The morality of Ugetsu is built from the premise that, in their pursuits of riches and new social status, Genjuro and Tobei have sacrificed the safety of their wives and families in the middle of a civil war. Genjuro and Tobei should have behaved like the villagers that, successful or not, were fully committed to protecting their kin from the surrounding violence.
The price of moral transgressions in Ugetsu prove to be very high. Genjuro’s wife is stabbed and Ohama, the abandoned wife of Tobei, is forced into prostitution after being raped by soldiers. The two households will find peace in the end, but this peace comes from an acceptance of where farmers sit in the feudal order. Genjuro and Tobei reform their ways and reconcile with the low social positions from which they originally dreamed of becoming rich or being a samurai.
As one of Mizoguchi’s masterpieces, Ugetsu is a beautiful film, filled with clever staging and perfect tracking shots. He also positions the audience to clearly see the tragedy in Genjuro and Tobei’s desires. For example, the dreams of Tobei to become samurai are clearly impossible in feudalism. The fate of Ohama is all the more tragic because she needed little effort to see how his transformation from peasant into samurai would be a cost to their happiness.
The ending of Ugetsu is the ending of a moral story of individuals. It is also, perhaps, a demonstration of why Smedly Butler, a retired Major General for the US Marines, said in 1935 that war is a racket: “A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small “inside” group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.” War in Ugetsu is a chaotic environment, unsuitable for gain, particularly for poor farmers going it alone as “outsiders”. But this view might also be only a perspective of the majority that believe that one should not make profit from war. An “insider” — maybe a daimyo — might think that Genjuro and Tobei failed not moral standards, but political ones. To the insider, the plans to profit from war are strategic; it is just that Genjuro and Tobei lacked the power to minimize the damage that was done to their inner circles.
notes on cinema 