The Sword of Doom

It's been a while since I've done an old samurai movie, hasn't it? To be perfectly honest, that last one I watched, Samurai Rebellion, was such a downer that I was a little reluctant to watch another. Well, enough time has passed for me, so here comes The Sword of Doom, a 1966 classic directed by Kihachi Okamoto.

The Sword of Doom is dark, intense, and brutal, but it's much less of a downer than Samurai Rebellion for one reason: you are not supposed to like the main character. I'm not sure I've seen a samurai movie told from the perspective of such a bad guy before.

The Sword of Doom stars Tatsuya Nakadai, best known to westerners, perhaps, as the gun-wielding villain in Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo. Nakadai plays Ryunosuke Tatsue, a stone cold bastard of a man who is introduced to us by killing a harmless old grandfather for no real reason (OK, the old man was praying for death at a shrine, but it wasn't Ryunosuke's place to carry it out), and not registering a bit of emotion for doing so.

He goes back to the village, where he is participating in a Kendo tournament. A woman visits him, begging him not to defeat her husband in the battle. He scoffs, claiming swordsmanship is to a man what chastity is to a woman. He tells her he'll lose the battle if she has sex with him. She complies, her husband finds out and divorces her on the spot. The friendly, no-strings-attached tournament battle has now become a grudge match. Ryunosuke kills the guy and is exiled from his clan (killing many more guys on the way). The lady he nailed catches up to him, and says she has nothing and asks to go with him.

Two years later, he's living with her in exile, under assumed names. They have a baby from their initial encounter. He runs into an old servant of his family's who tells him that his own father, on his deathbed, regretting having unleashed such an evil man onto the world, has sent the brother of the man he killed to find and kill him.

There's way more, but I'll stop there. It's pretty complicated, right? I wasn't expecting such a complex story, most samurai movies tend to be pretty straight forward. But it was also engrossing. There are a whole bunch of characters surrounding Ryunosuke and his heinous acts, and they're all connected to each other somehow. It actually feels quite Shakespearean. There's the granddaughter of the man he slaughtered in the opening, her uncle who raised her, and Toshiro Mifune as a master swordsman of another school. Mifune doesn't have a huge role, but it's a very important one, and he owns it, and yes, he does get to mow some people down.

There's a whole lot of slaughter in The Sword of Doom. More than I've seen in most 60's samurai movies, but way, way less than the crazy ones of the 70's. In fact, the last 10 minutes or so is non-stop samurai sword action (my favorite kind of action).

The ending was a little confusing to me at first. There have been all these interwoven, complicated stories going on, and none of them pay off! I thought maybe they were trying to make a statement about something. I then did a little of research on Wikipedia and found out that The Sword of Doom was meant to be the first part in a trilogy of films, based on a classic piece of Japanese literature. The ending was a big cliffhanger that never got resolved. What a letdown it was to get so wrapped up in a story only to find out that I was never going to see it end.

Lack of resolution aside, I kind of loved The Sword of Doom. I got very involved in it, and never had any idea what was going to happen next. The cinematography, sound design, acting, and action scenes were all top notch. And the ending wasn't a total downer, because there wasn't really an ending! I hear the story was adapted a couple more times before this version was made. I'm wondering if those versions were any good, and if I can find them anywhere, so I can get a better idea of the full story.