It looks like CARMEN COMES HOME was enough of a success that director Keisuke Kinoshita followed it up, with Hideko Takamine and Toshiko Kobayashi repeating their roles as a couple of ditzy strip-teasers who think they're artists. Some time has passed. Miss Kobayashi has had a baby with a communist, who has abandoned her and Carmen is taking care of her. However, when they are trying to abandon to baby in front of a home inhabited by modern artist Masao Wakahara, Miss Takamine is caught. She falls in love with him, even though he's supposed to marry a divorcee in order to split a three-million-yen dowry offered by her mother, who's running for the Diet in the first post-War election on a platform of spiritual values and rearmament. Mr. Wakahara has just paid off the mother of his illegitimate child,who wants more money, and everyone gets confused with everyone else. Miss Takamine can't strip any more, and every time she gets a job, the wives of her employers keep getting her fired.
The movie looks to have been a troubled production. The script is far more serious than the first movie, with some real contemporary issues mixed into the comedy, and real feminist issues were written into the script, probably to better accommodate Miss Takamine's screen persona. DP Hirosho Kusuda seems to have compensated for the lack of color by shooting almost all the shots at an angle, perhaps to suggest to the audience that the whole movie is cockeyed, and after a hundred minutes of screen time, the movie ends with the promise of a third movie to settle matters -- and I can find no sign of one having been made by any of the principals. Certainly they all worked together again, but on different projects.
There are many good parts of this movie, but I am uncertain whether it is particularly good as a whole. Certainly it is a transition piece, both in terms of Japanese society and the star's career arc, and makes reference to those transitions in the script. The start is heartlessly funny, but the later parts are more problematic for me. It was made two-thirds of a century ago for the Japanese market.
