Snow Trail

Three criminals on the run after a bank heist head for the snowy Japanese Alps and hole up in a remote mountain cabin with an elderly man, his granddaughter, and a local climber. The screenplay was co-written by Akira Kurosawa and stars two of soon-to-be famous director's regulars, Toshiro Mifune (one of his first films), and Takashi Shimura, as a young volatile crook and his older, more pensive gang leader respectively. The story is an uneven mix of harsh and maudlin but the cast is very good and the B/W mountain cinematography is excellent. The music is by Akira Ifukube (who 6 years later would write the iconic Godzilla March) and his choice of incorporating the classic 'Americana' tunes of Stephan Foster in a gritty Japanese crime melodrama seems odd but hearing the quaint tune of 'My Old Kentucky Home' while the three criminals trudge through the snow to shelter high above the tree-line is effective (but slightly surreal).

This peculiar romantic crime drama would probably be hailed as a classic if it were widely seen today, although it's not that tremendous; still, it's a deliberately unusual piece of work, and a generally neglected piece of Akira Kurosawa's filmography (as indeed are the majority of those pictures he wrote but did not direct, an alarming number of which have never even been shown outside Japan). It marks the formal debuts of Senkichi Taniguchi as director and Akira Ifukube as composer, but in the long run it's very much more a Kurosawa movie, shot through with his accustomed humanity, and full of surprises. Especially interesting is the way Takashi Shimura's criminal character develops, starting out proudly savage and then against all odds becoming a tender person, who ultimately cannot bear to kill the man who is loved by the woman HE'S in love with ... because he can't stand the idea of hurting her. Toshiro Mifune's character, by contrast, seems redeemable at the start but grows increasingly evil -- not at all what the filmmakers suggested at the start, and not at all expected. The film also boasts an astonishingly restrained performance by Yoshio Kosugi, who rarely met a piece of scenery he didn't like to gnaw upon, but who is remarkable here. Setsuko Wakayama and Kokuten Kodo are also superb; this is probably one of the only pictures that gave Wakayama a chance to shine, as for whatever reason she never became a major star in Japan.

The snowbound location photography is excellent (much of the picture was drawn upon director Senkichi Taniguchi's own considerable experience as a mountain climber), and while Akira Ifukube's score is almost too energetic for its own good -- he clearly thought that his first time out he ought to be scoring every different scene with a separate leitmotif, and GODZILLA fans might be amazed to hear his first version of the famous "underwater ballet" music from that original 1954 film already in here (more conservative viewers who avoid monster movies might have also happened to hear the identical music in THE BURMESE HARP) -- Ifukube underlines the drama beautifully, and in the lengthy sequences that are without dialogue, he tells us most eloquently what the characters are feeling. When the elegy kicks in under Shimura's reappearance over the cliff, it's a heartbreaker. And yet there's hardly any music at all in the first hour, unusual for a film of any type at the time.

It's not quite a masterpiece, but THE END OF THE SILVER MOUNTAINS is essential viewing for anyone who cares about Kurosawa, Mifune, Shimura, Ifukube, or indeed everyone who worked on this movie, and very clearly cared about it a lot.

Japanese crime dram from Toho and director Senkichi Taniguchi. A trio of bank robbers (Takashi Shimura, Toshiro Mifune, and Yoshio Kosugi) hideout in an isolated snow mountain resort town. After a close call with the cops, they end up in small hunting lodge run by mountaineer Honda (Akitake Kono), young girl Haruko (Setsuko Wakayama), and her grandfather (Kokuten Kodo). In such close quarters, the robbers nerves begin to fray, as the snow piles up higher outside and the police close in. Also featuring Fusataro Ishijima, Fumio Omachi, Taizo Fukami, and Eizaburo Sakauchi.

Featuring a screenplay by Akira Kurosawa, this frigidly atmospheric crime picture is also notable for being the film debut of Japanese screen legend Toshiro Mifune. He plays a violent hothead, a character type he'd return to several times over the next decade or more. He's very charismatic here, lean and intimidating. Takashi Shimura turns in yet another fine, understated performance. The snow-capped mountain scenery offers some fantastic location cinematography, and the mountain climbing scenes are suspenseful. Mifune and Shimura would re-team the next year in Drunken Angel, directed by Akira Kurosawa, and it would mark a turning point in all three careers and begin decades of fruitful collaboration.

Thieves hide in a small lodge in the mountains as the police trail them. They decide to cross over the top but things go wrong (of course).

This was an early Kurosawa script and Mifune role and you can see lots of what came later in this fairly straightforward crime story. It's got some nice mountain photography and suspense even though it's nothing you can't predict or have seen before. Still worth it for the people involved.

It's quick moving and well acted so worth checking out if TCM shows it or you find a DVD somewhere.

Black and white, reasonable length, good score, check it out and have a good time!

A group of bank robbers flee into the Japanese alps to escape the police. After barely getting away from their hideout the path behind them is cut off by an avalanche and they have to hole up in a cabin whose friendly inhabitants know nothing of their true nature.

This was a really pleasant surprise. I didn't expect all that much since the only Taniguchi film I had seen before was the rather dull Lost world of Sinbad which ironically left me entirely cold.

The beauty and danger of these mountains is captured amazingly well, especially for the time. All I could think of was how this couldn't have been an easy production as I watched the actors struggle to move in meters of snow, scaling cliffs and looking insignificantly small in the vast landscapes.

This movie has an interesting pedigree to begin with, being the first film to bring Toshiro Mifune and long time acting partner Takashi Shimura together. It's also the first score of composer Akira Ifukube, most famous for the Godzilla soundtracks (and original roar) as well as the Burmese Harp and countless others.

Mifune is great as the young, cruel, greedy and unpredictable thug, who seems like a man who never came back from the war, but Shimura as the older, melancholic boss opposite of him takes the cake here.

The script by none other than Akira Kurosawa elevates what could have been a rather standard thriller of the time, by adding a lot of layers and nuance to the story.

While the war is never mentioned explicitly it looms large (hell it was barely two years ago at the time). More often than not it feels like a movie about soldiers coming home from war and unraveling rather than a mountaineering adventure. Our main characters are all clearly damaged. I'm sure if you had been in the audience back then you would have picked up on a lot more of these hints. Yet typical for a Kurosawa script there's a shimmer of hope and humanity that shines like a beacon through the dense mist.

While this isn't quite a masterpiece yet it has a strong atmosphere of solitude and a sweet mix of hopefulness and melancholia. It deserves to be much more widely seen and appreciated. If you like early Kurosawa or Naruse I definitely recommend it.