11 SAMURAI (1966)

More isn't necessarily better, but Eiichi Kudo has plenty to offer in this picture along with four more warriors than sufficed for Akira Kurosawa. To be correct, Kudo's team of heroes includes one ronin, with a grudge against aristocrats, and one woman, valiantly determined to make up for the loss of her brother to tuberculosis. Like many such pictures, 11 Samurai is concerned with the honor of a clan and the sacrifices its retainers will make to preserve it, usually by taking revenge on a villain. In this case the villain is particularly obnoxious. The spoiled relative of a retired shogun, and thus a privileged noble, Lord Nariatsu (Kantaro Suga) blunders across the border into the neighboring fiefdom while hunting rabbits and slaughters the first peasant who gets in his way. He isn't supposed to cross into another fief without permission, and the murder only exacerbates the offense in the eyes of the local clan leader, who presumes to reprimand Nariatsu and catches an arrow in the eye for his trouble. Nariatsu's family is so privileged that the government decides to blame the murdered man's clan for the incident and strip them of their lucrative fief, which the envious Nariatsu has coveted for some time. The most Hayato (Isao Natsuyagi) gets by appealing to the government is a one-month delay in the announcement of the penalty. But that gives him time to formulate a plan to change the game by killing Nariatsu. He suspects that the government would cover up a revenge killing that would embarrass the state and write Nariatsu off as a victim of illness, and with Nariatsu out of the picture the government might rethink the confiscation.

Nariatsu (above) offends, and members of the Abe clan defend their honor.

Hayato has two priorities: keeping his subordinates from jumping the gun and attacking Nariatsu on their own, and outwitting the crafty chamberlain Gyobu (Ryutaro Otomo) responsible for protecting Nariatsu. He suppresses one premature attempt by his men (and the woman Nui [Keiko Okawa], subbing for her brother) and sentences them (except for the woman) to seppuku. Their readiness to die only proves their worth to him; they (and the woman) become key to his plan. Nui's role is more actress than warrior; she absconds with Hayato as he attempts to convince everyone that he's given up on the fief and abandoned his wife Orie (Junko Miyazono) to live with the other woman. Orie proves more understanding about this than her brother, who decides to show up Hayato by attacking Nariatsu singlehandedly, with predictably disastrous consequences. With her brother dead and her husband not likely to survive, Orie kills herself, to Hayato's horror. He envisioned a revenge scenario with minimal damage to his clan, but it's not turning out as he'd planned.

 

With Orie dead, Hayato has even less to live for than before,

apart from waiting for his chance for revenge.

Pressing on, Hayato contrives the perfect ambush to take out Nariatsu -- Kudo shows us how perfectly it would have worked were our hero not a sucker willing to trust authority. At practically the last moment, word reaches him that the government is going to reconsider the confiscation, and he aborts the clan's best chance to nail their enemy. Soon enough, he learns he's been lied to, with no alternative left to him but a direct assault on Nariatsu's entourage.

Justice is on Hayato's side, but Kudo sees little glory in his hero's vengeance. The film climaxes with a running battle in the rain that might remind viewers of Seven Samurai but comes closer in spirit to the muddy combat of Orson Welles's Chimes at Midnight. The bad guys lose, but there's little sense of triumph in their downfall. A defining shot of a survivor sitting in the mud, slashing at a puddle with his sword, underscores the pointlessness of it all perhaps too blatantly. Kudo has it both ways, however, since the final fight is excitingly staged and punctuated with crowd-pleasing violence, most notably when one of our heroes becomes a suicide bomber by jumping on a bonfire with a pack of gunpowder. Samurai cinema in general was good at having it both ways, many films from the Sixties forward strongly criticizing feudal injustice without disappointing action fans. Kudo's are more cerebral samurai films, often focusing on a strategic battle of wits between leaders as with Hayato and Gyobu here, and 11 Samurai features strong performances from Natsuyagi and a diverse ensemble. He impresses as an action director as well, and 11 Samurai can certainly be enjoyed by action fans (though patience is advised) regardless of whatever message Kudo had in mind.

