Four Sisters / 山麓 / Sanroku (‘The Foot of the Mountain’, 1962)

Obscure Japanese Film #167

Isuzu Yamada

 

Yoshiko Mita

Sonny Chiba

 

Modern-day Tokyo. Masako (Yoshiko Mita) is a young woman who wants to marry mountaineer Shinkichi (Sonny Chiba), but her domineering mother (Isuzu Yamada) wants her to wed the more financially solvent Sakurai (Fumio Watanabe). Once Sakurai begins courting her, Masako finds herself warming to him and becomes torn between the two men, so she begins to consider the marriages of her three older sisters in order to help her decide what to do. 

 

Chikage Awashima

 

Ko Nakahira

The eldest, Kikuno (Chikage Awashima), has been trapped in an unhappy and childless marriage to the wealthy Mitsumine (Ko Nishimura) for the past 10 years. Mitsumine loves her but has constant affairs on the side which he thinks Kikuno should just accept. The next sister, Misao (Chikage Ogi), is happily married to Igarashi (Tetsuro Tanba), with whom she has two children. Third sister Kanako (Kaneko Iwasaki) has angered their mother by eloping with Asayama (Hiroshi Minami), but leads a cheerful life with him in their small apartment and is newly pregnant.

 

Chikage Ogi and Kaneko Iwasaki

 

Chishu Ryu

 

The father of the four sisters (Chishu Ryu) is a classic henpecked husband who failed in business and now keeps his head down, busying himself with his bonsai while letting his wife make all the decisions. However, a family crisis is provoked when Kikuno – who had married Mitsumine at her mother’s urging – decides she’s had enough and leaves him, which will cut off an important source of income for the family…

 

 

As the IMDb page for this film not only contains a poster and a few stills in black and white, but also states that the film was shot that way, I was surprised to find that it’s actually in colour and, in fact, rather nicely shot by cinematographer Masahiko Iimura. A Toei production, it’s based on a just-published novel by Fumio Niwa, who also wrote the novels on which The Beloved Image (1960) and Women of Tokyo (1939) were based. The adaptation is by Zenzo Matsuyama, who had recently become a director himself, but this one is helmed by Masaharu Segawa (1925-2016), a director best-known for comedies, which this certainly ain’t. It’s the only film I’ve seen by Segawa, but it’s made with a sure hand and features consistently clever blocking of scenes and good performances across the board. The tasteful music by Ichiro Saito is also a plus. 

 

 

The mountain serves as a metaphor for marriage here, which is seen as a difficult journey that many abandon before reaching the peak, so the youngest sister is at ‘the foot of the mountain’ which was also the title of the novel and film in Japanese. The climax of the film involves a literal mountain, and this part does get a little melodramatic and corny, it has to be said, but not fatally so. 

 

 

Among a strong cast, the chameleon-like Isuzu Yamada delivers the finest performance as the apparently cold and materialistic queen bitch matriarch who, deep down, is actually insecure about both her position and her fading looks. Surprisingly, she was not even nominated for an award for this, but perhaps it’s simply because she’d already won a handful.

The film also features a cameo by popular singer Kazuko Matsuo, who appears crooning the film’s theme song in a nightclub. 

 

Kazuko Matsuo