Cinema: The New Pictures, Jun. 15, 1959

Street of Shame (Daiei; Harrison), the last picture completed by the late Kenji (Ugetsu) Mizoguchi, perhaps the most gifted of recent Japanese moviemakers, is a Dickensian diatribe against prostitution. At the time the movie was released, Japan had some 500,000 "flowery-willowy" girls, and the picture is said to have swayed millions to support the stop-prostitution bill that was passed in 1956. In the U.S., where prostitution has seldom been seriously discussed on the screen, audiences will no doubt be stunned by the film's unblinking realism. But they will probably not be startled by...