HARA-KIRI: DEATH OF A SAMURAI (2011)

American movie buffs will recognize Takashi Miike's film as a remake of Masaki Kobayashi's 1962 Harakiri and wonder why anyone should remake a classic. Some Japanese fans might have felt the same way, but since both films are adaptations of a novel by Yasuhiko Tamaguchi there's no reason why you can't eventually have as many Harakiris as there are movies of, for instance, Les Miserables. My example has a point, since anyone moved by the grim portrait of oldschool poverty that even the musical version of Hugo offers should be moved similarly by either version of the Tamaguchi novel. The movie are more distinct for Japanese audiences, since they call the 1962 film Seppuku and the 2011 Ichimei. Nevertheless, the stories are the same, and I refer you to my review of Kobayashi for plot details. The two films differ in emphasis and more profoundly on the sensory level, for not only is the Miike film in color, but it was also made to be shown in 3D. It may be a virtue that you can watch it flat and not realize that you missed a dimension. Miike, often a provocateur in his prolific career, works in neoclassical mode here so you can appreciate the widescreen framing and cinematography without ducking at simulated flying gore. You get the impression that he respects the source material, both the novel and the earlier film.

The biggest difference I can see, relying on my memories of the Kobayashi film, is Miike's gimmick of the hero, Tsugumo Hanshiro (kabuki star Ichikawa Ebizo XI) taking his righteous anger out on the heartless retainers of Ii with a bamboo sword similar to the one they made his hapless son-in-law Chijiiwa Motome (Eita) use to commit seppuku. This is a good idea, since Miike has stressed how torturously difficult it is to disembowel oneself with such a weapon. It creates the impression that Tsugumo wants to inflict pain rather than death on the cruel samurai and teach them a lesson in the process. Miike also stages the final battle in snowy weather, most likely to show off the 3D by adding a layer to the image. It looks quite nice flat, too.

Overall, cinematographer Nobuyasu Kita makes a good case for color alone justifying a remake. But the story itself is the best justification of all. If anything, a story of a man forced out of honorable employment and watching helplessly as his child sinks into poverty and sickness has more resonance for Japanese and global audiences today than it had 50 years ago. When I reviewed the Kobayashi version I compared it to Vietnam-veteran films, given the hero's samurai status, but modern audiences should simply see poverty without worrying about the man's profession. Miike seems to stress the poverty of his protagonists more consistently than Kobayashi did. I recall their poverty seeming more genteel for at least part of the earlier film before the illness of Tsugumo's daughter and grandson precipitates a crisis, while even in color the family home in the Miike looks darker and more drab throughout. Miike plays for pathos more blatantly, aided by a poignant score by Ryuichi Sakamoto, but this isn't an inappropriate course to take with this story. The more abject the family's plight, the more righteous is Tsugumo's wrath at the climax. Also helping justify that cathartic violence are the performances of the Ii retainers. I was particularly impressed by Munetaka Aoki, who took over Testuro Tamba's performance in the original as the bullying retainer who refuses to finish off  Motome despite his agony with a broken sword. Since Miike truncates the story's duel between this bully and Tsugumo, Aoki gets by mainly with a formidable and not unhandsome glower and a hissible contempt for the weak, and that's enough. He could play villains for life with that face. The whole cast benefits from Miike's strong sense of dramatic pacing in the very formal dialogue scenes that frame the non-linear story. The sustained deliberation sustains suspense, even for viewers familiar with the story from the earlier film.

My first impression is that Miike doesn't equal Kobayashi, primarily because Ichikawa Ebizo doesn't equal Tatsuya Nakadai in the lead role. But the new Harakiri is a worthy effort that proves the story evergreen. The flashbacks and the pathos and the righteous anger worked before, work now and probably could work again a generation from now. We may not have needed Miike's Harakiri, but I'm glad we have it.

THREE OUTLAW SAMURAI (1964)

Hideo Gosha's first theatrical film was an adaptation of a popular Japanese TV series. The Shochiku studio promoted it as a revolutionary film while noting that it was star Testuro Tamba's first movie as a producer. 1964 was a big year for Tamba, as the future Tiger Tanaka would make his first English-language film, The 7th Dawn (coming soon to this blog). While the studio stressed these milestones, Three Outlaw Samurai is in line with a number of contemporary films that used the chambara genre to criticize historical injustices and highlight class conflicts. There seemed to be a cinematic consensus that feudal Japan was a cruel land where aristocrats ground peasants into the earth, while samurai and ronin chose sides according to their personalities.

