What Made Her Do It?

What Made Her Do It? (1930)

何が彼女をそうさせたか

Sumiko's father sends her to live with her alcoholic uncle. He sells her to a circus, which is the start of a downward spiral in an unforgiving world.

Date of release
1930-02-06
TMDB
6.8 / 10 (5)
Runtime
1h 25m
Genres
Drama
Director
Shigeyoshi Suzuki

Casting

Interesting facts

What Made Her Do It? is a 1930 Japanese silent film directed by Shigeyoshi Suzuki. It was the top-grossing Japanese film of the silent era. Notable as an example of the tendency film genre, it reportedly caused a riot upon its showing in Tokyo's Asakusa district.

Production and reception

After the commercial success of other tendency films such as Tomu Uchida's A Living Puppet and Kenji Mizoguchi's Metropolitan Symphony (both 1929), produced by the Nikkatsu studio, the entertainment-oriented Teikine (Teikoku Kinema Engei) studio produced What Made Her Do It?, introducing "vulgar elements" (Geoffrey Nowell-Smith) aimed at the audience to the story, thus lightening its social criticism.

In his 2005 book A Hundred Years of Japanese Film, film historian Donald Richie titled the film "a melodramatic potboiler", at the same time acknowledging it for being "also extraordinarily film literate". The British Film Institute listed What Made Her Do It? as the best Japanese film of 1930, considering it to be representative of the period's tendency films.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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