SAMURAI!

The Balboa Theater, December 2 - 22, 2005

A steely look, a drawn sword, and then … a frantic melee! Geishas, assassins, gamblers, destitute ronin and greedy daimyo all await you in the intoxicating realm of the samurai!

For its first annual Winter Samurai Fest, the Balboa is proud to present newly-struck 35mm prints of sixteen films representing the finest achievements in samurai cinema. Featuring great auteurs of the genre such as Akira Kurosawa, Masaki Kobayashi, Kihachi Okamoto and Hideo Gosha as well as enthralling performances by Toshiro Mifune, Tatsuya Nakadai, Shintaro Katsu, Tetsuro Tamba and many more, these timeless classics of Japanese film history represent a fusion of great art and rousing entertainment.

Kicking off the festival on December 2nd, author Patrick Galloway will speak and sign copies of his book, Stray Dogs and Lone Wolves: The Samurai Film Handbook. A San Francisco native now living in Oregon, Mr. Galloway is a lifelong film enthusiast and student of Asian culture. He wrote the introduction above and the film notes below.

Thank you to Sarah Finklea of Janus Films for providing these stunning new prints and to The Japan Foundation for the Assassination print.

Presented in association with NAATA. All films presented in 35mm, in Japanese with English subtitles.

Autographed copies of Stray Dogs and Lone Wolves: The Samurai Film Handbook will be on sale at the Balboa throughout the festival for $19.95 plus $1.65 sales tax ($21.60) . We only accept cash but there are ATM machines . For more books from the publisher see the Stonebridge site.

G. Allen Johnson provides an excellent overview, SAMURAI FESTIVAL: FILMS WITH AN EDGE, in the San Francisco Chronicle

Chuck Stephens is one of the most knowledgeable writers about Asian cinema and his SF Bay Guardian article is terrific.

There are many interesting websites to go to for reference on Japanese films and historic background about Samurais. We think this overview called "Samurai Cinema 101" is a great place to start

Patrick Galloway's site is the most thorough we've seen with great historical and cinematic links.

Friday, Dec. 2 - Tuesday, Dec. 6

Patrick Galloway, author of Stray Dogs and Lone Wolves: The Samurai Film Handbook, will introduce the Friday evening showings of Harakiri and sign books before each evening show.

Harakiri (Seppuku)

Dir. Masaki Kobayashi (1962, Shochiku)
When a young ronin suffers a heinous and tragic end at the hands of the Iyi clan, a battle-weary samurai (Tatsuya Nakadai) must teach the Iyi retainers, and their elder (Rentaro Mikuni), the true meaning of Bushido, the Warrior's Way. A devastating anti-feudal masterpiece. (Patrick Galoloway)

Script by Shinobu Hashimoto, from a novel by Yasuhiko Takiguchi; b&w, scope, 135 min.

Shows daily at (1:30), 4:15, 7:00, 9:30

One of the great masters of Japanese cinema.

— Satyajit Ray on Masaki Kobayashi

Great Artists Of the Samurai Epic

By TERRENCE RAFFERTY, New York Times
Published: August 14, 2005

Before Chinese martial artists became iconic figures for Western action-movie aficionados, stern, unsmiling Japanese swordsmen were pretty much all we knew about Eastern styles of violence and the rigorous codes that governed them. We learned much of this, of course, from the peerless Akira Kurosawa. But for many I suspect, the revelation of a samurai film festival will be the fiercely beautiful work of Masaki Kobayashi. His two movies here, "Harakiri" (1962) and "Samurai Rebellion" (1967), are amazing: stirring, subversive and, beneath their dauntingly severe surfaces, sneakily lyrical.

What Kobayashi's films are not is conspicuously action-packed, at least by the standard of slash-'em-ups like Kurosawa's "Yojimbo" (1961) and Kihachi Okamoto's "Sword of Doom" (1966) and "Kill!" (1968), all of which are being screened in the series. Both "Harakiri" and "Samurai Rebellion" are slow-burn movies, in which everything builds to a climactic bloodletting, and the point of the violence is not so much its kinetic exhilaration as its tragic inevitability. Travis Bickle, the ticking time bomb of "Taxi Driver," might well recognize the profoundly alienated warrior heroes of Kobayashi's pictures as his ancestors.

But the internal conflicts of Tsugumo (Tatsuya Nakadai), the hero of "Harakiri," and Isaburo (Toshiro Mifune), the hero of "Samurai Rebellion," are, if anything, more acute than even those of the frustrated young urban loner Travis. These men, in middle age, are facing the realization that everything they believe in is conspiring to betray them: that the social order to which they have been loyal all their lives feels no loyalty toward them. And the lofty, spiritual-seeming principles of their samurai code, which demand unwavering obedience to authority, are no help at all when authority, as is its habit, turns capricious and cruel. Although this is a tough call, it's at least arguable that living, as Kobayashi's heroes do, in an absurd universe is actually more deranging than living in the bankrupt, crime-infested, sanitation-challenged New York of the 1970's.

The dire events of "Harakiri" take place in 1630, in the early days of centralization under the Tokugawa shogunate: the power of local feudal lords is diminishing and the samurai whom they once employed to fight their constant battles are now largely unnecessary. Some of these masterless samurai, the movie tells us, have developed a perverse but apparently reliable con: the unemployed warrior presents himself at the house of an established clan and, pleading desperation and disgrace, asks for a place to commit suicide honorably (i.e., with proper observance of the precisely codified ritual). The clan, it's hoped, will deny the request and give the poor man a job, or, failing that, throw a little money his way and tell him to go disembowel himself somewhere else.

At the beginning, hollow-eyed Tsugumo turns up at the headquarters of the Iyi clan with just such a request, and the Iyi brain trust — hardliners who consider the suicide con shameful — prepare to oblige him. Before Tsugumo will do the deed, though, he insists on telling a story. It concerns a younger samurai who, likewise taken at his word by the stiff-backed Iyi honchos, was compelled to kill himself, very painfully, with a dull bamboo sword. (Kobayashi shows the gruesome act in flashback, and although the scene is elegantly staged, you may feel, as this horror unfolds, that you've never been more grateful a movie was shot in black and white.)

Tsugumo, it turns out, has an agenda beyond self-slaughter or simple extortion, and that agenda — not unheard of in this genre — is revenge. Or, at least, satisfaction: some acknowledgment by the Iyi clan that their treatment of the young samurai (the hero's son-in-law, we learn) was, for all the righteous invocations of honor and tradition, purely barbarous.

After nearly two hours of philosophical debate and mournful flashback narration, "Harakiri" ends the only way it can, with a bloodbath. The climactic battle, a brilliantly choreographed dance of rage and exhaustion, is as exciting as any action-movie addict could wish, but it provides few of the usual vicarious thrills of consummated vengeance. There is, rather, a melancholy, held-breath stillness to the whole sorry spectacle: even at its violent end the movie continues to hover, as it has from its opening scenes, between resignation and cold fury.

"Samurai Rebellion" is a bit less highly regarded than "Harakiri" (which won the Special Jury Prize at the 1963 Cannes Film Festival), It deserves to be rediscovered: if it is a slightly less intense, less scarily focused picture than "Harakiri," it is also, I think, a subtler one. Set a century later, "Rebellion" depicts a society that appears more settled but is, as the hero discovers, no less treacherous and no more forgiving of perceived transgressions.

Isaburo, a master swordsman, is in every other respect a placid and utterly ordinary family man, with a job, a couple of sons and a wife by whom he is, he ruefully admits, henpecked. Most of the drama, until very near the end, is domestic, revolving around the sorts of issues that might arise in a Yasujiro Ozu film, where they would be resolved, with tight smiles and quiet tears, over endless cups of tea.

Kobayashi's world, however, is one in which household arrangements can be dictated by forces even more unyielding than those of social convention — in which Isaburo's clan can demand that the faithful samurai's eldest son marry one of the lord's cast-off mistresses, and then, years later, demand with equal insistence that she be returned to the palace. So Isaburo and his son, who has come to love his wife, have to strap on their swords and make a stand. There's probably less swordplay in "Rebellion" than there is in "Harakiri," but the humbler context of this drama makes the violence seem even more shocking, the depredations of authority even more pointlessly malign. And you feel, in Mifune's superbly nuanced performance, that Isaburo has to work harder than doomed Tsugumo does to make sense of what's happening to him — to fight his way toward something better than the suicidal resignation that seems the only road out of this skewed moral landscape.

The greatness of these movies is so unambiguous that you're bound to wonder why Masaki Kobayashi isn't better known, and I have no good answer for that. This series should provide him some belated justice.

He was a remarkable director, and the proof is in the delicately controlled style of these anti-authoritarian martial-arts pictures. Every shot is impeccably composed, every camera movement smooth and serene, every cut logical and exact. The filmmaking itself is supremely orderly without being oppressive. That's an impressive achievement, and in this context a terribly moving one. The clarity of art, Kobayashi's movies say, is everything. It's the way out that his noble samurai, for all their skill and faith and courage, couldn't find.

A good exploration of Harakiri

Wednesday-Thursday, Dec. 7-8

Throne of Blood

Dir. Akira Kurosawa (1957, Toho)
Shakespeare's Macbeth is relocated to 16th Century Japan. Washizu (Toshiro Mifune) and wife (Machiko Kyo) plot the foul murder of their lord and descend into madness. Much bloodletting ensues. A faithful retelling, except for the three witches, here distilled into one malignant she-ghost. Spellbinding. (Patrick Galoloway)

Script by Shinobu Hashimoto, Ryuzo Kikushima, Hideo Oguni and Akira Kurosawa, from the play Macbeth by William Shakespeare; b&w, 110 min.

(12:50), 4:50, 8:50

Akira Kurosawa's 1957 version of Macbeth is a virtuoso exercise, as stylized and formalist in its way as Eisenstein's "Ivan the Terrible" movies, though not as ponderous or as inexplicably strange. This is like a demonstration of the uses of violence, décor, pageantry, and costuming, and it's almost a textbook in the techniques for making a movie move. Besides that, it has the great Isuzu Yamada washing her bloody hands, and West or East, there may never be a more chilling Lady Macbeth. Kurosawa is at his playful best when Birnam Wood advances on the castle, and that's just it — he loves this sort of effect so much it's all play. The ending, with Toshiro Mifune's Macbeth stuck full of arrows, like a porcupine-quill cushion, suggests the wildest Kabuki tradition. (Eisenstein was also fascinated by Kabuki.) The action for its own sake can seem like an orgy of masculine delight in warfare. Its greatness is in Kurosawa's glorious bad taste; he flings mad, absurd images onto the screen. He has the courage to go over the top.

— Pauline Kael, New Yorker

A great Toshiro Mifune site with info and images.

Is it Shakespeare?

plus

New Tale of Zatoichi

Dir. Tokuzo Tanaka (1963, Daiei)
The third installment in the Zatoichi franchise (and the first in color), New Tale explores the inner Ichi (Shintaro Katsu), painting an intimate portrait of the blind swordsman. He falls in love with his sword teacher's sister, confesses his sins, even vows to give up his sword. We'll see … (Patrick Galoloway)

Script by Minoru Inuzuka from a story by Kan Shimozawa ; color, 91min

(3:00), 7:00

Who is Zatoichi?

