Japanese pirate noir? That’s right. And one of them even wears an eye patch. In Hideo Ôba’s low-budget, low-key Taifuken no onna (US: Woman in the Typhoon Area), the legendary Setsuko Hara stars as pirate moll Kuriko Sato, a former nurse and former prostitute who now provides companionship to a ship full of thieves on the high seas (“I keep thinking about who is responsible for what I’ve become,” she says). When the ship runs out of fuel and drifts to a small island hosting a weather monitoring station, the criminals take the small crew of meteorologists hostage and destroy their communications equipment, despite an approaching typhoon about which the station must inform the mainland. Surrounded by the dissolution of her criminal “colleagues” and possessive boyfriend and gang leader Kijima (Sô Yamamura), Kuriko’s embittered heart (“When a man beats a woman like me, it’s absolutely natural”) comes alive when she begins taking care of Amano (Jun Asami), a goodhearted radio engineer suffering from a bullet wound. Thus commences two storms, one of nature outside and one of jealousy inside, as the winds howl and the rains roar. Naturally inviting comparisons with Huston’s Key Largo (1948), the film’s relatively low budget prohibited fancy sets and special effects, but Ôba builds steady tension, and Ifukube’s woodwinds-heavy score inserts plaintive refrains that help highlight Kuriko’s humanity throughout.