A group of men, most with bicyles, gather around their leader in a field, while a mine is visible in the background

The Eleventh Hour (Dotanba;どたんば), 1957

(Continued from page 1)

Commentary and Analysis

A Coal Miner’s Story

I had missed this very rare film when it was screened during the 2016 Uchida retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, so I was delighted when I found out that a DVD with English subtitles had recently become available. This work was part of a spate of films released in Japan in the 1950s about coal miners: apparently, the ongoing industrial recovery of Japan made coal mining a hot topic.1

What fascinated me most, though, is that it may well be the only movie ever made about trapped miners that was filmed by a director who had himself worked as a coal miner. During his sojourn in China after the war, Uchida had labored in the mines alongside his fellow Japanese expatriates, though he was not required to do so, as the Communist Chinese authorities had exempted him, as a famous film director, from this work. However, the filmmaker felt he had no right to ask his fellow countryman to risk their lives in the mine if he didn’t join them and face the same dangers. The harsh conditions and the strain of this work nearly broke his health. Uchida was thus able to bring his personal experience to bear in depicting with admirable verisimilitude the fear and anxiety – and also the paradoxical tedium – of the miner’s daily routine.

A Raw Film

Of all the Uchida films known to me, perhaps even Earth, this is the one that most strongly displays Uchida’s Realist style to the total exclusion of the others. There is here nothing of the classical elegance and poise of Chikamatsu’s Love in Osaka or Hero of the Red-Light District, nor of the mannerist tendencies and wild subject matter of The Mad Fox, A Fugitive from the Past or Swords of Death. Here the artist strives for, I think appropriately, a quasi-documentary approach to the material, and the best parts of the movie are those that come closest to that ideal. It is as if, having created a strong screenplay in collaboration with Hashimoto Shinobu (arguably, Kurosawa’s best screenwriter), Uchida decided to simply trust the material and shoot it straight, with as few embellishments as possible.

A two-shot of a young man and an older man in a dark mine, looking with fear at something in the distance
The mine seen through the terrified eyes of a young man, Yamaguchi (with the equally frightened miner, Ban’no)

Uchida’s skill in staging and composition, however, is still very much in evidence. The opening shots establishing how the mine works are quietly masterful in their simplicity and directness. Shrewdly, the filmmakers introduce a twenty-one-year-old apprentice miner, Yamaguchi (apparently a character that didn’t exist in the original television play), who has just been hired and is scheduled to begin his job the following day. The Chief Miner then gives him a guided tour of the depths of the mine, and we see it all through his appalled eyes. (There are hints that Yamaguchi is claustrophobic, adding to our sympathy for him.)

Picture of a rushing river with trees on the opposite bank and a single hut near the left of the frame
The gloomy upper world matches the dark underworld of the mine

The effectiveness of these scenes is enhanced by Uchida’s decision to shoot in widescreen black-and-white, which allows him to capture a wide view of both the mine and the landscape in which the mine is situated without prettifying the image, as color cinematography might have done.2 One would assume that Uchida, for dramatic contrast, would want to differentiate, in photographic terms, the dim world of the interior of the mine with the world above ground. But Fujii Shizuka’s cinematography makes the upper world, with its almost endless rain and clouds, seem nearly as gloomy as the hell-like world below.

The occasional moments in which the film deviates from straight realism are mostly misguided. One example occurs just before Yamaguchi goes down into the mine. He locks eyes with Michi, the pretty girl who operates the winch, and the sappy music that accompanies this moment implies some past romantic feelings between the two. This is confirmed by Michi’s younger brother, Jiro, who reminds his sister – much to her chagrin – that she once held hands with the young man at a town festival. This movie definitely doesn’t need the addition of a banal romantic subplot out of a conventional Hollywood melodrama. Thankfully, Uchida doesn’t follow up on this plot thread, and the relationship between the two young people is quickly forgotten as the focus shifts to the larger narrative.

A more unfortunate instance, though, occurs later in the film, just before Yokota – a veteran miner who’s returned to the town to use his unique knowledge to help save the men – goes down into the mine. The filmmakers, in an ill-conceived attempt at comic relief, introduce a new character, Takichi, who was involved in some kind of blood feud with Yokota before he left town, and now challenges him to a fight at the most inappropriate moment possible. The scene isn’t particularly funny and also doesn’t make much sense because, as Ban’no’s relative, Takichi should actually be happy that Yokota is trying to save him. At any rate, it’s an annoying distraction from the main plot. (The scene is reminiscent of similar failed attempts at broad humor in some of John Ford’s films.)

Hollywood/Not-Hollywood

It’s a bit ironic that this is one of Uchida’s most obscure movies (that is, obscure even for him), because it’s the Uchida film that seems most strongly to employ the traditional conventions we associate with classic Hollywood. The narrative, like a Hollywood film and atypically for a Japanese one, is more plot-driven than character-driven, and makes use of old-fashioned but effective stylistic devices – and a conventional Hollywoodesque score – for generating and sustaining suspense. For example, just before the cave-in, when the water level of the river becomes dangerously high, and the people working aboveground suddenly notice this, there’s a burst of ominous music on the soundtrack, exactly as there would be in an American film of the era in a similar scene.

Medium shot of a young woman wearing a head covering and operating two levers of a machine (a winch)
Michiko (“Michi”), the winch operator: Uchida’s working-class heroine

Three elements, however, sharply distinguish this film from a hypothetical Hollywood film on the same subject: the painful loss of face experienced by Sunaga, the mine owner, and Kusaka, the Chief Miner, following the cave-in; the emphasis on a woman, the winch operator Michi, as a crucial figure in the rescue effort; and, particularly, the examination of race and class tensions that nearly doom the trapped miners. Hollywood would almost certainly not have tolerated, particularly in the Cold War era, a movie that examines such tensions as honestly as this film does – though, as I will clarify below, the work stops far short of being a Marxist polemic.

