There’s an awful lot to like in this film; it may be my favorite of the Mizoguchi series I’ve been watching.
Street of Shame is about a band of women, prostitutes, who work together and become a team despite their various, and often competing, interests. It’s a refreshing take on the many band-of-men movies I’ve seen lately, and one that subverts the bonded guys types of film by focusing on gender-specific concerns. The women in this band focus on fathers, getting married, husbands, and children, all concerns that I’ve rarely if ever seen in films about teams of men. Not bad for 1956, I think.
You have to suspect this film has some of its origin in Mizoguchi’s earlier Women of the Night. Both open with a panoramic scan of an urban area before heading into the hardscrabble street to greet the characters. And there is harshness and brutality here as in the earlier film. An older woman is dumped by her john when he chooses a younger woman, a son learns of his mother’s profession and rejects her even though she has sent him money his entire life, one woman marries to discover her husband only wants her so he can have help at work, and a tricked businessman severely beats one of the women. The women also face hypocrisy and exploitation as the one woman’s father begs her to leave the brothel although he himself is often a client. And the brothel owners keep their workers under a crushing load of debt so they won’t leave. It’s a hard life.
Mizoguchi takes Street of Shame beyond his early, unfocussed Women of the Night, though, by showing all the women in this film in some depth. And there’s character development in each of the women here, each with her own character arc and each growing though the movie. And though the women face ordeals, they find some redemption in their profession. One woman realizes there is less hypocrisy in the brothel than in the family, and another discovers she can make more money in the brothel than in working with her husband. One even manages to put enough money together to leave the brothel and start her own business, shrewdly targeting her former work mates as customers, too. The women find an independence in prostitution that they don’t find outside.
There is a lot of beauty in Street of Shame, too. Mizoguchi uses shorter takes than I saw in many of his films, but the frame is chock full of information because of the elegant depth of field . Foreground, middle field and background are all often in focus, giving us lots of visual information to enjoy. The opening scenes of the brothel decorated for Christmas there in Japan are perfect examples of Mizouchi filling the screen with interesting things to look at. And perhaps suggesting an American connection to the practice of prostitution in Japan.This is a very well-done, warm, humanistic view of life in a brothel. Such a life isn’t filled with one bliss after another, though, and we see both its good and bad sides. Though the stories of a team of sex workers, Street of Shame is a mature, controlled, engaging interpretation of this unique segment of society.
