Dispersed Clouds

Dispersed Clouds (1951) is another well-made Heinosuke Gosho postwar melodrama. This films concerns a selfish young woman, Masako (Keiko Sawamura), who catches pneumonia while traveling in Yamanashi with her college girlfriends and is forced to recuperate in a mountain village inn and learns some lessons about life. These are provided by the widowed inn worker, who acts as a surrogate mother, and the young but worldly doctor Minami,, who freely gives her advice when she suggests becoming his assistant. Gosho again is shooting on location in Yamanshi and has lots of great outdoor shots of the local villages and the surrounding forests and mountains. The tragedies of the war are embedded in the personal stories of the characters as well as the slow postwar development is underscored as on many rural villages have not yet gotten electricity.