Zatoichi is the famous, fictional, blind masseur and roving gambler who, when innocent lives are threatened, becomes the ruthless swordsman who can cut down a dozen men — yakuza and samurai alike — before they know what hit them.

He's as famous a film character in Japan as the Indiana Jones character is in the States. He wandered the Japanese countryside in the early 1800s during the waning years of the Tokugawa Shogunate, barely scraping a living by giving massages and gambling. Although saddled with the physical handicap of blindness and the social handicap of living at the bottom of a rigid feudal class structure, Zatoichi manages to gain the upper hand with nearly everyone he meets, including the samurai or warrior class. He achieves this by using his good-natured wit, perceptive understanding of human nature, keen sense of hearing, and the lightning fast draw of his cane sword.

— From Rick Momii's website

Tarantino's KILL BILL films paid homage to Zatoichi and last year a new version of Zatoichi was made by cult director Takeshi "Beat" Kitano, who also played the lead.

Vera H-C Chan wrote an excellent overview

Some rare original posters from the series

Friday-Saturday. Dec. 9-10

Three Outlaw Samurai

Dir. Hideo Gosha (1964, Shochiku)
Three ronin, one cool (Tetsuro Tamba), one cynical (Mikijiro Hira) and one comical (Isamu Nagato), defend hapless farmers from a powerful foe. Gosha's directorial debut is a triumph, filled with knowing Kurosawa allusions and delivered with the kinetic style and pyrotechnic swordplay that would become his trademark. Highly recommended. B&w, Shochiku Grandscope (95min)

(2:40), 7:15

Three Outlaw Samurai was Hideo Gosha's first feature film, and it's fresh and brilliant right out of the box. Gosha was unique among film directors of his day: he started out in TV in 1953, working as a reporter, then as producer and director. Three Outlaw Samurai is based on a TV series he'd developed, and the characters and settings have a cool, stylized, lived-in quality that stems from their previous life on the small screen; there's an easy familiarity, you feel like you know these guys. Add to this the fact that several character traits and plot points have been lifted wholesale from Yojimbo, Sanjuro, and Seven Samurai, and no wonder this movie feels so right. If you're going to steal, steal from the best. However, Gosha's directorial style is so modern and kinetic, the Kurosawa components play more as homage than heist. If you weren't looking for them, you might not notice.

The story concerns the eponymous ronin, Shiba (Tetsuro Tamba), Sakura (Shintaro Katsu look-alike Isamu Nagato), and Kikyo (Mikijiro Hira). Shiba is all cool, exuding a calm self-confidence and takecharge attitude as only Tamba can. Sakura is the portly Porthos of the piece whose weapon is the spear. He provides the comic relief but is as deadly as his compatriots. Kikyo is an ultracynical, sophisticated samurai working for the dishonorable chamberlain of the local clan, but eventually he comes around and joins the other two.

Shiba happens upon three farmers holding a young woman of high rank hostage in an old ramshackle mill. She turns out to be Aya (Miyuki Kuwano), the daughter of the chamberlain. The farmers, led by Jinbei (Kamatari Fujiwara), are starving and desperate to have their petition of grievances heard; however, the chamberlain will have none of it, hence the standoff. Shiba's just looking for a place to sleep for the night and figures the hostage drama will make for some free entertainment. But soon enough he's embroiled in the conflict.

Sakura, sitting in a cell for vagrancy, is offered his freedom and some money if he'll help eradicate the kidnappers. He likes to fight, so off he goes. On his way, he's attacked by another desperate farmer while urinating by the roadside. So keen are Sakura's reflexes that he has slain the man before he knows it, and with a childlike petulance, asks, "What made him do that? Reckless fellow!" When he learns that the men he's been sent to kill are poor farmers fighting for justice, Sakura declares, "I quit. I'm originally from a farm myself. From this moment, I'm on the side of the farmers." Shiba asks Kikyo, also present, whether he'd like to join them for some millet porridge. "No thanks," Kikyo sneers, "I prefer good food, wine, plenty of it." He saunters off, but he'll be back. Circumstances change, characters and groups turn on one another constantly, plots shift, there is many an exciting sword battle, an appearance by the "Gods of Death," and before it's over, Kikyo is fighting side by side with Shiba and Sakura, bodies strewn about them like autumn leaves.

Regarding the Kurosawa elements, it's like this: the lead ronin, Shiba, is strongly evocative of Toshiro Mifune's character in Yojimbo. Under the opening credits, we follow him as he walks along the lonely road, his back to the camera. A stray dog trots by (albeit without the severed hand). Later we see him deciding which way to go by throwing a lady's hairpin in the air (in Yojimbo it was a stick) and following the direction it points. There's also Shiba's brutal beaten-to-a-pulp scene, followed by a crawling escape beneath decking (just like Toshiro Mifune and Clint Eastwood to boot!) as his pursuers chase about right above his head. The theme of ronin helping poor farmers, while not the property of Kurosawa, nevertheless shows the influence of Seven Samurai, and one of the three ronin being an ex-farmer certainly sounds like Mifune's Kikuchiyo. Then there's the issue of a savvy ronin helping a bunch of amateurs match the political machinations of a wicked and entrenched authority (see Sanjuro). Again, these touches are more circumstantial than outright plagiaristic. I'm merely pointing out how a talented filmmaker can learn his craft by sitting at the feet of the master (and maybe snagging a couple of things on his way out).

Gosha and director of photography Tadashi Sakai have also learned a thing or two about deep-focus framing and mise-en-scène from Kazuo Miyagawa's work in Yojimbo. Notice how people are nicely broken off into frames within frames by window slats, prison bars, all manner of architectural latticing. This is not so much stylistically derivative, however, as it is simply good form. In addition, there are plenty of nice touches, such as: light glinting dramatically off sword and spear blades; spookily lit dungeon scenes; a general foreboding darkness throughout (fully half the film takes place at night); and to mark the onset of the grand finale sword battle, a sudden manual tilt of the camera into an extreme dutch angle, communicating the skewing of everything that has gone before.

As for story direction and pacing, Gosha's style crackles with electricity, it pulses, running through the movie like a current. Perhaps it's due to his early training in television that his films are infused with the immediacy that television demands—fast-paced plot and explosive action sequences—yet tempered by the cerebral and contemplative dimensions of film. It's slick, yet deep. It's deceptively simple, yet extremely sophisticated. What results is something wholly complete, finished in a way that films are rarely finished, every element in balance with the rest, providing the audience a sense of satisfaction akin to fine dining or good sex.

As a first effort, Three Outlaw Samurai is sublime. When you consider that each successivefilm saw Gosha's powers growing, you realize, as you pursue Gosha, that you're in for some of the most formidable and unforgettable of samurai film experiences.

— Adapted from Patrick Galloway's, Stray Dogs and Lone Wolves: The Samurai Film Handbook. The book continues with an in-depth discussion of the Kurosawa influences on this work as well as Gosha's own unique style.

On the same program:

The Hidden Fortress

Dir. Akira Kurosawa (1958, Toho)
Two luckless peasants (Kamatari Fujiwara and Minoru Chiaki), a samurai general (Toshiro Mifune) and a beautiful, strong-willed princess (Misa Uehara) steal secretly through Warring States-period Japan in this rousing samurai adventure. A peasant revolt, gold fever, a fire festival, action, suspense, betrayal -- it's all here. Later re-made as Star Wars. b&w, TohoScope, Restored original 139 minute version

(12:00), 4:35, 9:10 The Treasure of the Sierra Madre meets Star Wars (minus the spaceships) in Warring States period Japan. More on this later. . . .

There's a lot going on in The Hidden Fortress: action, suspense, gold fever, a peasant revolt, a spear duel, a fire festival, mounted samurai in sword combat, forced labor, a beautiful princess, greed, a cunning general, betrayal, intrigue, and at the center of it all two luckless, pathetic peasants. Akira Kurosawa had just made two very down films (Throne of Blood and The Lower Depths) and was ready for a bit of a romp. The result was The Hidden Fortress, the most fun-loving, straightahead samurai adventure in his oeuvre.

The story revolves around Tahei (Minoru Chiaki) and Matashichi (sometimes listed as "Matakishi," played by Kamatari Fujiwara), two constantly bickering peasants caught up in the chaos of a provincial war. Akizuki Province is currently occupied by the victorious Yamana forces. However, Akizuki's princess Yuki (Misa Uehara) and all of Akizuki's gold reserves have vanished. There is a reward for the princess, and the starving Tahei and Matashichi decide this would be a good way to make some quick dough (they have, of course, no idea where she is). They do manage to stumble upon some of the Akizuki gold, ingeniously hidden inside pieces of firewood. (Ironically, they'd just escaped a forced labor dig in Akizuki Castle looking for the same gold.)

No sooner do the two bungling buddies make their find than a mysterious stranger appears. He follows them menacingly, then finally sits down at their campfire. He has a piece of gold too. They take him for a mercenary and he recruits them to help him find the rest of the gold, promising them a cut. He is in fact General Rokurota Makabe (Toshiro Mifune), a legendary Akizuki samurai. His goal is to move the gold and the princess (both secured in the hidden fortress) to safety in neighboring Hayakawa Province. Unfortunately the only way to get there is through the enemy Yamana territory. He convinces the punchy pair that the princess is his mute girlfriend, and after making them dig for a few days in the hot sun, reveals the cache of gold. It's time to go.

From here the movie becomes a road picture of sorts. Maka-be uses the gold to control Tahei and Matashichi, and though they attempt to run off with it periodically, Makabe manages to stay on top of the situation and keep one step ahead of his pursuers. This often involves giving the two peasants heart failure by treating the gold (hidden in large bundles of sticks) in cavalier fashion to elude detection, a hide-in-plain-sight strategy.

Eventually the group find themselves at a traditional Japanese fire festival. Tahei and Matashichi lose their minds as Makabe, suspecting they've been spotted, tells them to throw the goldfilled sticks into a giant bonfire as the peasants sing:

The life of a man
Burn it with the fire
The life of an insect
Throw it into the fire
Ponder and you'll see
The world is dark
And this floating world is a dream
Burn with abandon.

The Buddhist theme of the song contrasts with the two peasants' gold fever, emphasizing it all the more. This is just one of a dozen thrilling, heart-stopping moments in The Hidden Fortress, a roaring, never-gets-old actioner that finds Toshiro Mifune taking a more supporting role as straight man to the comical capers of Chiaki and Fujiwara.

The Hidden Fortress was the last film Kurosawa shot for Toho as an employee; Toho, ever nervous about the free-spending director, forced him to form his own production company and, in turn, take on part of the cost of future productions. It is also Kurosawa's first widescreen film, and he utilizes the oblong frame with intuitive perfection. Whether its open vistas and mountain ranges, or subtle mise-en-scène depicting dynamics between characters, Kurosawa masterfully manipulates the screen elements within this new, broader range.

The part of the plucky princess was a casting nightmare. Kurosawa saw some 200 actresses, but none would do. He finally put out a call to the Toho theater chain, requesting that theater employees keep their eyes peeled for the special young face he sought. This approach paid off with the discovery of 20-year-old Misa Uehara, who plays the role of the fierce girl raised as a boy. When Mifunes's character informs her that his sister, her kagemusha, has died in her place, she castigates him for his cold samurai manner, "Your nobility that doesn't even shed a tear when you've killed your sister!" She storms out, and subsequently blubs away, her anguished tears flowing from the real-life pressure of the shoot. Her career only lasted a few years, but her performance here is excellent and has stood the test of time.

