Hit And Run

Hit And Run (1966) is the 12th and final collaboration between director Mikio Naruse and leading lady Hideko Takamine. In this film Takamine plays a mother whose young son is killed in a hit and run accident by the wealthy wife,Yoko Tsukasa, of a car executive that lives on a hill above the poorer residents of Yokohoma-a setting that hearkens back to Kurossawa's 1963 hit High and Low. The woman decides not to stop after the accident since she was driving with her lover. But once she gets home and sees the blood on the fender she tells her husband who arranges to have his chauffeur to take the blame for the accident. However, Takamine refuses to accept the judgement where the man must pay only 30,000 yen in damages and arranges to get hired as a amid in the household where she plans to get her revenge. However, in the end she is deprived of this opportunity. Catherine Russell puts it succinctly in her book The Cinema of Naruse Mikio: "Naruse depicts the automobile as demonic machine of modernity, grinding the bodies of women, children, and serving class in its gears and spitting them out as dead and damaged."