The Blizzard

A group of mountaineers becomes trapped in a blizzard on the way back to camp. One by one, all the men sink into the snow, giving in to certain death. The leader struggles to keep going, until he too falls asleep in the snow. A mysterious woman with long black hair appears and cloaks him in a shawl, coaxing him to sleep with reassuring words. Suddenly he realizes the eerie woman is a yuki onna (a malevolent snow spirit) and with the last of his strength, the man fights her off until she disappears in the wind. Awake at last, the man rouses up his group and discovers the storm has calmed down and their camp is only a few feet away.

"The Blizzard," which begins with interminable snowy shots of mountain climbers trudging miserably through a storm, and ends with a fleeting but sublime payoff, in which the snow fairy who comes to comfort a collapsed climber is transformed into an angel of death and flies away.

The problem with this material is that it's not nearly as profound as Kurosawa thinks it is. If the points the director hoped to make in "The Peach Orchard" and "The Blizzard" are obscure, in the others the meaning is painfully obvious, so much so that there's nothing much to develop, and they seem labored and overlong.

All but one of the other episodes are social commentaries, or make sweeping social statements. In both content and style, these stories are at best commonplace and often much worse. In all of them, Kurosawa seems to have something to get off his chest, but the approach he's chosen is so distanced that any passion or conviction they might have had seems to have evaporated.