As to the Star Wars issue mentioned at the outset of this review, it's widely known that George Lucas appropriated several key elements of The Hidden Fortress for his space saga. Tahei and Matashichi became R2-D2 and C-3PO, the tough princess stayed a tough princess, her male protector splintered into several male leads, and the whole issue of moving through dangerous territory on a mission is utilized as well. The first and last scenes of the film figure largely in Star Wars, as does the choice to focus on the two underlings. And let's not forget the Japanese influence on costumes and a little thing called a light saber (read samurai sword). Just add a healthy dose of Frank Herbert's Dune, and the recipe is complete. (To his credit, George Lucas would later return the favor, helping put together a production deal with 20th Century Fox for Kurosawa's 1980 feature, Kagemusha.)

The Hidden Fortress was a big box office hit for Kurosawa, the biggest since Seven Samurai and only to be surpassed by Yojimbo. In addition, it was a critical success, garnering the director the Tokyo Blue Ribbon Prize, International Film Critics Prize, and a Silver Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival.

— From Patrick Galloway's, Stray Dogs and Lone Wolves: The Samurai Film Handbook.

Read Japanese? Kurosawa site

Sunday-Monday, Dec. 11-12

Samurai Saga

Dir. Hiroshi Inagaki (1959, Toho)
A poet swordsman with a remarkable proboscis (Toshiro Mifune) drinks, duels and professes his unrequited love through a lesser-endowed man in this samurai re-make of Rostand's Cyrano De Bergerac. Inagaki, Toho Studio's resident epic-maker, imparts vivid color and period flourish to this faithful retelling of the French classic. SCR Hiroshi Inagaki, from the play Cyrano De Bergerac by Edmond Rostand; color TohoScope (111 min)

(2:45), 7:00

The official Toshiro Mifune site

BIG IN JAPAN

A poll was conducted in 1984 to uncover the most famous person in Japanese cinema. To the surprise of film critics, Akira Kurosawa, the Oscar-winning director, didn' top the list. He was beaten into second place by his on-screen alter ego, Toshiro Mifune (1920-1997). For what Kurosawa was to John Ford, Toshiro Mifune was to John Wayne: an actor with enough talent and charisma to redefine the big-screen hero.

Although he was to become an archetypal Japanese movie star, Mifune spent the first twenty years of his life in Manchuria with his missionary parents. It was World War II, and a call-up to the Imperial Air Force, that brought him to Japan. Mifune would later describe this time in the armed forces as "desperate" and "a nightmare;" it left him with a feeling of rage that he was to channel into his performances on-screen. Not that Mifune yet envisaged himself as an actor. When the war ended, he applied to the Toho movie studio to be a cameraman; somehow, his application form got misdirected. He was called to an actors' audition, where he impressed the young Kurosawa-and a great cinematic partnership was born.

Mifune and Kurosawa's first movie together was Drunken Angel (Yoidore Tenshi, 1948). Mifune had been given a minor role as a young hoodlum, but proved so convincing that his part was fleshed out into a lead. Kurosawa realized that he'd found an actor capable of embodying his cinematic vision. "He reacts so swiftly to direction," Kurosawa explained. "You know, if I say one thing, he understands ten." Mifune would star in a further fifteen of Kurosawa's films, bringing Brando-esque intensity and aggressive spontaneity to his work. Nowhere was this more evident than in the Oscar-winning Rashomon (1950), in which Mifune played a dialogue-spitting, fly-swatting bandit. Later movies saw him refine this character into a dark, brooding hero. Such was the cop in Stray Dog (Nora Inu, 1949); the lone samurai taking on rival gangs in Yojimbo (1961); and his personal favorite, the brash peasant accompanying six nobles in Seven Samurai (Shichinin no Samurai, 1954). In effect, Mifune had taken the classical Japanese hero-brave, self-sacrificing, strong-willed-and reinvented it, adding layers of world-weariness and sardonic humor. It won him two Best Actor awards at the Venice Film Festival, for Yojimbo and Red Beard (Akahige, 1964); and heavily influenced Hollywood actors like Clint Eastwood, Steve McQueen and Paul Newman, who followed his "tough-guy-with-a-heart" approach.

Mifune and Kurosawa were at their artistic peak when, in 1965, they suddenly stopped working together. The cause of their feud was never disclosed. Mifune chose to broaden his repertoire, founding a production company and acting school, and playing more conventionally heroic figures on-screen, like Admiral Yamamoto (Yamamoto Isoroku, 1968; Midway, 1976). He also appeared in English language films, with mixed success: he matched Lee Marvin glare-for-glare in John Boorman's Hell in the Pacific, but his cameo in Spielberg's 1941 was as disappointing as the movie itself. However, Mifune enjoyed an Indian summer in 1980, when he starred in the hugely popular TV adaptation of "Shogun."

Toshiro Mifune died of organ failure on Christmas Eve, 1997; Akira Kurosawa would pass away a few months later. Asked to pinpoint the significance of his former star, Kurosawa stated, "Mifune had a talent I had never before encountered in the Japanese film world." Rarely has his talent been equaled since.

— Richard Eaton, Metropolis

and

Assassination

Dir. Masahiro Shinoda (1964, Shochiku)
Japanese New Wave auteur Shinoda's first period drama concerns the enigmatic Hachiro Kiyokawa (Tetsuro Tamba), real-life master swordsman and political manipulator during the last days of the Tokugawa shogunate, the bloody Bakumatsu period. Kiyokawa is stalked by a swordsman (Seven Samurai alumnus Isao Kimura) with one single-minded purpose: Assassination! b&w Shochiku Grandscope (104 min)

(12:40), 4:55, 9:10

Assassination (or Ansatsu) marked Masahiro Shinoda's first attempt at a period film, and is widely considered to be his finest achievement. Previously gaining fame and status alongside Nagisa Oshima and Kiju Yoshida, challenging established Japanese cinema with tales of reckless youth, The Dry Lake (1960) and the seminal yakuza drama Pale Flower (1964) Shinoda graduated from Shochiku, where, like Shohei Imamura, his grounding was working as an assistant to Yasujiro Ozu.

The story of Assassination begins with the events of 1853 when "four black ships" — the foreign steamboats of Commander Matthew Perry — anchored at Edo Bay, sparking civil unrest and the major political maneuvering that saw the end of the Tokugawa Shogunate. At a time when assassination had become a disturbing political tool, Shinoda's film follows Hachiro Kiyokawa (Tetsuro Tamba), an ambitious, masterless samurai whose allegiances drift dangerously between the Shogunate and the Emperor. Filmed in richly stylish black and white 'Scope by cinematographer Masao Kosugi, Shinoda's film explores the character of Kiyokawa as he singlehandedly attempts, against a backdrop of betrayal and abrupt violence, to prevent the outbreak of civil war.

With an award-winning score by Toru Takemitsu (Pitfall, The Face of Another) and a deft, twisting narrative structure, Assassination's profound nihilism has a striking contemporary resonance which fiercely displays the director's skill and individual vision.

— Eureka

Yale tribute to director Masahiro Shinoda

Tuesday-Wednesday, Dec. 13-14

Bandits vs. Samurai Squadron

Dir. Hideo Gosha (1978, Shochiku)
Elaborate heists, bloody vendettas, epic sword battles and much, much more await you in this marathon samurai/crime extravaganza. Tatsuya Nakadai, Tetsuro Tamba and Shima Iwashita head up the massive cast and Gosha directs with his usual style and flair, highlighting the gruesome realities of sword combat. SCR Kaneo Ikegami; color (163 min)

(3:25), 8:15

Portrait of star Tatsuya Nakadai

In this, the first edition of the new Focus, film critic Chuck Stephens takes an in-depth look at the five-decade-long career of the versatile and venerable leading man, chanbara icon, and Japanese screen legend Tatsuya Nakadai.

When I was a boy and Abbey Road was still on the New Release racks at my local record store, one familiar pop culture question my friends and I would often entertain concerned the potential existence and probable identity of a "fifth Beatle"—a session-seasoned ghost-star brought in to buoy up Paul's bass lines, or some funk-for-hire kagemusha, secretly shadow-doubling keyboard rumbles deep within the mix. Today—grayer, far less groovy, and no longer so susceptible to such frivolous and rhetorical pop-cult idylls as those of yore—I tend toward weightier and more serious concerns. The possibility, for example, that alongside the seven blade runners of Akira Kurosawa's sword-toting supergroup there might have strode an extra warrior—an "eighth samurai."

In fact, the existence of a supernumerary slice-artist among those Seven Samurai has been verifiable all along, and sharp-eyed cineastes will have long since spotted his inaugural if momentary membership in that Kurosawa-gumi, just as you can today—by scanning and rescanning the frames between the film's ten-minute-sixteen- and ten-minute-nineteen-second marks. The fleetingly glimpsed swordsman who saunters through those scant few frames of screen time has no bearing on that 1954 classic's surrounding narrative, and if you blinked through those three seconds, his absence would remain unfelt—he is but one stubbly bearded mercenary among the many potential warriors-for-hire that the film's desperate rice farmers observe striding through the city, his only attribute an attitude of indifference, another replacement killer, cameo'ed and left unnamed. But for Tatsuya Nakadai—then a contract player at Shochiku Studios and not yet twenty-three years old—those flash-frames in the spotlight would prove three of the most decisive seconds in front of a camera an actor ever spent.

Soon to become as overwhelmingly familiar to Japanese film fans as the pair of Kurosawan icons upon whom Seven Samurai most depends—the older, wiser Takeshi Shimura and the wilder, dankly odored Toshiro Mifune—Nakadai wouldn't remain in eighth position very long. Even before he'd succeed in working again with the director nicknamed "the Emperor"—under whose imprimatur he'd eventually rise in rank to become the jidai-geki genre's irrefutable "second samurai"—Nakadai was rapidly forming associations with an entire generation of filmmakers that would last most of them a lifetime. By the end of the decade that followed, he'd already made his mark in the films of left-of-mainstream studio drifters Mikio Naruse and Kon Ichikawa, radical-aesthetes Masaki Kobayashi and Hiroshi Teshigahara, and idiom savants Hideo Gosha and Kihachi Okamoto—and each of those directors would continue hiring Nakadai throughout the following decades, as if they'd come to consider his recurrent presence an essential component of their auteur identities till their very ends. For most of them, Nakadai's name would still faithfully appear in the closing credits of their final films.