Shiba (Tamba) stumbles into a zone of class warfare where some exceptionally bold peasants have kidnapped the daughter of a local lord in hopes of extracting concessions from him. His exactions have left them hungry, and Shiba takes an initially dispassionate interest in the kidnappers, advising them on how to defend their ground and finally intervening when the lord's men try to rescue the girl. The lord recruits a motley lot to escalate the conflict, including two more ronin. One, the deceptively lazy looking Sakura (Isamu Nagato), quickly switches sides to support Shiba, though not before killing a peasant who attacked him for no apparent reason. The third, the self-styled "freeloader" Kikyo (Mikijiro Hira), sticks with the lord until he sees proof of the man's dishonor.

 

Following Sakura's defection, the lord's men capture a peasant girl and torture her in order to force the hostage's release. When the peasants relent, the girl kills herself by biting her own tongue off rather than see her people give up their own advantage. But when the peasants threaten to kill the lord's daughter for revenge, Shiba defuses the situation by turning her and himself over to the authorities, vowing to accept any punishment the lord wishes so long as the peasants are spared. Kikyo witnesses Shiba's torture, and learns that the lord has ordered the peasant ringleaders slaughtered anyway. He helps Shiba escape, then finally joins forces with Shiba and Sakura to fight a small army determined to prevent the peasants from presenting a petition to a nobleman denouncing the lord.

For a debut film Gosha's is pretty slick, but the director had honed his craft on the TV version. Three Outlaw Samurai is stylishly efficient, packing plenty of plot and subplot in little more than 90 minutes.  Amid all the action Gosha manages to fit in a major romantic storyline for Sakura, who falls for a peasant widow before either realizes that the attacker the ronin had killed earlier was her husband. While the film as a whole is understandably Tamba's show, Isamu Nagato just about steals it as the samurai who comes nearest to a spaghetti-western "ugly" type, but is also the most conscientious and soulful of the three.

 

(l-r) Mikijiro Hara, Testuro Tamba, Isamu Nagato;

(Below) You cannot petition the lord with prayer!

 

Sixties samurai films anticipate spaghetti westerns in their class consciousness, most resembling the spaghettis set in Mexico, where the oppression of the poor by the rich could be shown in starkest if not cartoonish detail. Gosha steps back from embracing the peasantry, however. He emphasizes how exceptional the few were who dared kidnap the lord's daughter by portraying the rest as abject cowards in the denouement, when Shiba, having risked his life for the peasants' right to submit their petition, can't convince any of them to actually give it to the nobleman. Gosha's peasants are less the salt of the earth than an opposite extreme of wretched impotence from the nobility's extreme of oppressive ruthlessness. The samurai seem to be the only ones capable of decisive, honorable action, and for every one who proves a good guy there's probably another who tramples the helpless under foot. Looking at it from the broadest perspective, Three Outlaw Samurai is no more political than any Robin Hood or William Tell movie, since just about everyone agrees that feudalism was bad and made people bad. As an action movie, it can be enjoyed quite easily without looking for any politics in it. Gosha's greatest works in the genre were yet to come, of course -- Goyokin is his masterpiece of the films I've seen -- but Three Outlaw Samurai is an impressive start to his cinematic career.

SAMURAI BANNERS (Fuurin kazan, 1969)

Promoted as "the biggest movie production in Japanese history," Hiroshi Inagaki's historical epic was produced by its star, Toshiro Mifune, who may have seen in the real-life protagonist a kind of antithesis of the Japanese Macbeth he'd performed for Akira Kurosawa in Throne of Blood. Mifune plays Kansuke Yamamoto, an important general of Japan's sengoku period (roughly the 16th century CE) whose ambition has shady origins but is ultimately more vicarious than personal. He's introduced in a black-and-white opening sequence in which he eliminates a creditor by convincing him to attack but spare an important daimyo as a demonstration of his skills. The film immediately shifts to full color as the incident plays out exactly as the creditor feared, with Kansuke following up to rescue the daimyo from the attacker by killing him. The shifty scarfaced ronin thus ingratiates himself with the rising Takeda (Kinnosuke Nakamura), who is quickly impressed by Kansuke's strategic acumen and his ambitious vision of Takeda's future. Kansuke persuades him to conquer a neighboring province with minimum fuss, with Kansuke himself conspiring under diplomatic cover to assassinate the rival lord. He discovers a kind of kindred spirit in the lord's daughter, Princess Yufu (Yoshiko Sakuma), who refuses to do the proper thing and kill herself. Her desire to live, even if that means becoming Takeda's concubine, strikes a chord in Kansuke, who has a similar desire to live at all costs. "I can't die, even if they kill me," he says at one point. That's because he's a visionary with an overwhelming drive to see his vision become a reality. That vision involves Takeda expanding his domain from coast to coast, at the very least.

