No Limiar da Morte

People say the first collaboration between Kurosawa and Mifune was DRUNKEN ANGEL in 1948, yet here's this movie from 1947 with a script co-written by Kurosawa with the second lead by Mifune.... and the lead by Shimura. Other Kurosawa regulars in it include Akitake Kôno and Kokuten Kôdô. Yes, it was directed by Senkichi Taniguchi, but it feels like a Kurosawa picture to me.

Mifune, Shimura and Yoshio Kosugi have stolen some money and fled to the mountains. Kosugi has been killed in an avalanche, and the two survivors fetch up at a hunting-and-mountaineering cabin in the dead of winter, where Shimura makes friends with the owner and his granddaughter and Mifune blackmails mountaineer Kôno into helping them over the mountains before the police catch up to them, lest he kill the innocent.

Kurosawa's scripts always borrowed liberally from other nations' literature, and here I have the impression he was writing a German Mountain movie as if B. Traven had done the novel and then Warner Brothers had turned it into a movie. Had Kurosawa gotten wind of the production of THE TREASURE OF SIERRA MADRE and co-written his script, with Mifune in the Bogart part.... and then cast his mind back to HIGH SIERRA for an earlier Bogart role for Shimura?

Maybe not. Taniguchi certainly brings a lot to the movie, with his co-writing, long shots of bright snow and unbreakable paths, as well as obdurate mountains. It's hard to tell at this distance who had written what and who had which insight. Film is a collaborative medium in which dozens, if not hundreds of auteurs collaborate; when it works, academics and critics like to assign the responsibility to one individual. When it fails, of course, the suits in the front office get the blame.

Three bank robbers are pursued across a dangerous snowy Japanese mountain range. They only have one hope and that is to rely on mountain-climbing expert Akitake Kono (Honda) who is stranded at the same mountain cabin as they are. The pursuing police are confident they will get the robbers. Mother nature has a few tricks up her sleeve.

It's a different setting for a film and the outdoor locations give it a welcome authenticity. There can be melodramatic moments and these supply unintentional humorous moments on occasion. However, the message of the film is sound and the story allows you to sympathize with one of the robbers - Takashi Shimura (Nojiro) - the leader of the gang. It's also funny to see how far American records can travel.

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.

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).

I saw this film for the first time in 2022, some 75 years after it was made, and thought it was amazing. The character study of the police, the bank robbers, and the people who were affected by the crooks' actions was very well done and so believable. This movie was about trust, betrayal, and revelation. I am thankful there were not any car chases or shootouts; those would have ruined the movie. The copy of the print I watched had a few flaws / glitches in it, but that did not distract from the film itself. I would put this film up against any other crime drama where the criteria were trust, betrayal, and revelation. It had me on the edge of my seat. Loved every minute of it.

And yes, my review does not include any plot lines - that would ruin it. You have to watch it yourself, not knowing what will happen next. That is the real pleasure in watching this film.