As befits a celestial celebrity from the golden era of any movie-mad country's studio system heyday, Nakadai's storied "discovery" is so legendary and stardust-sprinkled as to dissuade even the most cynical historian's efforts at disproof. Born in Tokyo, while Japan was still enjoying the prewar fizz of Jazz Age frivolity and Western-flavored high times, on December 13, 1930—or, according to some sources, in 1932, the year Yasujiro Ozu completed his classic I Was Born, But . . .—Nakadai, so the story goes, was working as a shop clerk when, in 1953, fledging Shochiku Studios director Kobayashi chanced to walk through the door. The actor made his screen debut in Kobayashi's first film, The Thick-Walled Room, later that year. Whether or not the shop clerk story is true, Nakadai was scarcely green when Kobayashi first encountered him, and it was his prior training as a stage actor specializing in Shingeki (the Japanese New Theater movement, which rejected the traditions of Noh and Kabuki in favor of Western "realism") as much as his fresh-faced photogeneity that quickly endeared the young actor to directors and audiences. By 1960, Nakadai had more than twenty feature films on his Shochiku résumé, including the three installments of Kobayashi's nine-hour social realist scroll-painting The Human Condition (1959-61), where he staggers through the trenches from hell to Manchuria and back, only to be systematically stripped of his convictions, his conscience, and the last vestiges of the film's titular concern, until the horrors of war are etched into the death mask that had once been his face. As the new decade dawned, so too did Nakadai's hard-won celebrity as one of the last of pre-new wave Japanese cinema's most versatile and resilient new talents—and shortly thereafter, as one of samurai cinema's all-time genre giants and immortal superstars.

There are those who like to say that Nakadai was once, and perhaps still is, the second best-known Japanese actor in the world, his global cine-celebrity rivaled only by that of Toshiro Mifune, with whom, from opposing extremes of the widescreen battlefield, he would come so often face to scowling face, in such genre-molding chanbara chestnuts as Yojimbo (1961), Sanjuro (1962), The Sword of Doom (1966), and Samurai Rebellion (1967). The truth is that neither actor ever fully cracked the crossover conundrum, and if the stage-trained and always technique-driven Nakadai never quite got the opportunity of working with an oddball international auteur and a charismatic celebrity costar like the ones afforded the flamboyant and fiery Mifune in his encounter with John Boorman and Lee Marvin on Hell in the Pacific (1968), he also never suffered the sorts of indignities that assailed Mifune after Shogun (1980), and haunted him to his grave. Indeed, if Nakadai is less recognizable around the world today than ever before, perhaps it has something to do with his longevity: while all of his most famous cinematic collaborators have now slipped the surly bonds of earth, the still hearty and passionate 72-year-old Nakadai keeps right on working in Japanese movies, television, and in the place he first began, as an actor on the stage.

From the walking (nearly-)dead ronin of Kobayashi's Harakiri (1962), where the venality of official indifference to the Edo era's rampant poverty and starving peasant class is reduced to cowering terror by the actor's tomb-toned vocal intonations and horror-hollowed cheeks, to the alternately scurvied insouciance and Silver Surfer-like existential interiority he'd evince in Okamoto's tonally disparate genre classics Kill! and The Sword of Doom, Nakadai's lingering legacy rests entirely on his resplendent and extraordinary range. Was it the salt-and-pepper point-counterpoint of his fame-making roles as Mifune's altogether unlike antagonists in Yojimbo and Sanjuro that first set Nakadai's depth-testing of his various characters' visual and visceral extremes in motion? In the former film, Nakadai essays the part of a flashy young assassin named Unosuke-who, according to some, "looks as timid as a rabbit" in order to conceal the savagery of "a wolf inside"—as if he were some sort of time-out-of-joint chinpira, his top-knot climaxing in a toy-poodle spray of bangs, a loudly patterned and tightly wound muffler warming his throat atop a ratty old kimono, an imported Old West six-shooter hidden lethally within. Though a gale-force wind sends him gusting through most of the picture, he exits with a simper, luffless as he dies. In the sequel, as the shaven-headed and stolid security chief Murota, his steely efficiency and ossified air of authority render Nakadai almost entirely unrecognizable from the earlier role, and his iron-girdled rectitude makes the fire hydrant hyperbole of his jaw-dropping destiny during Sanjuro's climactic showdown at once hilarious and obscene.

Those prone to cruising a film's back alleys in search of subtext will be richly rewarded by a close reading of Nakadai's career-and not just because his demise in Sanjuro remains the single greatest money shot that sexually inexplicit cinema has ever seen. The actor has always made a habit of imbuing his most complex creations with a combination of adamantine outer armor and exquisitely tormented internal affairs. And while some may find Nakadai's candied affectations and ultraexpostulatory approach to acting overbearing, his fans remain forgiving, as if preferring their emperor not just fully clothed but overadorned-a sentiment with which the Mifune of Yojimbo and Sanjuro would certainly concur. When the dying Unosuke asks the scruffy yojimbo if he might cradle his pistol for a final moment, tenderly admitting that he feels "sort of naked" without it, Mifune reluctantly submits; dead already, Murota is eulogized by Mifune as "a naked sword" whose tragic flaw suggests nothing so much as an actor out of costume: "He couldn't stay in his sheath."

— Excerpted from the full portrait which can be found complete and with photos here

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Zatoichi the Fugitive

Dir. Tokuzo Tanaka (1963, Daiei)
The fourth film in the blind swordsman series, The Fugitive is jam-packed with entertaining characters, yakuza gang intrigue and amazing swordplay, the latter courtesy of star and fight choreographer, the irrepressible Shintaro Katsu. Here we find Katsu hitting his stride, confidently embodying a character he would play for decades. Color Daieiscope (86 min)

(1:40), 6:30

The adventures of Ichi, the blind swordsman continues with a story heavy on drama until the end which pays off with a spectacularly ferocious showdown between Ichi and an entire clan of yakuza thugs.

Episode four follows the previous film in offering a light-hearted opening as Ichi participates in an open wrestling competition. Of course, trouble is just around the corner as a thug named Kisuke loses his life attempting to collect a bounty on Ichi. Ichi pays respects to the dead man's mother and begins to seek out the man responsible for the bounty which turns out to be a local yakuza boss and banker named Yagiri Tokyuro. Yagiri has hired a ruthless ronin named Tanakura to dispatch with Ichi. Their impending clash is complicated by the fact that Tanakura's lover is Tane, a woman who returns from Ichi's past (Zatoichi 1) and whom he still loves.

Ichi's main companion becomes Nobu, a spunky innkeeper's daughter who loves Sakichi, the hesitant heir to the Shimonida clan. Yagiri plots to kill Sakichi, take over their territory and do away with Ichi all in one fell swoop. He convinces Sakichi to lure Ichi into a run down house as Yagiri's entire clan surrounds the structure. But, the unexpected murder of Tane at the hands of the ronin sparks a fury in Ichi who charges out to lay waste to the yakuza thugs and exact revenge on Tanakura.

Featuring much of the same crew from the previous film, The Fugitive shares the same level of quality in terms of production, acting, and story. Shintaro Katsu does a terrific job of evoking child-like mirth and immediately switching to heavy sorrow. Without a doubt, this series would not be nearly as good without his increasingly rich performances.

Most of the film is shot outdoors, on location and does take good advantage of the scenery. This is highlighted at the end as bird's eye shots of Ichi struggling against a small army of yakuza in and around a pond. Up to this point, much of the film is heaped in character development and features little action. For fans of this series who appreciate the depth and range of characters present, its just as entertaining as the action. And the final match up makes up for any loss of swordplay during the bulk of the film with an incredible display of animal fury as Ichi launches himself into the center of the mob and begins cutting them down like wheat. Interestingly, this potentially gory scenario is virtually bloodless and can be compared to the sort of American Westerns being produced at the same time where a simple grasping of the chest before falling down sufficed to denote being maimed or killed.

The Fugitive succeeds in offering an entertaining continuation of the series, despite it's limited amount of action early on. The colorful actors' performances, period recreation, and depth of storytelling are maintained which makes for satisfying viewing.

— Mark Pollard, Kung Fu Cinema.com

Another review in Asian Cinema Drifter The Zatoichi series was popular for many years with Shintaro Katsu as the blind swordsman. Here's a fan site covering the entire series.

Thursday-Friday, Dec. 15-16

Samurai Rebellion

Dir. Masaki Kobayashi (1967, Toho)
In Kobayashi's other samurai masterwork, Toshiro Mifune portrays a mature samurai retainer who endures numerous indignities at the hands of his lord. Finally, when the very fabric of his family is ripped asunder, he decides on the path of rebellion. Co-stars Tatsuya Nakadai and Go Kato. SCR Shinobu Hashimoto, from the novel by Yasuhiko Takiguchi; b&w, scope (121 min)

(12:10), 4:40, 9:10

A fan site to Mifune

Dave Kehr recently wrote in the NY Times:

The Japanese call them chambara eiga, or swordfight films, while the rest of the world refers to them, imprecisely but unshakably, as samurai movies. As one learns quickly when one dives into this very deep pool, ''samurai'' is only one rank among many in the militarized world of feudal Japan, where every individual is assigned a strict position in a social hierarchy. (The films are usually set in the Edo period, 1603 to 1867.)

Many heroes of samurai films — including those of the swordfight film most famous in the West, Akira Kurosawa's ''Seven Samurai'' from 1954 — are actually ronin. These are professional soldiers without clan loyalty who roam the countryside involving themselves in local conflicts or personal vendettas, trying to scrape together a living from their skills in violence. Dramatically, ronin are much more compelling figures than the professionally and philosophically conformist samurai, and Americans love them because we have grown up with them, too — only we call them gunslingers and locate them in our own safely distanced Edo period, the Old West.

Westerns and chambara share many obvious parallels. Though chambara had been a staple of the Japanese cinema since its beginnings, it is the implied thesis of many films that the social unrest of the 60's brought the genre new meanings and elevated it to new heights. A form that once played on Japanese nostalgia for a lost, well-ordered past became a vehicle for the anti-authoritarian and individualist impulses that had been building in Japan since the end of World War II.

Reflecting a growing dissatisfaction with established power structures and a greater emphasis on personal freedom. ''Samurai Rebellion,'' made in 1967 by Masaki Kobayashi, offers a thematic sequel to his groundbreaking ''Harakiri'' of 1962 with its story of a loyal retainer (played by the chambara superstar Toshiro Mifune) who stoically accepts the injustices of the feudal system until his clan lord tries to claim his son's bride as his own.

"Samurai Rebellion" takes place in a world where bushido, the samurai's unwritten code of excruciatingly correct behavior, is still very much in effect. His sense of self-control reinforced by Kobayashi's metronome pacing and tightly symmetrical visuals, Mifune's character unflinchingly endures each new humiliation heaped upon him, until finally it is too much and he resolves to resist his master's command, even though it will mean the annihilation of him and his family.

Patrick Galloway's, Stray Dogs and Lone Wolves contains a superb chapter on Samurai Rebellion.

An in depth study in Senses of Cinema

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Yojimbo

Dir. Akira Kurosawa (1961, Toho)
An icon is born. Yojimbo's mangy lone wolf ronin character (a very itchy Toshiro Mifune) is synonymous with "samurai" in the minds of millions. Adapted from the Dashiell Hammett novel Red Harvest and appropriated by Sergio Leone for A Fistful of Dollars, Yojimbo is a timeless classic of samurai cinema. b&w Tohoscope , Original uncut Japanese version. (110 min)

(2:30), 7:00

Iconic.

With Yojimbo, the alienated, sardonic ronin antihero was indelibly inked into the pages of samurai film history. A smash success upon its release in 1961, Yojimbo, and its lead character, Sanjuro (Toshiro Mifune), would reinvigorate the landscape of samurai films for the remainder of the '60s; from this fertile soil would spring a wide range of lone wolf swordsmen with bad attitudes, from the sleek sophistication of Sleepy Eyes of Death's Nemuri Kyoshiro to the disheveled debauchery of Shinkai, the Wicked Priest. Before long, even blind masseurs were getting into the act!