 

Kurosawa's Shakespeare influence may have rubbed off on Toshiro Mifune, who delivers an ultimatum reminiscent of Henry V's Harfleur speech -- with serious props to back him up.

Strangely, Kansuke has no apparent ambition to usurp Takeda's domain; it'll suffice for him if someone achieves these great triumphs. But he'll manipulate Takeda as best he can to make him realize Kansuke's vision. Likewise, he manipulates the princess, for whom he feels strong yet repressed emotions, to make sure she bears Takeda a son -- whom Kansuke treats as his stake in Takeda's future. In an intense and disturbing scene, he takes the newborn from Yufu's arms and tells it that he, Kansuke, and not Takeda or Yufu, is the boy's true parent. For her part, Yufu has love-hate relations with both the men in her life, and probably with herself, and the film creates the impression that Kansuke has kept her alive by his own force of will, because she's part of his vision. But this samurai control freak can't master everything. In the literal fog of battle, when it looks as if all his plans will collapse, he throws himself into reckless action, charting his own course for fate separate from the outcome of war....

"I am your father!" The dark side of Kansuke's ambition doesn't exactly score points with Princess Yu(Yoshiko Sakuma, below)

Fuurin Kazan (the Japanese title is a sort of anagram of the four slogans on Kansuke's banners) is a big historical spectacle in the classical manner, and it has the air of a history lesson about it. Inagaki, who directed Mifune in the Miyamoto Mushashi trilogy of the 1950s, can handle the pageantry with ease, though his battle scenes lack the abstract clarity of Kurosawa's. He also throws in some impressionistic bits, including solarized scenes, to illustrate Kansuke's subjective consciousness and ambition. The psychology of Kansuke's vicarious ambition holds the film together, and Mifune makes the most of the acting opportunity. It's an intense lead performance from a period when he was starting to recede into distinguished guest-star roles and may be one of the last full-power performances he gave, down to what had become a stereotypical human-pincushion finish. At the same time, producer Mifune gives Yoshiko Sakuma every opportunity to make a strong impression as the princess, a woman who seems like Kansuke's soulmate, but is probably doomed for just that reason. By comparison, Nakamura is underutilized as a malleable authority figure, but his star power keeps Takeda from being blown off the screen and keeps Kansuke's singleminded yet self-serving subservience to the lord plausible.

Mifune biographer Stuart Galbraith IV reports that Fuurin Kazan was "mildly successful" at the box office but already regarded as old-fashioned even within Japan. It seems analogous to the period spectacles that were losing loads of money in the U.S. at the same time, but Samurai Banners doesn't seem like a failure to me. You might be able to imagine the greater film Kurosawa may have made of the Kansuke story (had he been willing to work with Mifune again), but Mifune had enough of a sense as a producer of his strengths as an actor and star to make the film an impressive personal vehicle and a compelling, personality-driven historical drama.

THE SECRET OF THE URN (1966)

Before there was a one-armed swordsman or one-armed boxer in Hong Kong, before there was a one-armed murderer on The Fugitive TV series, before Spencer Tracy was a one-armed karate expert in Bad Day at Black Rock, there was Tange Sazen. Created by the author Fubo Hayashi in 1927, the one-armed, one-eyed ronin has been a fixture of Japanese pop culture ever since. Within a year of his invention, he was in the movies, and films have been made of his mythical exploits ever since, the latest in 2004 according to Wikipedia. So popular was the motif of Tange Sazen that one studio contrived to turn the character into a woman for a presumably bizarre but also presumably progressive series of films. Hideo Gosha's rendering of the Sazen story is, one must assume, more conventional, and has the advantage of being made when Gosha was at the peak of his powers as a director of suspenseful action films. Apparently an adaption of an established Sazen story, The Secret of the Urn also feels like a dry run for Gosha's masterpiece Goyokin, which would appear three years later.

