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 Men Who Tread on the Tiger's Tail (Akira Kurosawa, 1945)

Ken'ichi Enomoto and Denjiro Okochi in The Men Who Tread on the Tiger's Tail

Benkei: Denjiro Okochi
Togashi: Susumu Fujita
Porter: Ken'ichi Enomoto
Kamei: Masayuki Mori
Kataoka: Takashi Shimura
Ise: Akitake Kono
Suruga: Yoshio Kosugi
Yoshitsune: Hanshiro Iwai
Hidachibo: Dekao Yokoo

Director: Akira Kurosawa
Screenplay: Akira Kurosawa
Based on plays by Nobomitsu Kanze and Gohei Namiki
Cinematography: Takeo Ito
Production design: Kazuo Kubo
Music: Tadashi Hattori

Akira Kurosawa's fourth film and first venture into the samurai movie genre is only an hour long, but it displays both the attention to character delineation and the infusion of humor into a sometimes earnest genre that would be present when Kurosawa began working on an epic scale almost a decade later in Seven Samurai (1954). But he ran into trouble with the censors both before and after the war ended, first with the militarists of the Japanese government who wanted propaganda, not subtlety, and then with the American occupying forces, which banned all films that seemed to glorify the warlike past. It was held from release until 1952. As a film, it's little more than an anecdote about how the samurai serving Lord Yoshitsune managed to elude a roadblock and escape into hiding. Kurosawa added a comic figure to the retinue, a porter played by the big-mouth comedian Ken'ichi Enomoto, a kind of Japanese Joe E. Brown. Enomoto's mugging gets a bit annoying at times, but he also keeps the film from turning into a historical pageant as the leader of the samurai, Benkei, tricks the garrison commander at the roadblock, Togashi, into thinking that they're actually a group of monks raising funds for the restoration of a temple. When his bluff is called and he's asked to read the paper that sets for the appeal for funds, Benkei unfurls a blank scroll and improvises -- to the astonishment of the porter, who is looking over his shoulder. Yoshitsune is disguised as a second porter, and in order to deter Togashi's suspicion, Benkei is forced to beat the disguised lord for laziness -- an unthinkable act of lèse-majesté under normal circumstances. Slight as it is, The Men Who Tread on the Tiger's Tail gives off a sense of the greatness to come in Kurosawa's career, including the presence of several actors, such as Takashi Shimura, who would become prominent in the director's later films.