Snow Trail (Senkichi Taniguchi, 1947)

Setsuko Wakayama and Toshiro Mifune in Snow Trail

Cast: Toshiro Mifune, Takashi Shimura, Akitake Kono, Yoshio Kosugi, Setsuko Wakayama, Kokuten Kodo. Screenplay: Akira Kurosawa. Cinematography: Junichi Segawa. Art direction: Taizo Kawashima. Film editing: Senkichi Taniguchi. Music: Akira Ifukube. 

Snow Trail is the start of a famous collaboration, that of Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune. It was Mifune's first film, and he goes headlong into his handsome, brooding mode, playing a tough, ruthless bank robber on the run in the Japanese Alps. Kurosawa didn't direct the film, but wrote the screenplay and had a strong hand in working with director Senkichi Taniguchi. Though Mifune gets top billing and has probably the showiest role, the best performance in the film comes, as it often did, from Takashi Shimura, who would collaborate with Mifune and Kurosawa often over the next couple of decades. They would reunite almost immediately for Drunken Angel the next year. Mifune and Shimura have joined with a third robber, played by Yoshio Kusugi, in their flight into the mountains, which hasn't gone unnoticed by the police. After a brief stay at a popular spa, the trio head deeper into the snowy wilderness, where their plight becomes more desperate after Kusugi's character is killed by an avalanche. But they come across a small lodge run by an elderly man (Kokuten Kodo) and his granddaughter, Haruko (Setsuko Wakayama) for the benefit of mountain climbers. Only one climber, Honda (Akitake Kono), is currently staying there. It's the perfect hideout: The only contact with the outside world is by carrier pigeon (which Mifune's character swiftly kills). But when the barking of dogs alerts the robbers that their pursuers are drawing nearer, they decide to move on with the aid of Honda, the experienced climber, whom Mifune's character forces to be their guide by threatening to kill Haruko. The robber played by Shimura is beginning to have regrets, but he goes along with the plan until calamity puts the climbers in peril. It's a solid action drama, with some fine cinematography in the mountain wilderness. It gets a little sentimental in the scenes with Haruko and her grandfather -- there's a heavy-handed use of a record of, no kidding, "My Old Kentucky Home" -- but good performances keep it going. 

The Tale of Zatoichi (Kenji Misumi, 1962)

Shintaro Katsu in The Tale of Zatoichi

Cast: Shintaro Katsu, Masayo Banri, Ryuzo Shimada, Hajime Mitamura, Shiguro Amachi, Michiro Minami, Eijiro Yanagi, Toshio Chiba, Manabu Morita. Screenplay: Minoru Inazaka, based on a story by Kan Shimozawa. Cinematography: Chikashi Makiura. Production design: Akira Naito. Film editing: Kanji Suganuma. Music: Akira Ifukube.

Shintaro Katsu's performance in The Tale of Zatoichi as the blind masseur who happens to be a brilliant swordsman launched a string of sequels as well as a long-running Japanese TV series in which he starred.

The Burmese Harp (Kon Ichikawa, 1956)

Shoji Yasui in The Burmese Harp

Capt. Inouye: Rentaro Mikuni
Pvt. Mizushima: Shoji Yasui
Ito: Jun Hamamura
Kobayashi: Taketoshi Naito
Maki: Shunji Kasuga
Baba: Ko Nishimura
Oyama: Tomio Aoki
Old Woman: Tanie Kitabayashi

Director: Kon Ichikawa
Screenplay: Natto Wada
Based on a novel by Michio Takeyama
Cinematography: Minoru Yokayama
Film editing: Masanori Tsujii
Music: Akira Ifukube