Yojimbo also marked the reunion of director Akira Kurosawa and cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa, who together, a decade before, had blown the Western world's mind with their 1950 masterpiece, Rashomon. Miyagawa was the perfect foil for Kurosawa. With his camera he brilliantly interpreted Kurosawa's rich, complex set-ups through the use of deep-focus photography (a technique wherein everything in the background and foreground stays in perfect focus). This allows Gonji the tavern-keeper (Eijiro Tono) to explain the layout and power dynamics of his shabby little town for Sanjuro (and us) by simply opening various shuttered windows; within each aperture a complete mini-scene plays out in puppet pantomime, individuals broken into sub-sections by the window's wooden slats. It's a brilliant device, allowing for tight, compact storytelling within a few short shots.

When we first encounter Sanjuro, we're staring at his back. He shrugs his shoulders and scratches his head. He does this a lot—he's very tense and itchy. Also, when he's thinking, he pulls his hand out of his kimono sleeve, bringing it up to the neckline of the garment to rub his chin. The body language says he's surreptitious, guarded, cunning. The move is a visual cue to the audience that he's pondering, he's working something out.

At a fork in the road, Sanjuro throws a stick in the air and heads off in the direction it points. He passes a farmer and his son, in midaltercation: "Who wants a long life eating porridge?" asks the yakuza-wannabe son, storming off to town. The father complains to his wife, "The smell of blood brings the hungry dogs," as his eye falls on Sanjuro.

Sanjuro enters the dusty, wild west—style town (basically one big, wide boulevard for showdowns). The camera cuts to a host of Felliniesque characters, yakuza grotesques, and pallid prostitutes, framed in windows (the window motif again) as they watch his approach. He is greeted by a stray dog carrying a severed human hand, an image that sets the violent/ absurdist tone of the film.

Sanjuro soon learns from Gonji how it is. Two yakuza bosses, allied with merchants, are squaring off:

Caught in the middle is a small peasant family, as well as Gonji, the gruff yet kind-hearted tavern keeper who befriends Sanjuro. Gonji spends most of his time lecturing Sanjuro about how killing is wrong—he is the moral center of the movie and, understandably, in a state of perpetual anxiety. "I'll cause some trouble and pay you," Sanjuro tells him. "In this town I'll get paid for killing. And this town is full of men who are better off dead."

From here we move through a series of plot twists, each leaving Sanjuro more enriched, until things suddenly turn nasty and our antihero finds himself a prisoner of Ushitora, lying on the floor of the sake brewery in a bloody heap. Will he prevail? Sure, but he's going to need some time off. . . .

Integral to the impact and originality of Yojimbo is the score by longtime Kurosawa collaborator Masaru Sato. It is percussive and playful, full of blaring horns and unusual arrangements. Sato's much-beloved harpsichord is here, years before the instrument would come to dominate pop music and the soundtracks of the late'60s. The score is clearly influenced by the antic sophistication of Henry Mancini, a fact openly acknowledged by Sato, who called him "one of my favorite composers" (Stuart Galbraith IV, The Emperor and the Wolf, p. 303.)

Anyone who's seen Sergio Leone's 1964 classic spaghetti western A Fistful of Dollars will find striking similarities with Yojimbo, as the former is a shot-for-shot remake of the latter. When A Fistful of Dollars was released, Leone received a letter from Kurosawa. It began, "Signor Leone—I have just had the chance to see your film. It is a very fine film, but it is my film." Apparently, the Italian film's producers had sought remake rights, never got them, but went ahead with the film anyway. Lawsuits followed, culminating with Kurosawa being awarded 15% of worldwide receipts.

Ironically, despite this litigation over creative rights, Kurosawa himself seems to have lifted something from another film during the making of Yojimbo. In the scene where Sanjuro faces Unosuke, a smiling sociopath with a pistol, he throws a knife and incapacitates the gunman. This same scene was used in The Magnificent Seven, John Sturges' 1960 remake of Kurosawa's own Seven Samurai! Perhaps Kurosawa felt that, in light of this artistic concatenation, it was OK, perhaps even his right, to take a souvenir. It's a harmless appropriation, and a nice touch.

If you are new to samurai films, this is probably the best film to start with. Epics like Seven Samurai and Hiroshi Inagaki's Samurai Trilogy are great when you're ready, but start with Yojimbo. It is a pivotal film in the genre, an initiation rite that will bring you firmly into the fold of the samurai film fan.

Abayo!

— Excerpted from a great Yojimbo chapter in Patrick Galloway's Stray Dogs and Lone Wolves

Considered by many to be the greatest actor-director team in the history of cinema, the collaboration of Akira Kurosawa (1910-1998) and Toshiro Mifune (1920-1997) is one of legend. Each was a towering figure in his field—Kurosawa the master craftsman and technical innovator of world-wide acclaim; Mifune the uncontrollably charismatic international star—who did his best work when partnered with the other. Together they created a series of filmic masterpieces throughout the 50s and 60s, including such perennial favorites as Rashomon, Seven Samurai, and High and Low. Although best know for their samurai films, both possessed a tremendous range of ability, together tackling such disparate genres as the suspense thriller and the modern morality tale; Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky. The Criterion Collection's Focus features Kurosawa/Mifune experts Stephen Prince, Donald Richie, Chris Fujiwara, Stuart Galbraith IV, and Akira Kurosawa himself look at various aspects of the work and relationship of this celebrated pair.

— Criterion Collection's Focus

Saturday-Sunday, Dec. 17-18

Seven Samurai

Dir. Akira Kurosawa (1954, Toho)
Kurosawa's magnum opus is a deceptively simple story of seven ronin defending a village against bandits. Yet the characters are so compelling, the action so exciting, the drama so moving, and the narrative so infused with the spirit of Bushido, the film becomes a cinematic rite of passage, changing you forever. Winner of Silver Lion, Venice Film Festival; 2 Oscar nominations. Script: Kurosawa, Shinobu Hashimoto & Hideo Oguni. b&w (200 min plus intermission)

(12:10), 4:05, 8:00

Farmers are stingy, foxy, blubbering, mean, stupid and murderous! God damn! That's what they are! But then, who made them such beasts? You did! You samurai did it! You burn their villages! Destroy their farms! Steal their food! Force them to labor! Take their women! And kill them if they resist! So what should farmers do?

— Kikuchiyo, Seven Samurai

The Seven Samurai is as exciting as a good Western: its leading characters are distinct and appealing ; the situation is contrived but compelling; the action is shot with virtuoso skill. But it's almost twice as long as a good Western, and its social theme…is made monotonously.

— David Thomson, A Biographical Dictionary of Film (1994)

The Seven Samurai is incomparable as a modern poem of force. It is the Western form carried to apotheosis — a vast celebration of the joys and torments of fighting, seen in new depth and scale, a brutal imaginative ballet on the nature of strength and weakness.

— Pauline Kael, KPFA broadcast, 1962, anthologized in the collection, For Keeps (1994)

As an action spectacle, it is a truly magnificent work with tremendous battle scenes filled with violence and cruelty, all splendidly directed by Akira Kurosawa… Although the black-and-white photography is striking, the beautiful color associated with recent Japanese films would have been an added asset. The picture is strong fare for the art houses but of little value generally.

— Boxoffice Magazine (January 5, 1957)

The extreme formality of Kurosawa's compositions also emphasizes the boundaries of the frame; there is only occasionally a sense of off-screen space, as if nothing existed beyond the limits of the camera's eye. The world of The Seven Samurai is carefully delineated, compartmentalized; not only are the characters isolated in the separate group, but in separate spaces.

— Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader, (February 4, 1983), anthologized in the National Society of Film Critics collection, Foreign Affairs (1991)

Roger Ebert writes about why it is one of the Great Movies:

Akira Kurosawa's "The Seven Samurai" (1954) is not only a great film in its own right, but the source of a genre that would flow through the rest of the century. The critic Michael Jeck suggests that this was the first film in which a team is assembled to carry out a mission—an idea which gave birth to its direct Hollywood remake, "The Magnificent Seven," as well as "The Guns of Navarone," "The Dirty Dozen" and countless later war, heist and caper movies. Since Kurosawa's samurai adventure "Yojimbo" (1960) was remade as "A Fistful of Dollars" and essentially created the spaghetti Western, and since this movie and Kurosawa's "The Hidden Fortress" inspired George Lucas' "Star Wars" series, it could be argued that this greatest of filmmakers gave employment to action heroes for the next 50 years, just as a fallout from his primary purpose.

That purpose was to make a samurai movie that was anchored in ancient Japanese culture and yet argued for a flexible humanism in place of rigid traditions. One of the central truths of "The Seven Samurai" is that the samurai and the villagers who hire them are of different castes and must never mix. Indeed, we learn that these villagers had earlier been hostile to samurai—and one of them, even now, hysterically fears that a samurai will make off with his daughter. Yet the bandits represent a greater threat, and so the samurai are hired, valued and resented in about equal measure.

Why do they take the job? Why, for a handful of rice every day, do they risk their lives? Because that is the job and the nature of the samurai. Both sides are bound by the roles imposed on them by society, and in To the Distant Observer, his study of Japanese films, Noel Burch observes: "masochistic perseverance in the fulfillment of complex social obligations is a basic cultural trait of Japan." Not only do the samurai persevere, but so do the bandits, who continue their series of raids even though it is clear the village is well-defended, that they are sustaining heavy losses, and that there must be unprotected villages somewhere close around. Like characters in a Greek tragedy, they perform the roles they have been assigned.

Two of the movie's significant subplots deal with rebellion against social tradition. Kikuchiyo, the high-spirited samurai played by Toshiro Mifune as a rambunctious showoff, was not born a samurai but has jumped caste to become one. And there is a forbidden romance between the samurai Katsushiro (Isao Kimura) and a village girl (ironically, the very daughter whose father was so worried). They love each other, but a farmer's daughter cannot dream of marrying a ronin; when they are found together on the eve of the final battle, however, there are arguments in the village to "understand the young people,'' and an appeal to romance—an appeal designed for modern audiences and unlikely to have carried much weight in the 1600s when the movie is set.

Kurosawa was considered the most Western of great Japanese directors (too Western, some of his Japanese critics sniffed). "The Seven Samurai" represents a great divide in his work; most of his earlier films, Jeck observes, subscribe to the Japanese virtues of teamwork, fitting in, going along, conforming. All his later films are about misfits, noncomformists and rebels. The turning point can be seen in his greatest film, "Ikiru" (1952), in which a bureaucrat spends his days in the rote performance of meaningless duties but decides when he is dying to break loose and achieve at least one meaningful thing.

That bureaucrat was played by Takashi Shimura—who, incredibly, also plays Kambei, the leader of the seven samurai. He looks old and withered in the 1952 picture, tough and weathered in this one. Kurosawa was loyal to his longtime collaborators, and used either Shimura, Mifune, or often both of them, in every movie he made for 18 years.

