Women of the Night (1948)

Mizoguchi's Women of the Night (夜の女たち) is a cautionary moral tale, but it is also a story of postwar Japan and the way that the state abandoned wives, mothers, and children of soldiers and forced them to fend for themselves. Mizoguchi's film is in bad shape – even on the Criterion channel where I watched it – but it's still finely realized and emotionally affecting.