美しい芸者・滝の家清葉に片思いの医学者・葛木は、ある日、思いきって告白するが、旦那に一途な清葉に振られてしまう。それを知ったライバル芸者の稲葉屋お孝は、葛木をカモにしようと彼に言い寄る。一方、かつて清葉に振られた直後にお孝に言い寄られ、弄ばれて捨てられた五十嵐は、お孝を執拗に追い回していた…。 ロマン主義の先駆者・泉鏡花の同名小説を和田夏十(脚本)と市川崑監督の名コンビが映画化した文芸ドラマ。大正初期の日本橋を舞台に、新旧二派の売れっ子芸者の確執と、二人を巡る男たちの色と欲に彩られた人間模様を豪華キャストで描いている。特に淡島千景、山本富士子、若尾文子という3大女優の競演は見逃せない。また、助監督には'60年代にヒット作を量産した増村保造監督も名を連ねている。。The subtitle of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s first feature, from 1965, “Only Violence Helps Where Violence Reigns,” suggests the fierce political program evoked by their rigorous aesthetic. The pretext of the film, set in Cologne, is Heinrich Böll’s novel “Billiards at Half Past Nine,” which they strip down to a handful of stark events and film with a confrontational angularity akin to Bartók’s music that adorns the soundtrack. The subtlest of cues accompany the story’s complex flashbacks. The middle-aged Robert Fähmel tells a young hotel bellhop of persecutions under the Third Reich| his elderly father, Heinrich, an architect famed for a local abbey, recalls the militarism of the First World War, when his wife, Johanna, incurred trouble for insulting the Kaiser. A third-generation Fähmel is considering architecture, just as the exiled brother of Robert’s late wife, returns, only to be met by their former torturer, now a West German official taking part in a celebratory parade of war veterans. Straub and Huillet make the layers of history live in the present tense, which they judge severely. The tamped-down acting and the spare, tense visual rhetoric suggest a state of moral crisis as well as the response—as much in style as in substance—that it demands.。