In "The Seven Samurai," both actors are essential. Shimura's Kambei is the veteran warrior, who in an early scene shaves his head to disguise himself as a priest in order to enter a house where a hostage is being held. (Did this scene create the long action-movie tradition of opening sequences in which the hero wades into a dangerous situation unrelated to the later plot?) He spends the rest of the movie distractedly rubbing his bristling head during moments of puzzlement. He is a calm, wise leader and a good strategian, and we follow the battles partly because he (and Kurosawa) map them out for us, walk us through the village's defenses and keep count as the 40 bandits are whittled down one by one. Mifune's character, Kikuchiyo, is an overcompensator. He arrives equipped with a sword longer than anyone else's and swaggers around holding it over his shoulder like a rifleman. He is impulsive, brave, a showoff who quickly assembles a fan club of local kids who follow him around. Mifune was himself a superb athlete and does some difficult jumps and stunts in the movie, but his character is shown to be a hopeless horseman. (As a farmer's son, Kikuchiyo would not have had an opportunity as a youth to learn to ride.) One running gag involves Kikuchiyo's inability to master an unruly local horse; there is a delightful moment where horse and rider disappear behind a barrier together, and emerge separately. The movie is long (207 minutes), with an intermission, and yet it moves quickly because the storytelling is so clear, there are so many sharply defined characters, and the action scenes have a thrilling sweep. Nobody could photograph men in action better than Kurosawa. One of his particular trademarks is the use of human tides, sweeping down from higher places to lower ones, and he loves to devise shots in which the camera follows the rush and flow of an action, instead of cutting it up into separate shots. His use of closeups in some of the late battle scenes perhaps was noticed Orson Welles, who in "Falstaff'' conceals a shortage of extras by burying the camera in a Kurosawian tangle of horses, legs, and swords.

Repeated viewings of "The Seven Samurai" reveal visual patterns. Consider the irony, for example, in two sequences that bookend the first battle with the bandits. In the first, the villagers have heard the bandits are coming, and rush around in panic. Kambei orders his samurai to calm and contain them, and the ronin run from one group to the next (the villagers always run in groups, not individually) to herd them into cover. Later, after the bandits have been repulsed, a wounded bandit falls in the village square, and now the villagers rush forward with delayed bravery to kill him. This time, the samurai hurry about pushing them back. Mirrored scenes like that can be found throughout the movie.

There is also an instinctive feeling for composition. Kurosawa constantly uses deep focus to follow simultaneous actions in the foreground, middle and background. Often he delineates the distance with barriers. Consider a shot where the samurai, in the foreground, peer out through the slats of a building and across an empty ground to the sight of the bandits, peering in through the slats of a barrier erected against them. Kurosawa's moving camera often avoids cuts in order to make comparisons, as when he will begin on dialogue in a closeup, sweep through a room or a clearing, and end on a closeup of another character who is the point of the dialogue.

Many characters die in "The Seven Samurai," but violence and action are not the point of the movie. It is more about duty and social roles. The samurai at the end have lost four of their seven, yet there are no complaints, because that is the samurai's lot. The villagers do not much want the samurai around once the bandits are gone, because armed men are a threat to order. That is the nature of society. The samurai who fell in love with the local girl is used significantly in the composition of the final shots. First he is seen with his colleagues. Then with the girl. Then in an uncommitted place not with the samurai, but somehow of them. Here you can see two genres at war: The samurai movie and the Western with which Kurosawa was quite familiar. Should the hero get the girl? Japanese audiences in 1954 would have said no. Kurosawa spent the next 40 years arguing against the theory that the individual should be the instrument of society.

© 2005, rogerebert.com

TRIVIA courtesy of IMDB.com

• Filming had to be stopped several times due to a shortage of horses for the final battle sequences.
• Seiji Miyaguchi, who played the taciturn samurai Kyuzo, had not touched a sword at all before this movie. Editing and careful cinematography were both used to give the impression that he was a master.
• Toho pulled the plug on the project several times when it ran over budget, forcing director Akira Kurosawa to go back and personally argue with the board of directors who were convinced they were making a flop.
• Often credited to be the first modern action movie. Many now commonly used cinematographic and plot elements - such as slow motion for dramatic flair and the reluctant hero to name a couple - are seen for perhaps the first time. Other movies may have used them separately before, but Kurosawa brought them all together.
• According to a Japanese film scholar, the one of the things that inspired this film was an account the director read about a actual village who hired samurai to protect them.
• Kurosawa's original idea for the movie he was to make was a film about a day in the life of a samurai, beginning with him rising from his bed and ending with him making some mistake that required him to kill himself to save face. Despite a good deal of research, he did not feel he had enough solid factual information to make the movie, but came across the above-mentioned anecdote about a village hiring samurai to protect them and decided to use that idea. Kurosawa wrote a complete dossier for each character with a speaking role. In it was details about what they wore, their favorite foods, their past history, their speaking habits, and every other detail he could think of about them. No other Japanese director had ever done this.
• Heihachi is the first of the Seven Samurai to die in the film. Minoru Chiaki, who played Heihachi, was the last of the title character actors to die in real life (in 1999).
• Was voted the 12th Greatest Film of all time by Entertainment Weekly, being the only film in the magazine's top 20 greatest films not in English.
• The movie is set in 1586. We learn during the scroll scene that the real Kikuchiyo was born in year two of the Tensho era (1574) and is now 13 years old. Japanese convention considered a child to be one year old when he was born and advanced his age one year each new year.

GOOFS courtesy of IMDB.com

• Factual errors: Shortly after the second fuse-lock musket is stolen, the bandits fire twice at the samurai within five seconds with their last musket. A fuse-lock takes as much as two minutes to reload, prime, and fire.
• Crew or equipment visible: When the samurai are giving battle advice to the peasants, who sit around them forming a circle, the camera does a rather wide circle shot of them. You can see the dolly track behind the seated peasants.
• Continuity: Shichiroji throws a spear out the door of Rikichi's hut in anger, it lands obviously in parallel with the door. Later, after Kikuchiyo's outburst he runs outside and picks the spear up, however it's now laying sideways compared to the door.
• Revealing mistakes: During the climactic battle scene in the rain a man is running and takes an arrow in the back. As he falls into the mud you can spot the wire that the arrow traveled along and which is attached to his back.

Monday-Tuesday, Dec. 19-20

Sword of Doom

Dir. Kihachi Okamoto (1966, Toho)
Tatsuya Nakadai is a stray dog that likes to bite in Sword of Doom, action auteur Okamoto's explosive epic. As a psychotic ronin living only to kill, Nakadai's performance is electrifying, an unforgettable maelstrom of malevolent energy slashing all in his path. Screenplay by Shinobu Hashimoto (Rashomon, Harakiri). Must see. SCR Shinobu Hashimoto, from the novel by Kaizan Nakazato;, b&w, Tohoscope (119 min)

(12:30), 4:45, 9:00

Sword of Doom (1966)
AKA: Daibosatsu Pass

Premise: A skilled swordsman driven by what others perceive as evil intent walks a blood-soaked trail of destruction as he dispenses with an unearthly justice upon those he meets.

Review: Japanese cinema at its finest can be difficult for Western viewers to comprehend. In the case of Sword of Doom, the lines between good and evil are blurred in such a way that its protagonist appears on the surface to be a fallen samurai who's unexplained appetite for killing reduces him to a frenzied madness. Yet there is more at work in what is only part of a larger story conceived by novelist Kaizan Nakazato. Being unfamiliar with the story this film is based on, I'll have to admit to being suckered into seeing Sword of Doom as it is not, at least until giving it further consideration. Director Kihachi Okamoto leaves a lot of unanswered questions and is unable to tie up vital loose ends in the story, but what remains is still a fascinating, dark and violent epic that begs you to dig deeper.

The "hero" of the piece is Ryunosuke Tsukue (Tatsuya Nakadai), a sullen young man we are introduced to when he cuts down an old grandfather who moments ago quietly prayed for his own death for his daughter's sake. Ryunosuke returns home to be scolded by his ailing father who despises his son's unconventional sword technique and cruel nature. An arranged and non-lethal match Ryunosuke is set to participate in leads his opponent's wife Ohama (Michiyo Aratama) to offer her body in exchange for his promise to let her husband win. But her husband discovers his wife's indiscretion and his intent to kill forces Ryunosuke to respond in kind. This sets Ryunosuke on a downward spiral as he's challenged by his opponent's associates, takes the opportunity-seeking Ohama on as his mistress, and prepares to meet Ohama's revenge-seeking brother (Yuzo Kayama). Filling out the story is the 1860s backdrop of Japan's turbulent end days of the Shogunate when increasingly desperate samurai attempt to cling to their power. Ryunosuke becomes loosely affiliated with one such group. Meanwhile, Ohama's brother Hyoma trains at a school run by master swordsman Shimada (Toshiro Mifune) in hopes of reaching Ryunosuke's level of skill before challenging him. The ending to this film is satisfying from an action standpoint, but is likely to confound anyone pulled into Hyoma's efforts to seek revenge or his burgeoning romance with Omatsu (Yoko Naito), the woman who's grandfather was killed by Ryunosuke. Both plots are ditched as the focus returns to Ryunosuke who descends into what looks like madness brought on by the ghosts of those he's murdered. The ending is intense as a frothing Ryunosuke comes to be surrounded by dozens of his samurai comrades and launches into an unrelenting killing spree.

Ryunosuke seems like evil incarnate, but a second look reveals that all of the people he kills are guilty of some crime. Is he the instrument of some divine justice? He appears unable to answer that himself and the director smartly stays away from revealing too much, including his background or motivations. What is clear is that viewers can expect a high body count, a morbid atmosphere and lots of long, drawn out swordplay. Not all of it is well-choreographed however. An early engagement between Ryunosuke and a handful of swordsmen waiting in ambush on a road is shot in one long take which is nice. But a close look reveals that each of his opponents simply charge him with swords raised until he strikes them in their open torso. Almost all of them never swing their swords, even after coming within striking distance. This can be forgiven considering the volume of swordplay in the film including several other matches that are significantly better. Ryunosuke's duel with Ohama's husband is a perfect example of kendo technique as each person looks for an opening. The subtleties of their tense stances alert the knowledgeable spectators that this is no simple match, but a duel to the death. Ryunosuke's unique sword technique in the film is called the "Silent Stance" where he slowly lowers the tip of his sword until the opponent feels confident he can strike before Ryunosuke raises it in defense.

Japanese superstar Toshiro Mifune plays a small, but memorable role as the Shimada school instructor and a supremely skilled fighter. In keeping with Ryunosuke's true nature, the two men never meet in battle for Shimada is a righteous man. But he is forced to contend with a number of Ryunosuke's samurai associates after being mistaken for a government reformer. While never considered a great screen swordsman, Mifune is still magical in this violent battle.

Sword of Doom is a very grim and violent film, even today, and it packs a wallop at the end. The camera work, music and acting are all exceptional which is not surprising since this is a Toho production in 1966, when chambara films were at their creative peak. Yet the inability to effectively see the sub-plots though to the end is unfortunate. But considering this film is taken from a much larger literary work, it works well enough on the strength of Tatsuya Nakadai's despairing and subtle performance. In addition, Okamoto's ability to bring a veiled supernatural quality to the film and its leading man, not unlike Clint Eastwood's High Plains Drifter, makes Sword of Doom stand out even more. This is one swordplay film that is both narratively sophisticated and hemorrhaging martial violence at every turn and that's a winning combination.

