Part of an ongoing effort to watch a set of films from non-White, non-U.S., non-male, and/or non-straight filmmakers and depart a little from the Western canon. The intro and full list can be found here.
The narrative of “The Dancing Girl of Izu” is apparently a familiar one in Japan.
The term “melodrama” gets a bad rap these days, implying artificially heightened emotions and stagy, contrived narratives, but few genres or tendencies have held such continuing appeal over time. In the silent era, these were more the norm than the exception, and Teinosuke Kinugasa‘s Crossroads (1928) shows this to be as true in Japan as anywhere else in the film-making world.