Gosha's film opens with Tange Sazen's origin. Our antihero starts out as an ordinary Tokugawa-era samurai, Samanosuke (Kinnosuke Nakamura) who is assigned to assassinate a conspirator. He's tapped because he once loved the target's wife, so that his superiors can disclaim responsibility and blame Samanosuke for acting out of jealousy. He confronts his target in the countryside, informs him of the charge, and gives him a chance to die honorably in combat. The conspirator, deciding that his cause is hopeless, opts for seppuku instead, asking Samanosuke to be his second and deliver the deathblow. His promise proves treacherous; when Samanosuke assumes the position, the conspirator turns on him and slashes his face, blinding him in one eye and in effect making him the Jonah Hex of Japan. Samanosuke still finishes his man, but now has to fight off government men who tag him as an insane murderer. He escapes, but leaves his sword arm behind in the confusion.

The plot proper now begins. We're introduced to the famous Yagyu clan, which has been commissioned by the shogunate to host an important festival. The purpose of this is simply to drain the Yagyu of their resources; if they can't come up with the funds, their fiefdom will be forfeit. Times are tough, as they usually are in a Gosha film, so what is to be done? A 120-year old retainer has the answer: the Yagyu possess a treasure known as the Earless Monkey Urn. Of great historical significance in its own right, the urn also has the key to a million-ryo treasure. The only idea I can offer of how much that is is to note that one hundred ryo is the amount usually offered some sucker who happens to possess the urn but doesn't know its true value. Such a person is presumably very much impressed with the hundred ryo, so escalate accordingly. But how do other people get their hands on the urn?

There are spies and thieves everywhere, it turns out, so that not only the Yagyus' rivals but a pair of common thieves -- a stuttering burglar and a pistol-packing geisha -- know about the urn and its significance, even if none of them necessarily know how to interpret its inscriptions. The amazingly resilient urn -- what is it, made of iron? -- literally becomes a football scrimmaged over by rival factions as the two thieves and an ambitious little urchin watch and wait for their chance. The struggle eventually brings everyone to the doorstep, figuratively speaking, of the ronin Tange Sazen, who has trained himself as an invincible swordsman with his remaining arm. He soon takes charge of the urn, knowing only that people are fighting over it and that he can clearly make mischief with it. The thieves know what it's worth, but Sazen doesn't necessarily care -- and at the same time the more-or-less innocent Yagyu have a perfectly legitimate claim to the urn, and their future depends on it. Will the mockingly bitter Sazen regain his sense of honor? Will the reappearance of his lost love bring him to his senses, or has something developed between him and the geisha -- and will that bring him to his senses -- or her to hers?

My feeling that Secret of the Urn was a practice run for Goyokin is based on several factors, including the presence of Nakamura, the convergence of politics and a money grab, the involvement of a brother-and-sister team of rogues, and the fact that Urn isn't quite as good as the later film. Goyokin may simply have been Gosha's way of improving on many of the established story elements in the Tange Sazen saga. The later film has both a stronger moral core, embodied by Tatsuya Nakadai, and a more relentless dramatic momentum. Urn is episodic and protracted by comparison, even though it's a good half-hour shorter than Goyokin. It's inferior on just about every level, but not being a masterpiece is no crime, especially when Urn is as lively and well-acted overall as it is. It shares with Goyokin a realist but not revisionist awareness of the cynical and mercenary forces at work in samurai times, along with a faith that true heroism was both possible and capable of victory. That makes Gosha's samurai films classic adventures of the sort fans of classic Hollywood could recognize and empathize with.

Personally, one bonus element in Urn is the presence of ninjas. Especially gratifying is Gosha's use of them the way they should be used: as cannon fodder -- or, to be more accurate, either sword fodder or fodder for the geisha's pistol. For are not ninjas the most overrated creatures in all creation? I might take them seriously if they were "modern ninjas" like the ones Tetsuro Tamba (a welcome presence in Urn, as usual) was training in You Only Live Twice, but too often in movies ninja are no more than allegedly lethal mimes with Boba Fett powers. They are assumed to be badass because -- to somebody -- they look cool. The armies of ninjas that infested the 1980s were good only for laughs. Historical ninjas are admittedly more plausible as menaces, but only if used properly as skulking assassins. In Urn, when they attempt to attack frontally or en masse, they are properly slaughtered with sword and gun. Tange Sazen has my respect on the strength of this one outing as a ninja-killer. Doing it all one-handed is nearly as impressive as the Chinese martial artists in that Japanese film whose title I can never remember who could take out ninjas with his bare hands. So ha-ha to Eric Van Lustbader, Frank Miller and other ninja-lovers; I do not recommend Secret of the Urn to them.