Who’s to Blame?

Guilt and responsibility are major themes of the film, as they are in much of Uchida’s postwar work. The mine owner, Sunaga, feels intense guilt for having refused to fix the problem with the frame that caused the leak leading to the cave-in, though he couldn’t possibly have corrected it in time, after only having been notified of it that very day, to avoid the disaster. He spends most of the movie apologizing to just about everyone around him, offers to sell all he and his wife own to compensate the victims, and even plans to become a coal miner himself once again to survive. But though his feelings of guilt are by no means unjustified, his self-abnegation seems excessive.

A group shot of some Japanese, with a frail-looking elderly man at right confronted by two men in working-class clothes on the left, with several women looking on in the background
Sunaga, the elderly mine owner (right), is confronted by the angry family members (left), while his wife Toshie (background right) looks on

The character actor Katō Yoshi, who plays Sunaga, is a downright weird actor around which to build a movie. With his large, sad eyes and frail frame, Katō made a specialty out of playing vaguely pathetic characters, and he’s all too convincing when he tells a family member of the victims that he has “no physical or mental strength anymore.” (He would later go on to portray the heroine’s deeply confused father in Uchida’s The Mad Fox (Koiya koi nasuna koi, 1962).) There’s something oddly lovable about this wan, mournful wraith of a boss; one wants things to work out for him, even while conceding that the families are right to blame him.

Sunaga thus hardly fits the stereotype of a heartless Capitalist. In fact, he takes full, personal responsibility for the disaster in a way alien to modern corporate culture. And though he rejects suicide as a solution, he admits to his wife that he had briefly contemplated the possibility.

It must be noted that the film emphasizes that Sunaga is a small business owner, under pressure from competitors much larger and more powerful than his modest enterprise: he couldn’t be less like the cold-hearted corporate thugs of Kurosawa’s The Bad Sleep Well (Warui yatsu hodo yoku nemuru), released three years later. So, logically, as a struggling Capitalist, he violently resists a costly upgrade that might destroy his competitive edge, though this decision has disastrous consequences.

A close up of a Japanese man in working class clothes at night, looking downward in apparent great distress
The anguished Kusaka contemplates suicide

The Chief Miner, Kusaka, also experiences great guilt and shame, although his failure to persuade Sunaga to replace the defective frame was in no way his fault, and in any case, as already noted, there was no time to correct the problem prior to the accident. His actual suicide attempt, when the fate of the buried miners seems most hopeless, could thus be considered a kind of proxy for his employer’s contemplated suicide.

The passive roles of Sunaga and Kusaka are contrasted with the active role of Michi, the winch operator. Her dedication and competence under pressure are acknowledged and praised by the rescuers. (“Mi-chan, you stood strong!”) The unusual prominence of her role – unusual particularly in the context of Japanese films of the 1950s – reveals Uchida’s quasi-feminist sympathies.

A night shot of a middle-aged working class Japanese man, standing, confronting a seated elderly man in monk's robes, with a banner behind him a banner
Onishi the foreman confronts the drumming Buddhist monk, whose wisdom disarms him

The character of the foreman Onishi (played by Tōno Eijirō) is also interesting. He is harsh and dislikable, and even faults Kusaka for his suicide attempt. When he’s overcome with frustration and guilt for failing to come up with an effective rescue strategy, he takes his anger out on the harmless Buddhist monk who sits on the ground outside the mine, chanting prayers for the victims. On the other hand, his desire to save the men is as sincere and intense as anyone’s.

Each side in the struggle – manager and worker – is suspicious of the motives of the other side, and the family members also accuse the owner of bad faith. Each of them perceives in his adversary no compassion for the victims. But, as Uchida shows, all are wrong. The resolution of the plot depends on workers and managers finally uniting to save the men: a very Japanese (and very un-Marxist) idea. 

Unfortunately, and surprisingly, Uchida and Hashimoto do not depict the below-ground characters, the trapped miners themselves, as skillfully. Except for the kindly old man Ban’no (played by the famous Shimura Takashi, appearing in what amounts to a glorified cameo), and to a lesser extent the youngest man, the apprentice miner Yamaguchi, none of them is strongly individuated.

(Continued on page 3)

Footnotes

  1. Examples of other 1950s Japanese films dealing with the theme of coal-mining are: A Woman Walks the Earth Alone (Onna hitori daichi o yuku, Kamei Fumio, 1953), an epic tale about a female coal miner; Striving to Live (Ikitoshi Ikerumono, Nishikawa Katsumi, 1955), with a script co-authored by Hashimoto Shinobu, about labor problems in the Hokkaido mines; and, after Dotanba, My Second Brother (Nian-Chan, 1959), the fourth film directed by Imamura Shohei, about the struggles of a family of Korean miners in Saga. This last film won a government prize, much to Imamura’s embarrassment.
  2. Uchida by this time had already directed one film in widescreen: the first part of the Sword in the Moonlight (Daibosatsu Tōge) trilogy, shot in color and released earlier in 1957. The first non-foreign widescreen film ever released in Japan was the 1957 film (often erroneously dated 1958) The Bride of Otori Castle – a.k.a., The Lord Takes a Bride or Samurai Bride Hunter (Ohtori-jo no hanayome) – directed by Matsuda Sadatsugu and released by Toei on April 2. In 1960, all but two Japanese theatrical releases were in widescreen format, and Japanese filmmakers in general and masters like Kurosawa and Kobayashi in particular have often been praised for their highly creative use of it.

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