Something Like an Autobiography - Akira Kurosawa [76]
Anyway, the censors put me through some horrible experiences. Because I resisted them, they all looked like enemies to me. But even though I had had two scripts in succession shelved by them, I went on and wrote another one. It was called Tekichu odan sanbyakuri (Three Hundred Miles Through Enemy Lines). This was a big action-adventure story based on the novel by Yamanaka Hotaro, and it dealt with the Tatekawa reconnoitering party during the Russo-Japanese war just after the turn of this century. Tatekawa himself, who had been a second lieutenant at the time of his famous exploits nearly forty years before, had advanced to lieutenant general in the Pacific War, and was also ambassador to the Soviet Union. He was most enthusiastic about the idea of filming the story of his reconnoitering party, and I had calculated that with this kind of subject and support the censors in the Ministry of the Interior were not likely to complain.
Moreover, at that time around the city of Harbin in Manchuria there were a great many White Russians. Among these were a number of Cossacks, and they had preserved their military uniforms and flags from before the revolution very carefully. Everything needed for the filming was thus available, and I proposed the project to the company.
Morita Nobuyoshi was then head of the Toho planning division, and he was among the best film people I have ever met. But he looked over my script and groaned. “It’s good. It’s very good, but …” He trailed off. What he was trying to say was that the script was good and they certainly would want to film it, but that the scale of the picture was much too large to be given to a first-time director like me.
It was true that although there were no actual battle scenes in the script, the action is set in the battle camps of both sides as they pull back to a stand-off after the Battle of Mukden. And in the end I had to wave goodbye to this script as well. (It would be filmed much later, in 1957, by the director Kazuo Mori.)
Years afterward Morita recalled this incident as the greatest mistake of his life. “If only I had let you make that movie—but I felt bad about it even at the time. I really had no choice.” I saw his point—under wartime conditions, when the film industry as a whole was so full of hardships, no one could consider giving a large-scale picture to a complete novice. My feelings were assuaged somewhat when, after the project had been shelved, Yama-san and Morita succeeded in getting it published in Eiga hyoron magazine.
One day around this time I saw an advertisement in a magazine called Nihon eiga (Japanese Cinema) in which the name Uekusa Keinosuke appeared. I learned from it that this magazine had published my old schoolmate’s script Haha no chizu (A Mother’s Map). I went to a bookstore on the Ginza and bought the magazine. As I walked out the door, I ran straight into Uekusa, who was carrying in his pocket a copy of the Eiga hyoron with my script printed in it. I don’t remember what we did or what we talked about that day on the Ginza, but Uekusa came to join the screenwriters’ section of Toho, and finally we had the opportunity to work together.
My Mountain
AFTER MY Three Hundred Miles project was shelved, I gave up fighting to become a director.