Nor would I recommend it objectively to anyone unfamiliar with Hideo Gosha's work until you've seen Goyokin first. But since Urn is currently available as a Netflix streaming video, while they have to send you Goyokin in the mail, you may as well watch Secret, since it is a well-made, entertaining action movie from the classic period of samurai cinema. Think of it as an appetizer, with Goyokin as the main course; you'll probably like it, and I can assure you there's better to come.

AnimEigo released the film on DVD this year, provided the stream to Netflix, and uploaded this English-subtitled trailer to YouTube.

Tadashi Imai's REVENGE (Adauchi, 1964)

Ladies and Gentlemen! Our next bout: a death match! A grudge fight to a finish with no time limit! In this corner! The Kyoto Madman, the winner of his last two fights -- by fatality! -- Ezaki Shinpachi!

And in this corner!... Well, we'll get to that. But this is no way to introduce a samurai film, except that director Tadashi Imai and screenwriter Shinobu Hashimoto invite you to do just that. This film, Imai's follow-up to his international prize-winner Bushido: The Cruel Code of the Samurai, opens with the announcement of an officially-sanctioned duel between Shinpachi (Kinnosuke Nakamura, also from Bushido) and the latest challenger from the Okumo clan and the preparations for the big event. As the fighters meditate and worry, the organizers are setting up a reviewing stand and a picket fence to keep the expected rabble of spectators at a respectful distance. There's something disquieting about this almost immediately. We're not used to these duels of honor being treated as spectator sport. But Bushido proved Imai a debunker of heroic samurai mythos, and in Adauchi he and Hashimoto deconstruct the typical feud-and-duel storyline to demonstrate just how custom and self-interest make a mockery of the samurai ideal.

Imai slowly builds up the suspense as fight time approaches in the present by flashing back repeatedly to show how Shinpachi came to this point. The trouble began with a casual insult delivered by an Okumo scion as Shinpachi and his lower-ranking clan report for their customary military duty. The proud, reckless Shinpachi bristles when Okumo criticizes the dirt on his spear head. It can be polished clean with one wipe, he protests, and who says Okumo's own weapon doesn't gather dust on his off days? This just won't do. Shinpachi lacks the rank to talk to an Okumo like that, and Okumo demands satisfaction. They arrange to fight a clandestine duel to settle the issue, and in one of Imai's devices to deny us the conventional entertainment of samurai action, we never see the fight. Instead, we discover Shinpachi cleaning his blade by the river, and he directs the curious to the mortally-wounded Okumo.

Because the duel is unauthorized, both the Ezaki and Okumo clans are in legal jeopardy. They're liable to having their stipends confiscated by an eager feudal bureaucracy, but both clans resort to the insanity defense. Psychology in Tokugawa Japan not being what it'd become once the discipline was actually invented, the government has no real way to refute the claim. They let the matter drop on the understanding that the "insane" Shinpachi will be confined to a monastery. Meanwhile, the lack of liability on the late Okumo's part allows his estate to devolve upon his more talented brother Shume (Tetsuro Tamba), who decides that with the coast clear legally, he can settle scores with Shinpachi. He isn't going to get into trouble by fighting a duel, of course; he's just going to murder the bastard.

Tetsuro Tamba vs. Kinnosuke Nakamura

Shinpachi intercepts Shume on the road, and now we have a proper fight scene -- sort of. Shume is clearly the more skilled swordsman, but Shinpachi fights with desperation and raw strength, and he has a little bit of luck on his side. Needless to say, the news baffles the local administration: surely the Okumos can't say that two brothers were insane. What is it, catching? But instead of cracking down on the Okumo clan, the government presses for a settlement of their beef with Shinpachi. With the Ezaki clan's standing on the line, a deal is negotiated. The government will sanction a duel between Shinpachi and a younger Okumo brother -- but the fix will be in. To save his family's standing, Shinpachi will throw the fight, presenting no resistance to a clearly outmatched youngster. Unfortunately, while he's on the way to the makeshift arena, the terms of the fix are changed. Just in case Shinpachi changes his mind, young Okumo will be assisted by six top fighting retainers who'll soften Shinpachi up until Okumo can safely finish him off.

