What Made Her Do It?

Shigeyoshi Suzuki's social-realist drama about a young woman destroyed by the forces of poverty, exploitation, and a society indifferent to her suffering. Sumiko is sent to live with her alcoholic uncle, who sells her to a circus; she escapes, finds love, loses it, and spirals further downward. The film belongs to the "tendency film" movement — the wave of socially conscious Japanese cinema of the late 1920s and early 1930s that used melodramatic stories to expose systemic injustice. Its frank depiction of the economic forces crushing working-class women was daring for its time and places it in conversation with contemporaries like G.W. Pabst's Diary of a Lost Girl. A powerful, unflinching work that rewards viewers willing to engage with the early roots of Japanese social cinema.