RASHOMAN
Dir. by Akiro Kurasawa

Perhaps more than any other Kurosawa film, it is Rashomon that is considered his masterpiece. Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love Yojimbo and Sanjuro, but this is a film even for people who wouldn’t be caught dead watching a samurai film.

It’s a beguilingly simple idea (I first saw it on All in the Family), various people tell a story, and each is compared. It begins when a woodcutter (Takashi Shimura) finds a dead man near a forest road. The dead man is a samurai (Masahiko Mori), travelling with his wife (Machiko Kyo). The notorious bandit Tajumaru (a very young Toshiro Mifune) had attacked them, raping the woman. He proudly confesses to killing the man. Or did he? Tajumaru proudly tells of how the woman could not resist his virility and brought about a bloody duel between the samurai and the outlaw. But the woman tells a different story, it just isn’t the one you expect. A spirit medium channels the dead husband and he tells yet a third version. Each one blackens someone’s character, while sparing another’s. Which one is true? Is it possible to find truth at all? How do we find redemption is a world of self-serving lies?

Though certainly not a tough-guy action film in the conventional sense (though there is a surprising amount of swordplay), this is a historical drama of top quality. It is also the sort of film that denies us easy answers while establishing the questions we need to ask.

-Dave Hardy

LONE WOLF AND CUB: SWORD OF VENGEANCE
Dir. by Kenji Misumi

Comic book fans the world over are familiar with Kazuo Koike’s Lone Wolf and Cub, one of the best action comics ever, and a magnificent evocation of the dark side of Tokugawa Japan. Perhaps fewer people are aware that they were made into a series of movies. Even fewer realize how deeply committed the protagonist is to attachment parenting and taking children seriously, Ogami Itto isn’t known as “the baby-cart assassin” for nothing.

Sword of Vengeance is the first in a series of six films about Ogami Itto (Tomisaburo Wakayma) and his particular Highway to Hell. The time is the 17th century and the Tokugawa shogunate has imposed a police state on Japan. Ogami is the shogun’s executioner, when the orders a noble to commit seppuku (hara-kiri to us vulgar gaijin), Ogami stands by with his very sharp sword to make sure the deed is completed swiftly. But rivals from the Yagyu clan frame Ogami and arrange for his family to be slaughtered, only Ogami’s son Daigoro (Akihiro Tokayama, the cutest little shaver ever to go a killing spree) survives the massacre. Ogami is ordered to commit seppuku. But Ogami goes off the rails and declines that honor. In a touching scene he asks an uncomprehending Daigoro to chose: a life of murder with dad or instant death by his sword. In short order Ogami takes on the entire Yagyu clan with nothing but a stroller and a bad attitude (it’s quite a stroller though). Having done the unthinkable by refusing to commit seppuku when ordered, he has no choice but to become a hired killer. With Daigoro in tow, every day is Take Your Kid to Work day for Ogami.

All of Ogami’s back-story is inter-cut with an account of one of his jobs. It’s a brutal demonstration of just how far out of, not just social norms, but even normal affect Ogami has taken himself in order to be an assassin. The problem is that while the assassination story is good, it can’t bear the weight of Ogami’s fall from grace and the film is rather unbalanced. The one story culminates with a dramatic change in the protagonist while the other ends up with, well, an awful lot of dead guys. In true chanbara fashion, Ogami slices samurai like an automated salami processor. Finally, this may seem a very petty quibble, but I found Tomisaburo Wakayma’s face too fleshy to match the austere visage of Ogami that Koike’s art had burned into my brain.

If you are in love with Lone Wolf and Cub or just like chanbara, you can expect some pretty good stuff here. If you are new to samurai film in general, then consider starting with Yojimbo, or better yet, check out Koike’s comic books first hand.

-Dave Hardy

KILL!
Dir. by Kihachi Okamoto

The received wisdom is that the Western (Shane, The Searchers, Stagecoach) begat the Samurai film (Yojimbo, Sanjuro, Seven Samurai) which begat the Spaghetti Western (A Fistful of Dollars, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly). Of course it was never so easy, Kill! shows Okamoto’s ability to incorporate all those influences and feed them back with a generous dose of comic comment.

