiko Kobayashi. Her father, Takeshi Sakamoto, want to forbid it, even though she has sent home gifts and money since she ran away at 18; he can only imagine how corrupting Tokyo is. However, the school principal, Chishû Ryû, gives him a long lecture about art and culture, and he gives way. The girls are a little strange, showing too much leg, and it isn't until halfway through what seems to be Japan's first color movie that the village discovers the girls' art is the strip-tease.
It must have been a nice change of pace for one of Japan's leading actresses of feminist roles to play a ditzy stripper, but she appears to be having more fun in the part than this rather mild movie calls for. It's mostly about the characters in the small town; as I so often am, I am once again astounded at exactly the same sort of people cropping up in mountainous Japan as in small-town Indiana or Italy, with the same sort of story that might star Mitzi Gaynor or Diana Dors -- you choose your own Continental actress for the part. Keisuke Kinoshita directs facilely, if not deeply, Kiroshi Kusuda handles the color camera as well as he ever did the black & white model, and the mountain scenery is quite lovely. It's clearly a movie where they played it cannily, and the financial results seem to have been good enough to justify a sequel the next year. I'm sure that, having been a child actress on a movie lot at 5, Miss Takamine enjoyed showing a bitof adult skin .... and roaring at Miss Sakamoto like she was Toshiro Mifune.