— Mark Pollard, Kung Fu Cinema

A TRIBUTE TO KIHACHI OKAMOTO

The death of Kihachi Okamoto brings us yet another step closer to the disappearance of a truly matchless generation of Japanese filmmakers. He was part of a group of men who not only made some of the country's most vibrant and defiant genre films, but who were also united in having experienced the horrors of war and battle at an early age.

Okamoto was a 19-year-old university student when he was drafted into the army in 1943 and shipped to the front at the height of the Pacific War. "You could say it's a miracle I survived the war at all, since statistics show that the largest number of people killed were those born, like me, in 1924," he said in a 1977 interview with Peter B. High. As in the case of Masaki Kobayashi (born 1919), Kenji Misumi (1921), Seijun Suzuki (1923), Yasuzo Masumura (1924) and others, this battlefield experience would have an immeasurable impact on his later work as a filmmaker. It's certainly no coincidence that this is the generation that would take genre cinema into new directions in the 1960s, as it was their encounter with violence and destruction that led them to rethink the very foundations of genre film.

After the war Okamoto entered Toho studios in 1947, where he served as assistant director to Senkichi Taniguchi on the Akira Kurosawa-penned Snow Trail (Ginrei No Hate) before moving on to work with the likes of Masahiro Makino, Mikio Naruse and Ishiro Honda. His own chance to sit in the director's chair came in 1958 with the melodramas All About Marriage and Wakai Musumetachi [tr: Young girls]. He quickly began to specialise in action films and directed three entries in Toho's successful Underworld (Ankokugai) series, featuring his first of many collaborations with Toshiro Mifune. The films paired Mifune with a young Koji Tsuruta, who after two entries jumped ship to join Toei, where he starred in a competing series of Underworld movies before going on to become the undisputed star of Toei's ninkyo eiga yakuza films. A big fan of John Ford, Okamoto quickly began to model his action films on American westerns. Mixing this with his war experience, he delivered another bonafide hit with Desperado Outpost (1959), in which he transposed a cowboys-and-indians plot to the Manchurian frontlines of the 1940s. A sequel, Westward Desperado, followed less than a year later.

The Desperado films also featured a liberal amount of satire and comic asides, hinting at Okamoto's interests in comedies and musicals. However, after his Noh musical comedy Oh, Bomb sank, perhaps unsurprisingly, at the box office in 1964, he was forced to indulge in this particular love in roundabout ways. After starting work in the genre for which he is best known overseas, the chanbara, with 1963's Warring Clans, he began designing a very rhythmic approach to filming and editing action sequences. Carefully timed placement of sound effects and music combined with camera movement and movement within the frame to form a very rhythmic, almost musical whole.

Alongside his formal experimentations, Okamoto's Sam Fuller-esque exorcism of war traumas in his films would continue for much of his career. Not only in the large number of war films he directed (almost a third of his entire output), but also in his attitude to violence and human conflict in his other genre work. He was one of the main proponents of the wave of chanbara filmmakers that, in the wake of Akira Kurosawa, took a very critical attitude to bushido, the samurai lifestyle and Tokugawa society in general. Starting from the early 1960s with such films as Kurosawa's Yojimbo (1961), Kobayashi's Harakiri (Seppuku, 1962), Misumi's Destiny's Son (Kiru, 1962), Masahiro Shinoda's Assassination (Ansatsu, 1964) and the Sleepy Eyes of Death (Nemuri Kyoshiro) series, the emphasis of the genre was no longer on honour and heroism, but on the death and misery that inevitably follow those who live by the sword and the people with whom they inadvertently come into contact. Okamoto's notable contributions to this epoch include Samurai Assassin (1965), Sword of Doom (1966), Kill! (1968), Red Lion (1969) as well as his very peculiar entry in the Zatoichi series Zatoichi Meets Yojimbo (1970), which matched Shintaro Katsu's blind swordsman with Toshiro Mifune's emblematic ronin.

With the end of the studio era in the early 1970s, Okamoto returned to a more diverse output as a free agent. He had made his first of three films for ATG in 1968 with the self-financed war satire Human Bullet (another two followed: Battle Cry in 1975 and At this Late Date, the Charleston in 1981), but nevertheless his interest in genre cinema on the one hand and music and comedy on the other hand continued to characterise his output. Often in close partnership with his producer wife Minako, Okamoto ventured into territories as eclectic as a science-fiction satire (Blue Christmas, 1978), a crime comedy (Rainbow Kids, 1991), a samurai western (East Meets West, 1995) and the story of a quartet of black jazz musician lost in 19th-century Japan (Dixieland Daimyo, 1986). Okamoto's final film, 2001's Vengeance for Sale, saw him return to the chanbara genre, albeit with a generous comic slant. The film reunited him with Tatsuya Nakadai, star of his most internationally feted film Sword of Doom.

By the time he made Vengeance for Sale, however, the director was already in ill health. After the stroke that felled him during the shooting of East Meets West, Okamoto also suffered from lung problems. He had plans for another film, for which he had already written the script, but it was not to be. He died of esophagus cancer two days after his 81st birthday, on February 19, 2005. With Kihachi Okamoto gone, plus the recent passing of film noir specialist Yoshitaro Nomura, the ever non-conformist Seijun Suzuki remains the last active filmmaker of Japan's battlefield generation.

plus

Sanjuro

Dir. Akira Kurosawa (1962, Toho)
Some prefer this Yojimbo sequel to the original. Toshiro Mifune reprises his role as scruffy, cynical ronin, providing guidance, strategy and the razor edge of his katana to a group of nine young, naÔve samurai trying to rescue their town's chamberlain from the hands of wicked men. Tatsuya Nakadai co-stars. (96 min)

(2:50), 7:05

A Review by Tod Booth

Akira Kurosawa followed up his hugely influential 1961 stranger-in-town samurai blockbuster Yojimbo with this neglected sequel — but, you'll find Sanjuro proves to be an even better film than its predecessor. Like Yojimbo, Sanjuro is a tight, sardonically funny action film but, unlike its rather mean-spirited prequel with its cast of cartoony grotesques, Sanjuro has a sweet, sad soul hiding beneath its satiric skin.

His Name Is Nobody

Toshiro Mifune again plays the nameless, homeless ronin. The name he uses, Sanjuro, is a little joke he plays on anyone who gets nosy enough to ask him who he is. It means "30 years old" ("going on 40…" he always adds),and, in both films, he improvises his second name from whatever nearby vegetation happens to catch his eye — in this case, "Tsubaki," Japanese for the camellias blooming in the trees above him.

The film wastes no time getting started. Nine young samurai are in the midst of a secret meeting, heatedly discussing the rampant corruption within their clan. They suspect their Chamberlain of graft, and have received an invitation of help from the local Superintendent to expose him. Sanjuro overhears their meeting, swaggers into the room and, to the astonishment of these naive swordsmen, surmises that they not only have the situation exactly backwards, but that the Superintendent is certainly on his way at that very moment to kill them all. Naturally, he's right. He saves the group with a clever ruse (his quick work dispatching a half dozen bad guys impresses their leader so much he offers Sanjuro a job, since "it'd take too long to kill him"), and the plot is off and running.

Samurai Slacker

Sanjuro virtually adopts these nine hot-headed but woefully inexperienced samurai, doing most of their thinking for them, even as he longs for nothing more than a bellyful of rice and a nice long nap. Sanjuro is like no samurai they've ever seen, or heard. He's as elemental as an earthquake, ill-mannered, snarling, and lazy. His philosophy can be summed up in one of his funniest lines: "I'm hungry. Feed me." He'd prefers cold hard cash to thanks, and suffers no fools. But behind his lethargic yawning and scratching hides an astonishing killing machine, his laser-like sword ready to reduce a roomful of people to a pile of neat, steaming slices of meat.

The bulk of the movie is a rescue operation — the Superintendent has kidnapped the Chamberlain along with his wife and daughter. Our heroes must discover where the kidnappers have hidden the trio and save them. Their main nemesis is the Superintendent's gang-boss, Hanbei Muroto, played by the great chambara (swordplay) star Tatsuya Nakadai, who eventually replaced Mifune as Kurosawa's "most-favored" actor, going on to star in Kurosawa's '80s war epics Kagemusha and Ran.

Sanjuro meets his match when he and his boys rescue the Chamberlain's wife, played by the marvelous Irie Takao. A delicate, well-to-do woman, who refuses to exert herself even to save her own life, she nonetheless sees into Sanjuro's troubled soul like an x-ray. In one of the film's best scenes, she gently tells him, "Killing is a bad habit. You're like a drawn sword. You cut well. But good swords are kept in their sheathes." Sanjuro's probably never has been called on his "bad habit" before, especially by a woman, and he's deeply shaken by her insight. Her non-violent stance also manages to turn a prisoner they've captured into a hilariously pliant ally. It is Takao's influence on Sanjuro, though, that gives the film its ultimately melancholy heart.

Sanjuro is sometimes just a little too smart for his own good. His ingenious plans rarely accounts for the vagaries of his cohorts, and his crusty, bull-headed manner makes it tough for them to trust him. All of which makes for a devilishly entertaining series of twists and reversals as he, as in Yojimbo, plays one side against the other. He even takes up Hanbei Muroto's earlier offer of a job, to the dismay of his new proteges. The camellias from which he borrowed his name provide yet another terrific plot wrinkle.

The film ends, as it should, with a final face-off between Sanjuro and Muroto, in a swordfight as devastating as any in cinema, all the more striking for its extraordinary stillness. It's a shocking, graphic, powerful ending, and a perfect finish to this pair of remarkable films.

Cinematic Martial Artists- Mifune

Wednesday-Thursday, Dec. 21-22

Kill!

Dir. Kihachi Okamoto (1968, Toho)
"Disillusioned samurai turned tramp (Tatsuya Nakadai) and hick farmer turned self proclaimed Samurai (Etsushi Takahashi) find themselves caught up in a series of increasingly deadly double and triple crosses. Okamoto's dizzyingly fast paced mixture of black comedy, action, and social commentary is funny, exciting and surprisingly moving." — Ric Menello

SCR Akira Murao and Okamoto, from a story by Shugoro Yamamoto; b&w, scope, (114 min)

(12:45), 4:45, 8:45

Resistance Is Feudal
Play it again, samurai: Sword plays and bandit ballets in this razor-sharp series

by Chuck Stephens, Village Voice

Of all the agit-pulp punctuations peppered throughout action master Kihachi Okamoto's anarchically exhilarating and archly self-skewering 1968 swordplay classic Kill!, one loaded battle cry from deep within the chaos of that far too little-known spaghetti eastern continues to resonate with bushido buffs today. We'll get to that in a minute, but first—since all good samurai sagas are stuffed with spilling sheaves of backstory—a bit of setup is in order. Fans of Akira Kurosawa's Toshiro Mifune—fueled genre classics, forgive me if you've heard it somewhere before. And for those who haven't, it's time to hide your daughters: The pitter-patter of barefoot blade runners is coming your way, with a fistful of '60s and '70s slice operas by idiom savants like Okamoto and Hideo Gosha, a week-long run of Masaki Kobayashi's austerely anti-authoritarian Samurai Rebellion, and inevitable reiterations of Seven Samurai and four other Kurosawa/Mifune chambara ("swordplay") chestnuts unfurling in Film Forum's "Summer Samurai" series.

