In his first film, co-written and edited by Kurosawa and directed by Senkichi Taniguchi, Toshiro Mifune played a tough gangster, similar to his later role in Kurosawa's Drunken Angel. Mifune was given the part, according to the Japan Film Center's David Owens, because he claimed that he could perform his own stunts under difficult weather conditions in the snowy mountains of Japan's “Alps.” The story, somewhat similar to Treasure of the Sierra Madre, is that of three bank robbers who flee to the mountains. The film “made excellent use of its out-of-doors location.... Its pace and sweep reminded one of the better American action pictures, though there was a complete adaptation to a Japanese setting” (Anderson and Richie, The Japanese Film)