In Nakagawa Nobuo’s Death Row Woman (Onna Shikeishu no Datsugoku), the title character is Kyoko (Takakura Miyuki), the daughter of a wealthy businessman. She begins the film arguing with her father over her marriage plans. He wants her to give up her poor-but-decent fiancée for a better match with an obvious bounder. Kyoko refuses - and storms out of the room.
Soon after, her father is fatally poisoned. Kyoko is arrested for murder, convicted on false evidence and sentenced to death.
Once in prison, she becomes determined to prove her innocence. With the aid of a tough-but-sympathetic older convict (Wakasugi Katsuko), she makes a daring escape and reunites with her fiancée. But with the police closing in, how can this pair unmask the real killer in time?
Despite the mix of genres - romantic drama, prison movie and murder mystery - Nakagawa keeps the action taut and the tension high, albeit with a few lapses into teary melodrama.
The film also has a feminist subtext. Kyoko not only objects to her father’s choice of a husband, but also decides to have her lover’s baby minus a marriage certificate. These acts of rebellion against social convention were hardly unknown in 1960, a decade and a half after the Occupation began liberating Japanese women from their feudal shackles, but were still bold for an upper-class woman, expected to adhere to traditional mores.
As Kyoko, Takakura Miyuki is overly prone to hysterics and weeping fits - a cool convict she is not. All in all, the film is closer in sensibility to the era’s “woman’s pictures,” whose typical themes were female suffering and sacrifice, than to the Sasori series and other women-in-prison exploitation pics of the 1970s.
At the same time, Death Row Woman provided the template for several of their frequent tropes, from its woman-on-woman brawls to its (mile by later standards) depictions of same-sex desire.
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