It's March 1833, near the beginning of the end of the last century of the shogunate's feudal power hold over Japan—blah, blah, blah. (Sorry, this is Kill!, not Kill Bill—though a week's worth of samurai movies will convince you that Q.T.'s fondness for prefacing action-orgasm with endless expository foreplay has its roots in the Edo-era mud.) In the midst of a blinding dust storm, a dozen or so retainers are escorting their master's palanquin through hostile territory: a scorched-earth ghost town where peasants were recently slaughtered during a food riot by the forces of this now approaching clan. Peeking at the procession (in a sequence of chilling gazes echoed by Chris Marker's Sans Soleil) are assorted starving road warriors, a revenge-hungry group of seven farmers turned samurai wannabes determined to terminate the corrupt clan boss (whose name, you'll soon note, has a very familiar ring), and a solitary drifter who wanders into this local intrigue while pursuing a chicken he'd hoped to eat for lunch. Like much else in Kill!, this drifter—played with an admixture of bug-eyed bluff and palpable body odor by versatile genre giant Tatsuya Nakadai—isn't quite what he seems; were we in China, we'd have pegged him as a martial arts master in drunken guise.

Suddenly, the attack begins, heralded by that blood-curdling battle cry: "Die, Mizoguchi!"

Whether Okamoto or his frequent collaborator, screenwriter Shinobu Hashimoto (who penned eight of Kurosawa's best-known films), intended the cinematically double-edged thrust of that death sentence or simply employed a rather traditional and most likely historically specific Japanese name remains unclear. More sharply focused is the anxiety-of-influence eagerness Okamoto evinces as he strives, and often succeeds, to out-macho the stylistic engorgements of Yojimbo and Sanjuro (based on the same novel as Kill!) with each lacerating swish pan and savage shock splice in manga-existentialist masterworks like Sword of Doom. (Sadly, Okamoto's fondness for directing musicals was considerably narrowed by a Noh-inflected flop entitled Oh, Bomb in 1963, since even his most savage samurai films never lose their spasmodically syncopated beat.) Kurosawa, of course, had forefather issues all his own, having once complained that Japanese cinema's best-known Mizoguchi—that tradition-tethered auteur of archaic manners whose given name was Kenji—had no flair for samurai emotion.

DVD Verdict

The Charge

"Understand now what samurai are really like?"—Genta

Opening Statement

If Kill!'s plot sounds familiar, that's because it's based on Peaceful Days by Shugoro Yamamoto, the novel that was the inspiration for Sanjuro, Akira Kurosawa's sequel of sorts to Yojimbo. Fear not, though, director Kihachi Okamoto's (The Sword of Doom) film is different enough from Kurosawa's that the two make interesting companion pieces without feeling repetitive—they'd make a great double-feature, in fact.

I've never read Yamamoto's book, but I'm guessing that Kill! is a closer adaptation than Sanjuro. Comparing the two films, Kurosawa's penchant for lean, concise narrative shines through, as well as his standard operating procedure of rifling source materials for the elements he finds interesting, jettisoning the rest, and embellishing his adapted script with his own material. Kurosawa's film begins in roughly the middle of Okamoto's, the gang of naÔve samurai already holed up and ripe for ambush after having murdered the corrupt official. Kurosawa also, in order to translate Yamamoto's novel into a sequel to his wildly successful Yojimbo, distilled the dual heroes Genta and Hanjiro into his iconic ronin Sanjuro Tsubaki, who doesn't much resemble either of the men in Okamoto's film.

Facts of the Case

Joshu Province, March 1833. Genta (Tatsuya Nakadai, The Sword of Doom) and Hanjiro (Etsushi Takahashi, The Shogun's Samurai)—two dirty, hungry men—meet in a dusty, rapidly deteriorating town, ravaged only two months earlier by a riot of yakuza. Genta has given up the samurai's life by choice; Hanjiro is a farmer masquerading as a samurai. They stumble upon a group of seven headstrong (but none-too-bright) samurai who murder a vassal of the Shogun on behalf of a local boss named Chamberlain Ayuzawa (Shingeru Koyama, Akage). The assassins send Genta to their boss to inform him of the success of their mission. Hanjiro goes to Ayuzawa of his own accord seeking employment, and is told he will be made a samurai if he kills Genta in order to ensure the messenger doesn't gossip.

When Ayuzawa kidnaps the uncle of one of the seven samurai, the men realize their boss may be out to kill them in order to cover up the crime. The samurai head to a nearby boundary fort to hide out, while their friend Shinroku (Yoshio Tsuchiya, Seven Samurai) heads to Edo to alert the Shogunate of the dastardly goings-on in Joshu. Genta takes pity and joins their cause when he realizes they've been betrayed by Shinroku and will be ambushed at the fort. Meanwhile, Hanjiro becomes involved in the plight of a disgraced samurai whose wife has been indentured into prostitution. Unfortunately, the warrior intends to earn the 30 ryo he needs to free his wife by collecting a bounty on the seven samurai…and he'll kill Genta if he must.

The Evidence

Perhaps the most delightful aspect of Kill! is Tatsuya Nakadai's wonderful comic performance. A successful stage actor who made the leap to the silver screen in the '50s, Nakadai is known almost exclusively as a dramatic actor. His earliest roles were heavies, including the itinerant rogues Sanjuro faces off against in the climax of both Yojimbo and Sanjuro. His performance in Kill! is a revelation, proving the actor has genuine—mostly untapped—comic skills. Genta is more wistful and passive than Mifune's Sanjuro. His fallen state, poverty, and disillusionment with the waning Shogunate are more palpable because he lacks Sanjuro's swaggering bravado. Genta is careworn, beaten down by life, and no longer naÔve enough to believe in Bushido, but he's not cynical. He views his plight with a kind of wry humor, not taking himself any more seriously than he does the entire samurai class. The one thing he does share with Sanjuro is a sharp, calculating mind forged of experience in battle: He knows the next turn of plot long before the other characters do; he's the smartest guy in the picture.

Okamoto's movie is entertaining not only for its switchblade humor (in one fight sequence, the staging and crisp editing somehow make a severed finger funny), but also for its wit in throwing a dense mélange of chambara clichés at us (feuding local bosses, tea house prostitutes, a farmer longing to rise to the samurai class) while twisting the perspective enough to make it feel fresh. That said, the film works as a rousing action-adventure even as it deconstructs the genre. Considering the same can be said for Kurosawa's movie, this tenuous balance of postmodern intelligence and old-fashioned storytelling may be rooted in Yamamoto's novel (the author also wrote the source material for Kurosawa's Red Beard and Dodes'ka-den, as well as Masaki Kobayashi's Inn of Evil). In any event, Kill! is a more artful film than its pulp title indicates, yet its title is entirely appropriate.

Closing Statement

For fans of Kurosawa's Yojimbo and Sanjuro, Okamoto's film is a must-see. For the chambara neophyte, Kill! is an awfully good place to start: Smart, funny, and action-packed, it's a perfect point of entry into the genre.

The Verdict

Not guilty.

and

Zatoichi on the Road

Dir. Kimiyoshi Yasuda (1963, Daiei)
A rich young maiden becomes the target of kidnappers, yakuza thugs and a lustful lord and it's up to Ichi (Shintaro Katsu) to get her safely back to her family. This is more easily said than done, however, as the girl is forever slipping from his grasp. Great fun. (85 min)

(3:00), 7:00

The Zatoichi series reaches for new ground in this exciting fifth entry where Ichi plays escort to a noblewoman on the run, is nearly outwitted by another, and bloodies his cane sword on countless yakuza thugs. Having turned his back on thoughts of a normal life, Ichi is more comfortably assuming his role as a swordsman with an almost unearthly skill.

After splitting a candle in response to a gambler's attempt to cheat him, Ichi hits the road and is courted by a representative of Boss Tobei who wants Ichi to help him in a clan war. Men of Tobei's enemy, Doyama waylay the pair and the rep is killed. Moving on, Ichi discovers a dying man with a final request to look after a woman named Mitsu. After a samurai lord made unwanted advances, she stabbed the luckless fellow and is now trying to get home in one piece while his men hunt for her. Ichi vows to escort her to her home in Edo but a wily woman named Hisa, who also owes allegiance to Doyama enacts a plan to kidnap Mitsu in order to force Ichi to help them instead. One of Tobei's greedy lieutenants attempts to take Mitsu himself for the bounty which the samurai lord has put on her head. After rescuing her, Ichi sends Mitsu, who he has reluctantly fallen in love with on to Edo so as not to draw more attention. Doyama's men get a hold of her again and force Ichi to abandon his agreement to help Tobei. As a battle between the two clans erupts, Ichi takes on both sides while Hisa redeems herself by helping Mitsu to escape.

Seemingly free from constraints of humility in previous episodes, Ichi has become more confident and more willing to show off his incredible sword skills which is good news for action fans. The story is an adventurous one that could be compared to Akira Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress (1958) and Yojimbo (1961). The first half features Ichi's journey with Mitsu, played by a lovely Shiho Fujimura who returned to the franchise in 1967 for Zatoichi's Cane-Sword. The latter half features Ichi playing both sides in a turf war, much as Toshiro Mifune did in Yojimbo. Both parts are woven together well with Ichi's love for Mitsu being the dominating theme.

Its clear that the real reason Ichi never settles down with one woman is that it would hinder the potential for both dramatic and romantic tension which are key factors to the success of the series. Nevertheless, it is both unrealistic and saddening to see a blind man of low social stature given so many opportunities to find happiness with a woman, only be denied or to deny it himself. Don't let Shakespeare fool you, the truth is that the Japanese are the real masters of tragic romance in pop culture and On the Road is a grand example.

It may be that the success of the series began to affect the course it took. Although this episode contains the same relational dysfunctions and heartbreak that have appeared in every film so far, Shintaro Katsu's performance is more animated with the sexual tension being stronger (still very mild by modern standards), an increased willingness to display his skills, and more unrestrained dialogue. The filmmakers also seem to have a handle on the strengths of the series and take full advantage with interesting characters and more action. The result is one of the more colorful Zatoichi films that has the broadest appeal yet.

— Mark Pollard, KungFuCinema.com

Notes by Patrick Galloway, author of Stray Dogs and Lone Wolves: The Samurai Film Handbook (StoneBridge Press, 2005)

Other books we recommend

Japanese Film Directors by Audie Bock

A Hundred Years of Japanese Film by Paul Schrader (Foreword), Donald Richie

Something Like An Autobiography by Akira Kurosawa

The Films of Akira Kurosawa by Donald Richie, Joan Mellen

The Seven Samurai: And Other Screenplays (Classic Screenplay Series) by Akira Kurosawa, Donald Richie (Translator)

TokyoScope: The Japanese Cult Film Companion by Patrick Macias

The Samurai Film by Alain Silver

The Midnight Eye Guide to New Japanese Film by Hideo Nakata

Silver Screen Samurai: The Best of Japan's Samurai Movie Posters

A New History Of Japanese Cinema: A Century Of Narrative Film by Isolde Standish