Secret of the Urn is the tale of Tange Sazen, a one-armed, one-eyed Samurai character famous in Japanese literature. There have been many adaptations of this story and others featuring him, in manga, in movies, etc. But look at me, speaking like I'm knowledgeable of the subject, when actually, this was the first time I've ever heard of Tange Sazen. This particular version of Secret of the Urn was made in 1966, by famed director Hideo Gosha.
Hideo Gosha is a Japanese director who never really got a lot of attention here in America. A few of his movies are available here, most famously Sword of the Beast from the Criterion Collection (which I have yet to see), but for the most part, you have to find them by other means. Secret of the Urn is one of his early works, more fun and less dark than his films were eventually to become. I was elated to find it on Netflix Instant Watch.
The story begins with a samurai named Samanosuke, who is told to execute a man who is married to a girl he grew up beside. Loyally doing his duty, he is tricked and betrayed, first by the man he is executing, then by his own people. He loses his right eye and his right arm. In the scene, his arm actually flies through the air and lands in a flock of birds, scattering them into the sky.
The story picks up one year later, with Yokichi, an over-the-hill bandit overhears the lord of the Yagyu clan talking about how they need 300,000 Ryo to pay for a shrine renovation for the Shogun. Obviously, the clan would go broke with that much Ryo (I mean, obviously, right?), so the lord asks his man to retrieve the Earless Monkey Urn, which is said to contain a million Ryo.
Hearing this, Yokichi goes to his cohort, a music teacher/prostitute named Ofuji, who is really calling the shots, and they hatch a plan to snatch that can. They go to the river where the Urn is being picked up, and surprise! The samurai transporting it are attacked by ninjas! There's this really great sequence where the urn is passed back and forth between ninja and samurai as they all get cut down one after the other. Finally, a dying samurai manages to get the urn to a little orphan boy. Ofuji and Yokichi try to get it from the boy and he runs off, only to meet... Samanosuke.
Only Samanosuke no longer goes by that name, he goes by Tange Sazen. No longer the loyal and noble samurai he was only a year before, he is now bitter, grouchy, and foul mouthed. He is homeless, and supports himself as a hired sword. Sazen helps the boy, Ofuji and Yokichi get away with the urn, and joins up with them. He's pretty much doing all this to stick it to the system that threw him away like yesterday's trash.
Over the course of the movie, Tange Sazen forms sort of a family unit out of these people, and becomes the leader of the Thieve's Temple Gang, a comical group of thieves. He also gets justice for himself, gets the urn into the right hands, and uncovers corruption in the very top level of the government.
Secret of the Urn was a really enjoyable movie. The characters are all likeable. Tange Sazen is clearly a hero of the post-Yojimbo era, the flea-bitten, gruff samurai with a hidden heart of gold. The little boy doesn't care about the urn, he just wants Sazen to teach him the sword. Ofuji is sort of a scheming love interest, where you can't immediately tell if she's loyal to Sazen, or to the urn. Yokichi and the thieves are comic relief. It was interesting to me, because I've never seen a Hideo Gosha film with such light-hearted elements before.
Hideo Gosha's action sequences are always impressive. Unlike many other samurai movie battles, which were slow builds of tension as the fighters size each other up, and then suddenly over as fast as one stroke of the sword, Gosha's were more modern, fast paced, choreographed sword fights. The great twist, of course, is that Tange Sazen is only able to use his left hand. There's a scene where he's holding the urn and tossing it up in the air and mowing a couple guys down before catching it.
I have to admit, there were a couple of dangling plot threads, like when the Urn turns out to be empty with writing inside it, they never really explain what the writing means, and where the million Ryo is. It's surely addressed in some of the many other versions of the story, right? Maybe they didn't explain it all because the story is so well known in Japan that everybody there just knows the answer. I don't know, I'm no Japan expert, just a real big fan of their stuff.
So check this movie out. It's on Netflix for all to watch. And if you're interested in digging deeper for other Hideo Gosha fare, might I recommend the two films he made after this, Samurai Wolf and Samurai Wolf 2? Those are also a whole lot of fun, and have a pretty awesome lead character.
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