A family of displaced peasants comes to Osaka, where they nearly starve until they hit on the trick of gather rice that has fallen from sacks into the dirt and selling them. Over the next ten years, they accumulate some money, going into the tea business .... mixing used leaves into what they sell to increase profit. Then comes the day when the head of the family, Eijirô Tôno, sees way to improve his business connections by marrying his daughter, Kyôko Kagawa, into another miserly family grown wealthy. Her brother, Shintarô Katsu, and the house's clerk, Raizô Ichikawa, object and the house of cards starts to tumble down.
Kenji Mizoguchi gets a story credit, but director Kôzaburô Yoshimura makes a much less nuanced movie than Mizoguchi would have. Tôno is a monster of a miser, pure and simple, with not an ounce of sympathy for anyone or anything but money, and it's all got to be his. The story, about how he began to create a family that coud be something, if only in Osaka, and then destroyed it, is certainly a watchable tragedy, even if the characters as they exist in the movie version, are bizarrely naive. It's a wonderful cast, and the individual performances stand up, even if they don't mesh very well.
