Obscure Japanese Film #110
Rentaro Mikuni and Michiko Hoshi
Morioka, Iwate
Prefecture, mid-1920s. Kozo Iwami (Rentaro Mikuni) works for the railway as a
stoker but wants to become a driver. After failing the exam, he becomes
despondent and seeks solace in saké and the arms of bar hostess Koharu (Michiko
Hoshi).
Akiko Kazami
One day, Yukiko (Akiko Kazami), a young woman rushing home to see a dying relative, is permitted to ride the freight train on which Kozo is working. This chance meeting leads to marriage, but Iwami fails to change his ways and continues seeing Koharu, hardly even bothering to hide the fact from his wife. However, when an avalanche causes Kozo’s train to derail and the driver is killed, Kozo undergoes a personality change.
Mikuni
It’s not entirely clear why this occurs, but perhaps it’s just due to the fact that he now realises how lucky he is to be alive. In any case, he stops seeing Koharu and begins taking his job more seriously, eventually becoming a driver as a result.
Ken Takakura
The years pass, and Kozo and Yukiko have four children: Tadao (Hiroshi Minami), who gets called up for military service in China and is soon killed; Shizuo (Ken Takakura), who follows in his father’s footsteps and joins the railway; Sakiko (Mitsue Komiya), who marries the wrong type of guy; and Takao (Katsuo Nakamura), who voluntarily enlists in the army but later returns embittered and in poor health.
Katsuo Nakamura
Mikuni
Spanning three decades, this features Mikuni in another role in which he has to age considerably over the course of the movie, as he had previously done in Stepbrothers (1957) and Ballad of a Cart-Puller (1959). However, this was the first time he had won an award for such an effort, namely the Blue Ribbon for Best Actor. Kozo is a complex character and our feelings about him change as the story progresses; at first, seeing him as an uncouth worker in a wintry location who gets passed over for promotion, I thought he was going to be another Gonsuke from A Story from Echigo. However, though he can be unforgiving and even violent at times, Kozo usually regrets his actions almost immediately and sometimes displays a generosity of spirit. Mikuni made another railway picture, Oinaru bakushin, for the same director, Hideo Sekigawa, later the same year, but he played a different character and the stories were not connected, although both screenplays were written by – you guessed it (or not) – that one-man screenplay-machine, Kaneto Shindo. While many of Sekigawa’s films appear to have been routine assignments, he directed a couple of notable anti-war films: Listen to the Voices of the Sea (1950) and Hiroshima (1953), and he does a good job here, with the location shooting being particularly impressive, although the story has not dated well and must have seemed old-fashioned even at the time.
Takakura and Mikuni
The first half hour of the film is the most interesting – once Kozo changes his attitude after the accident, it becomes a sentimental family saga which unfolds all too predictably, while Ichiro Saito’s music lays on the harps and strings a bit thick. Like the previous film I reviewed, this is another with a strongly conservative message: everyone learns the error of their ways, and hard work and dedication to duty are rewarded in the end. This ideology is especially surprising coming from a couple of leftists like Sekigawa and Shindo.
Michiko Hoshi
Perhaps the most impressive thing about the film is the fact that they actually wrecked a real train in order to make it, a feat made possible due to Toei president Hiroshi Okawa, a former railroad employee who had maintained good connections with Japan’s national railway.
The omnipresent Eijiro Tono
Note on the title: The film is sometimes referred to as 'The Great Road', which makes little sense as tabiji means 'journey' rather than 'road'. It's also clear from the film that 'journey' has the double meaning of a railway journey and the journey of life.
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