Carmen's Pure Love

Carmen works as a strip dancer in Tokyo, appearing in a varieté version of Georges Bizet's Carmen, while her friend Akemi has been left with a baby daughter by her unfaithful left-wing activist lover. To spare the child an upbringing in precarious financial circumstances, Carmen and Akemi leave her at the doorstep of the upper-class Sudō family, but soon return in bad conscience to take her back. Carmen falls in love with Hajime, the Sudō's artist son and a notorious womaniser, taking his offer to pose nude for him as a serious interest in her. Meanwhile, Hajime's fiancée Chidori has constant arguments with her right-wing politician mother Kumako over Chidori's promiscuity.

When Carmen is fired after refusing to strip naked in front of Hajime, Chidori, and Kumako, whom she spotted in the audience, she decides to turn to "serious art" and takes ballet classes while working as an advertising girl for skin cream and rat poison. Contrary to the Sudō family's housemaid, who loses her job after confronting Kumako for her pro-rearmament politics, Hajime agrees to support his future mother-in-law's campaign out of sheer conformity. During Kumako's campaigning speech, she and Hajime are shouted at by a protester, who turns out to be the father of Akemi's child. While Akemi begs her embarrassed ex to take her back, Carmen attacks him for his unfaithfulness. In the final scene, the housemaid, now working as a shoeshiner, shakes her head over the election results she reads in a newspaper, with marching music and battlefield sounds drowning out the street noise.

• Hideko Takamine as Carmen
• Toshiko Kobayashi as Akemi
• Masao Wakahara as Hajime Sudō
• Chieko Higashiyama as housemaid
• Chikage Awashima as Chidori Satake
• Eiko Miyoshi as Kumako Satake
• Tatsuo Saitō as Hajime's father
• Sachiko Murase as Hajime's mother
• Yūko Mochizuki