No film that contains as many reprises of Henry Bishop's old parlor song "Home, Sweet Home" as Kon Ichikawa's The Burmese Harp does can escape charges of sentimentality. It's sung in both Japanese and English by male choruses accompanied by the titular harp -- which sounds a lot more like a full-size orchestral harp than the smaller Burmese saung that appears on the screen. But although the film contains scenes of the carnage of war, Ichikawa is clearly not aiming for realism here. The source of the film was a novel serialized in a children's magazine in 1946 that became an adult bestseller when it was published as a book. The book was designed as antiwar statement, a corrective to the militarism that had plunged Japan into disaster, and Ichikawa's film, which elaborates on the book's themes of Buddhist pacifism, still retains some of the power to stir sentiments in that direction. It focuses on Mizushima, member of a company of Japanese soldiers led by Capt. Inouye, who had been a music teacher before by war and tries to keep up morale as they trek through the Burmese jungle by having the men sing. Mizushima has found a harp and learned to play it extremely well, accompanying the singing as well as using the harp when he goes on reconnaissance missions, playing one tune for "all clear" and another for "danger." When the war ends, the company is sent to a temporary prison camp, from which Mizushima is sent out to try to persuade a recalcitrant group of Japanese soldiers that the war is over and they should surrender. The fanatics refuse, but Mizushima is unable to leave their hillside stronghold before the deadline passes and the place is shelled, killing most of the holdouts and leaving Mizushima unconscious. The company moves on, thinking Mizushima dead, and are about to be repatriated when they discover that he has survived. A flashback tells how Mizushima became a Buddhist monk, so devoted to the task of burying the Japanese corpses that still remain in the Burmese countryside that he refuses to return to Japan. The Burmese Harp is beautifully filmed by Minoru Yokayama, and became an international hit. There have been charges that the film "whitewashes" the Japanese campaign in Burma, ignoring atrocities committed under orders from the Japanese high command, and this criticism deserves to be heard. But the underlying antiwar fable of the film still holds its strength.

Sandakan 8 (Kei Kumai, 1974)

Kinuyo Tanaka in Sandakan 8

Keiko Mitani: Komaki Kurihara
Osaki Yamakawa: Kinuyo Tanaka
Osaki as a young woman: Yoko Takahashi
Okiku: Takiko Mizunoe
Hideo Takeuchi: Ken Tanaka

Director: Kei Kumai
Screenplay: Sakae Hirosawa, Kei Kumai
Based on a book by Tomoko Yamazaki
Cinematography: Mitsuji Kanau
Production design: Takeo Kimura
Music: Akira Ifukube

Kinuyo Tanaka was one of the world's greatest actresses, celebrated particularly for her work with Kenji Mizoguchi in The Life of Oharu (1952), Ugetsu (1953), and Sansho the Bailiff (1954), and she gives a heartbreaking performance in one of the last films she made before her death in 1977, Sandakan 8. She plays Osaki, an elderly woman who was sold into prostitution as a girl, servicing overseas Japanese in brothels in what's now Malaysia. In the film she tells her story to a young woman, Keiko Mitani, who is researching the history of the karayuki-san, women who were sent throughout the South Pacific to work as prostitutes. We see Osaki's life in flashbacks in which she's played beautifully by Yoko Takahashi. Osaki struggles at first against the life she has been forced into, but eventually gives in to the reality of her situation. Still, once the practice of selling girls for overseas prostitution is ended by the Japanese government and Osaki is able to return home, she finds herself the object of scorn. Even in old age, living in a shack on the outskirts of a town, she is looked down upon by her neighbors because of her past. When Keiko first visits her, Osaki tries to pass her off to the neighbors as her daughter-in-law from Kyoto. (After her first return to Japan, Osaki went to Manchuria, where she married and had a son. He sends her money, but his wife has never visited and seems determined to have nothing to do with her.)  Sandakan 8 tells a compelling story without excessive sentimentality or sensationalism. It drifts occasionally into clichés, as when Osaki falls in love with a shy young man who loses his virginity with her and promises to return when he's made enough money to buy her out of prostitution, but eventually he betrays her when he finds her exhausted after servicing a pack of randy sailors that has swarmed into the brothel after their ship came to port. But the rapport that develops between Osaki and Keiko is splendidly portrayed, as is Keiko's determination to make the story of the karayuki-san known in a country that would prefer to keep it an unknown episode in Japan's history.

Filmstruck Criterion Channel