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.

Samurai Rebellion

Masaki Kobayashi's Samurai Rebellion is a powerful 1967 film about the spirit of defiance. It stars the great Marlon Japando himself, Toshiro Mifune as the obedient patron of a samurai family, who, through a series of horrible injustices acted upon his family by his lord, is slowly pushed to act out in open rebellion. Like many samurai films of this era, it's a pretty dark story, and, well, these things just don't tend to end well in Japanese stories.

The story is actually pretty dense. As stated above, Mifune plays Isaburo, a low man on the samurai totem pole who has spent his entire life laying low and doing as he's told. He is regarded as a great swordsman, but has always lacked the drive to really stand out. He married his wife out of duty and political convenience, and has thus spent the last 20+ years in a loveless marriage.

His circumstances change when the lord he serves under demands that his son take a girl as his wife. The girl in question is considered damaged goods, as she was a former concubine of the lord, who, after bearing him a son, physically attacked the lord. Isaburo tries to refuse, despite the political repercussions these actions would have on his standing and his family. His son, raised with his father's sense of duty, steps in and volunteers to take the girl as his wife.

Cut forward two years, Isaburo's son and now daughter-in-law have fallen in love and had a daughter of their own. Things are going well, until the lord's own son and heir dies, and the son the girl bore is now his heir. Seen as dishonorable that the heir to the realm does not have a mother, the lord demands the girl back.

Moved by his son and daughter-in-law's love, and the threat of her being taken away, Isaburo is pushed to take a stand, along with the two of them. This tears his family apart, and puts all of their lives in danger, but for the first time in his life, Isaburo feels alive. I don't want to spoil the whole thing, but it gets pretty dark.

Kobayashi's filmmaking is superb, from the very opening scene, pulling focus from Isaburo's sword in the foreground to Isaburo himself in the background (likening him to his weapon), to his first subconscious act of rebellion, walking off the stone path in his yard, and leaving a trail of footprints in the neatly raked zen garden. The tension builds slowly and then bursts at the end with two bloody, fast-paced action sequences. I also loved the flashback-within-a-flashback utilized when Isaburo's son tells him of when his wife told him her side of the whole ordeal with the lord.

As tragic as Samurai Rebellion is, it does end with a little bit of hope for the audience to latch onto, but man, it's a bit of a tough ride getting there. I don't mind downbeat movies once in a while, but generally, I'm a happy ending kind of guy. I certainly couldn't watch movies like this one all the time. That said, I'm glad I saw it. I just wish they would make a movie called something like "Three Happy Samurai on a Sunshine Mission of Love and Blood-Spurting Decapitations" once in a while.

Seven Samurai

This is a big one, everybody.

A confession, this is the first time I have seen Seven Samurai all the way through. We watched it in Japanese class in high school, but I think I missed the first day, and I probably read books during the rest of it, because I was a shithead. I wasn't the best of students in that class, and my dumbass teenage apathy for old and foreign movies were also factors. We're all shitheads in our own ways in high school, though, right? Don't say you weren't, because we were all shitheads.

I discovered the films of Akira Kurosawa, along with anything else subtitled or made before Star Wars, on my own as an adult. I watched several of the major ones: Yojimbo, Sanjuro, Hidden Fortress, Rashomon, Throne of Blood; but I always have a hard time finding three and a half hours to set aside for an epic. On my recent quest for an awesome Blu Ray collection, I have finally righted this egregious error.

Look, it's a masterpiece. It's a perfect, perfect film. One of the best ever made. Kurosawa is possibly the greatest filmmaker who ever lived, or at least up there pretty high in the rankings.

What strikes me most about Akira Kurosawa's films is his storytelling. He conveys such emotional depth and complexity in all of his characters, and he achieves this with absolute clarity. The story is as straightforward as can be: a village of farmers, terrorized by a pack of brigands, recruit a group of samurai to help them defend themselves and their harvest. With that setup, Kurosawa unfurls a rich character-driven drama and adventure movie, simultaneously epic and personal.

The cast is huge and all of the characters are great, but we all know the star of this movie is Toshiro Mifune. There he is front and center on that poster. The man was one of the strongest screen presences of the time. The Brando of Japan (or Japando, as I like to say). This was before the role of Sanjuro took over his life and he became an international screen giant. He was still doing a variety of characters for Kurosawa at the time. And this is one of the greats. He runs rampant through the movie, and is clearly having a blast doing so. His energy is infectious for both the characters and the audience.

The only kind-of complaint is just the unfortunate fact that this movie was not shot in widescreen. Widescreen movies were still a fairly new thing at the time, the industry's way of competing with television. Kurosawa's first widescreen film was Yojimbo, 6 years later, and the man knew how to use the format like nobody else. That Yojimbo, a small, dark comedy got to use this format, but a movie as huge as Seven Samurai didn't have that opportunity is a shame. It could have opened up the scope so much more.

That complaint is small potatoes, really. The movie is beautiful. You can watch it instantly on Netflix, if you can find an appropriate chunk of your life to give to it.

Seven Samurai: A+

Marlon Japando: A+

High School Me: Shithead