Niji tatsu oka

Hideko Takamine and Akira Kishi are sister and brother. They live at a spa hotel, where Kishi works as a porter and Miss Takamine helps out in the gift shop. Because they are orphans, Kishi has raised his sister alone. Yet a shadow is about to fall on their world.

Miss Takamine was a nine-year veteran of the movies by the time she made this movie. She was also sixteen and growing out of the "Shirley Temple of Japan" roles; within a couple of years, she would become a young ingenue and lead, gradually expanding her range, often under the direction of Mikio Naruse. By the time she retired from the screen in 1979, her fifty-year career would extend to 179 features, work as a costume designer and Assistant Sirector, and an appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show. She died in 2010, aged 86.

This is a slight movie than concentrates on the loving yet seemingly casual relationship between Kishi and Miss Takamine.

What little I have managed to see from Toho Studios house director Otani Toshio would imply that he mostly worked with folk-comedies that were targeted for rural audiences. "Niji tatsu oka" (1938) shows more ambition as a narrative. The film is set in a hotel in the mountains. Kishii Akira and Takamine Hideko are stepbrother and stepsister who work there, him as a porter, and her as a clerk in the souvenir shop. The brother is an adult, who has pretty much raised the sister all on his own. They are very close, but this relationship faces problems, when Takamine's mother arrives in the hotel, and into their lives.

The story-line is good, and Kishii and Takamine make for a good team. Takamine was only about 13 while making this, and her talent is already evident, even though her best work was yet to come. The relationship between the two main characters is this film's core merit: the ending is beautiful, and could have been from a movie by Ozu or Shimizu. But that's also a problem for the film. Because it has potential, you are forced to compare it to other Japanese filmmakers of the time, and how they would have done this movie.

And Otani is not an auteur kind of guy. The film is only 53 minutes, but the screenplay forces way too many genres in this. Besides the melodrama, there is comedy, a rescue sequence from a mountain, as well as some songs. There is a Japanese interpretation of "Home on the Range" in this film. That gives it a nice time stamp, as the film law of 1939 would put an end to Americanisms like this.

All in all, this is the kind of film that should be remade. The story has potential, though the film doesn't manage to squeeze all of it into the finished product. Still, the ending is worth sticking around.