Raizo Ichikawa played the Japanese pulp hero Nemuri Kyoshiro in a twelve films for the Daiei studio between 1963 and his 1969 death from liver cancer at age 37. The Kyoshiro films (marketed in the U.S. as "Sleepy Eyes of Death") aren't as well known worldwide as Daiei's beloved Zatoichi series. That may be because they don't have as simply grasped a gimmick as "blind swordsman," and it may also be because, at least as far as the U.S. and Europe are concerned, there's something xenophobic about Kyoshiro's origin story. A typical wandering "rogue," his father was a "lapsed Christian" who apparently went to the dark side and performed satanic black masses. In Adventure, the sixth film of the series, we see Kyoshiro kill a lapsed Christian who uses the black mass as a cover for abortions. It's the sort of stuff that may make western audiences uncomfortable, but it's not the main story of this particular picture.
In the main story, Kyoshiro is propositioned by a prostitute who wears a Noh mask. He learns that she is a fallen aristocrat and spurns her advances. When he learns later that she has killed herself, he blames his own bad karma, due to the circumstances of his birth, for her sad end. He becomes embroiled in the fate of her young son, raised by a carpenter's family but now in line to inherit a rich fief. Needless to say the typical greedy local clan leader wants control of the boy and the fief, caring little what happens to the carpenter or for what the boy really wants, but Kyoshiro intervenes, fulfilling whatever debt he may owe to the suicide by making sure that her son can choose his own future. At the same time, he has to fend off repeated attempts on his life by Orin (Michiko Saga), the sister of a bandit Kyoshiro had killed a few films earlier. Orin is ineffectual but persistent, attacking with shuriken,snakes and much more, and for a time joins forces with the evil clan until she discovers the limits of her own villainy while holding the boy hostage.
Ichikawa gives Kyoshiro an almost self-pitying quality covered by his dedication to honor and righteousness. Between this film and the first in the series, The Chinese Jade, which I saw many years ago, I didn't get much sense of the hero's character beyond being a hero, but I give the actor credit for a heroic presence. Nemuri Kyoshiro may simply not be as well-developed a character as Shintaro Katsu's Zatoichi is. By comparison, Kyoshiro is more gimmick than character. The defining thing about him is his special sword attack, the "full moon cut," which in this film's climactic fight with the typical honorable-but-fighting-on-the-wrong side samurai looks more like cheating than skill, since sunlight reflecting from the hero's blade nearly blinds his enemy. Kyoshiro's running fights with flunkies are more one-sided but are more impressively staged with long horizontal tracking shots through a forest. It's all for a good cause, I suppose, and my criticisms aside I found this Kimiyoshi Yasuda film (he directed many Zatoichis as well as Daimajin) entertaining. I may just be easy to please when it comes to jidaigeki movies, but Daiei's programmers are consistently well made, in my experience, and this one was no exception.
No comments:
Post a Comment