The scene is set in classic fashion: a sandstorm in a burnt-out ruin of a town. A ragged wanderer enters, instead of confidently taking stock of the situation he brashly announces he is a REAL SAMURAI and just as soon as he gets a meal he’s going to get a samurai job. His meal plans devolve to scrabbling in the dust for a chicken even more scrawny and ragged than himself. The “samurai” is Hanjiro (Etsushi Takahashi) a strong but not-too-bright type who’s looking to move up in the world. Sharing his quest for the chicken is Genta (Tatsuya Nakadai), who claims to be no more than a yakuza (a term for gangster derived from a losing hand at cards, the very name encodes the Japanese sense that to be an outlaw is to be a loser). Their quest for chicken tempura is interrupted by an assassination. A group of idealistic young samurai have decided to murder a corrupt official. Seven of the young men survive, only to find out they’ve been betrayed, the lord who connived at their act of political murder wants them dead. The Seven will take the blame and the lord will reap the reward. The only thing that stands in the way of the evil plan is Genta’s ability to sabotage it with a Bugs Bunny-like defiance and wit that is more in the nature of a trickster hero than a sword-swinging killer.

This is of course a re-take of Kurosawa’s classics: Yojimbo, Sanjuro, Seven Samurai, and even The 47 Ronin. The joke is that the idealists are something closer to suckers, the peasant who wants to be a real samurai is disillusioned, and the loner who holds the balance is less a determined avenger than a man trying to live down his own past. Nakadai plays Genta as a marvelously diffident vagrant whose very cynicism allows him to penetrate the follies of the idealists, crooks, and hired swords around him. Takahashi plays off him giving a Hanjiro a wide-eyed acceptance and enthusiasm that literally has him bouncing off the walls. Takahashi conjures it deftly in a scene where the crooked lord is laying out his scheme for the hired thugs, while everybody is listening respectfully Hanjiro is fidgeting like a kindergartner who just had a Pepsi and half a box of Twinkies. Hanjiro is revealed as a true Son of the Earth, he likes his women “earthy” too.

Kill! plays with a comic deflation of samurai ethics in much the same way the Spaghetti Westerns turned the traditional Western on its head. If Tuco Ramirez wandered into the middle of Kill! he’d be right at home. Masaru Sato’s (he also scored Yojimbo, Sanjuro and about over a hundred other films) score is a Japanese echo of Ennio Morricone.

Okamoto was a director of consummate skill. Though never so widely known as Kurosawa, Okamoto’s many masterpieces (Sword of Doom, Red Lion, Human Bullet) have seeped into the consciousness of film fans. Okamoto’s satiric vision deserves to be better known.

-Dave Hardy

ZATOICHI
Dir. by Kenji Misumi

The story of the wandering swordsman is as deeply ingrained in Japanese cinema as the tale of the Western gunslinger is in American pop-culture. But don’t expect a chanbara (a sword-and-samurai action film) to be just a Western with a samurai for sheriff and swords for six-shooters. Zatoichi, a tremendously popular film that inspired a couple dozen sequels and a long-running TV show, features a uniquely Japanese style of hero, whose anti-hero status paradoxically confirms his idealism.

The tale is set in feudal Japan. Ichi (Shintaro Katsu) is a blind man and a masseur (a rather low-status occupation in a class-conscious society). He calls upon a yakuza boss and proceeds to engage in not-so-friendly game of dice with the boss’s loutish gangsters. After schooling the hoodlums in hygiene and honesty Ichi gets a warm welcome from Boss Sukegoro Iioka. Sukegoro has an ulterior motive for his hospitality: even though he’s blind, Ichi is the deadliest swordsman around. A gang war is brewing with the rival Sasagawa clan. Sasagawa happens to have his own sword-slinger: a samurai who has sunk to being a hired killer for gamblers.

The movie is not all bloody sword-fights. In fact, there aren’t very many at all. A great deal of attention is paid to the sordid lives of the gangsters and Ichi’s growing disgust with the kind of life he finds himself in. Therein lies the distinctive quality of Zatoichi, it is almost sentimental in its appreciation of courtesy, natural beauty, and respect for an honorable foe. Ichi’s uniquely Japanese character is that he is deeply ashamed of what he does and how he lives, even though he continues to live that way. There is none of the cynical posturing of the far more hard-boiled ronin Sanjuro played by Toshiro Mifune. Ichi is not an anti-hero in the sense that he defies society’s norms, but in that he doesn’t even consider himself to be heroic.

Zatoichi is a film that will best engage a viewer who wants a distinctively Japanese story with excellent characterization and just a bit of ferocious action.

-Dave Hardy