Blue Mountains

[j.izbicki at att.net]

Michael, here's a very brief summary of The Blue Mountains (Aoi Sammyaku):

 The Blue Mountains was one of the most box office-successful movies of 1949. In the story a young, pretty, university educated woman, Shimazaki Yukiko (Hara Setsuko), begins a teaching job at a girls' high school in a small town.  When some of her students harass and criticize a new schoolmate for talking and walking publicly with a young male university student, the teacher chastises the girls and lectures them on women's equality and on the legitimacy and goodness of romantic love. 
The chastized students resist Shimazaki's 'democratic' views on women's equality and on love, report her to the principal, and get her in trouble with the school board and the parents' association.  A special meeting of the board is organized to hear, democratically, everyone's views on the case and to vote, also democratically, on whether the teacher or the students are in the right. To make a long, two-part story ridiculously short, the young teacher triumphs in the end, winning over a majority of the board to her side, in part because the women of the town take their new rights to heart, and in part because of the support of the local (single) doctor, who winds up asking her to marry him.  The original young couple whose totally innocent walk together started the ruckus fall more and more deeply in love and their future together seems assured.  Presumably everyone lives happily ever after. 

Joanne
j.izbicki at att.net
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