The Eleventh Hour /どたんば/ Dotanba aka They are Buried Alive (1957)

Obscure Japanese Film #24

Eijiro Tono

Based on a television play by Ryuzo Kikushima[1] which was itself based on a true story, this Toei production concerns five coal miners who become trapped underground after a flood and the subsequent attempt to rescue them before they suffocate. One of the endangered miners is played by Kurosawa favourite Takashi Shimura, who seems set up to play an important part, but unfortunately he soon disappears for most of the film as Uchida and co-screenwriter Shinobu Hashimoto decide to focus attention on events above ground. Indeed, The Eleventh Hour is not only a film without stars, but also one which lacks any major characters to speak of, and this choice rather dissipates the drama in my view. However, there are certainly some familiar faces among the ensemble, including Eijiro Tono as the bad-tempered foreman and Eiji Okada (who went on to star in Hiroshima Mon Amour and Woman of the Dunes) as the spokesman of a Korean mining team. Okada had apparently worked as a coal miner himself, while Uchida also had experience of working in the mines during the war. 

Eiji Okada

 

As the fate of the miners hangs in the balance, it sparks a media frenzy and a crowd gathers at the mine while an ice cream seller makes a killing. These scenes briefly recall Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole (1951), but ultimately Uchida’s film has little in common; the reporters portrayed here are polite, respectful, and appear to be genuinely hoping for a positive outcome. Instead, Uchida gives us a surprisingly sentimental and typically Japanese movie in which people have to work together in order to surmount their difficulties and achieve a common goal, although he does add an extra wrinkle; in this case, they also have to overcome their anti-Korean prejudice as they will need the help of the Koreans working at another mine nearby if their rescue efforts are to succeed.

Takashi Shimura

Given that Uchida has made some really excellent films and the script was co-written by the great Shinobu Hashimoto, I had hoped to discover a hidden gem here, but actually found something that more closely resembled a lump of coal – a functional item with little sparkle. The Eleventh Hour is by no means a bad film, and technically the underground sequences are very well achieved (presumably in the studio), but these should have been much more suspenseful, so overall it’s not difficult to see why this particular Uchida film has remained so little-known.

 For more on this film, see The International Uchida Tomu Appreciation Society website

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[1] Like Shinobu Hashimoto, Kikushima frequently worked as a screenwriter for Akira Kurosawa. The TV play was broadcast live the previous year on NHK and featured the TV debut of Rentaro Mikuni. As a kinescope recording was made at the time, this work still exists. It was directed by Hiroshi Nagayama, who seems to have no film credits and presumably worked only in television.