It's one thing to agree to do the job, as they say in professional wrestling, and another not to know ahead of time that they intend to make you bleed by hitting you with a real chair. Right off the bat, Shinpachi is disturbed to see and hear the jeering crowd that's formed to watch his humiliation. And when Okumo's assistants hit the ring, our hero, who hasn't seemed to have been entirely faking the crazy thing, simply snaps. He protests that assistance isn't necessary, and for him it is insult and injury, proving that the Okumo and the government don't trust him and really want to embarrass him before everyone. Under those circumstances, screw all agreements -- Shinpachi is going to fight for real....

Samurai movies are cool -- but Tadashi Imai seems to have dedicated himself to eliminating the cool from the genre to expose the cruelty, stupidity and suffering that define the ethos for him. While it's almost impossible to eliminate a certain inherent elegance to the swordplay that kills with one blow, Imai strives to do so by emphasizing the confusion and raw fear that would probably come to the surface when real people fought. If Nakamura appears to go over the top playing the increasingly crazed Shinpachi, it's probably necessary to drive home Imai's point. And when Nakamura gets to go on a typical final rampage, Imai makes clear that fear is a major factor in whatever success his enjoys. Even if you outnumber a guy by six or more to one, if he comes bellering at you with a bloodstained sword, you're probably going to be scared despite your security in numbers.

Because it's less of a stunt movie than the seven-part, seven-roles-for-Nakamura Bushido, Adauchi (do we really need another movie called Revenge?) is a superior movie in story construction and character development. It's not as much of a showcase for Nakamura, but he definitely gives the performance Imai wants, and overall Imai makes the impression he wants. He's not a flashy or gimmicky director but tells his story with pictorial clarity. He seems to prefer the controlled environment of a soundstage, but the art direction and black-and-white cinematography make the painted backdrops look more like craftsmanship than mere fakery. AnimEigo has made their new DVD of Adauchi available as a Netflix stream, but the transfer isn't perfect. You do get a sharp widescreen transfer, but the text annotations that AnimEigo often provides above the image are cut off at the top of the screen. That won't really impede your understanding of the story, but the annotations themselves may prove an annoyance to viewers unaccustomed to AnimEigo product. Samurai film fans who can ignore the annoyance should appreciate Imai's change of pace and critical stance toward the genre, and fans of Japanese film overall should appreciate his renewed outcry against the cruel codes of the past.

THE CHRISTIAN REVOLT (Amakusa Tokisada Shiro, 1962)

Outsiders often think of Japan as a homogeneous nation and culture, but the Japanese themselves are often quite conscious of the problems minorities face in their country. Throughout his career, the director Nagisa Oshima has shown a special concern for the mistreatment of minorities, particularly Koreans. In Amakusa Tokisada Shiro, Oshima took up the topic of the persecution of Christians under the Tokugawa Shogunate. The best known Japanese work on this subject outside Japan is probably the Catholic author Shusaku Endo's novel Silence, an adaptation of which has long been a dream project for Martin Scorsese. While Endo generously focuses on the persecution of European missionaries, Oshima looks at the suffering of Japanese Christians and their conflicted response to persecution. He also strives for a critical synthesis of Japanese and European models of artistic representation while questioning in an almost postmodern way exactly what in people's hearts can be represented pictorially at all.

Oshima's protagonist is a historical figure, Shiro Amakusa, but seems to have taken liberties with history by making a character who supposedly died while still in his teens a former samurai (Hashizo Okawa) who's regarded as a leader of his peasant community as well as a charismatic prophet. His people are being pushed to the breaking point by a rapacious nobility that blames inadequate tax revenue on Shiro's religion. The local samurai, with one noble exception, compete to devise ways to torture Christians and terrorize them into recanting their faith. One such turncoat, Emosaku (Rentaro Mikuni) has become a court painter, specializing in European-style oil painting which he claims represents a subject's actual personality better than traditional Japanese art. He balks, however, when commanded to paint Christians performing the "straw dance," -- they are wrapped in husks of straw, set on fire and set running -- and is suspected of remaining a Christian. Desperate to save himself, he rats out Christians inside the local lord's household. This undermines Shiro's long-term plan to stage an uprising within the castle to overthrow the oppressive lord, though the plan often seems like little more than a promise of redemption to his angry co-religionists.

Shiro is a conflicted hero with an uncertain understanding of his own religion, despite his mother's constant tutelage. He sends mixed messages to his people, assuring them that their persecution is not the will of God but that an enraged peasant going on a foolhardy mission of revenge was God's will. As the pressure builds for an uprising, he rationalizes it by saying that his people will fight as oppressed peasants, not as Christians in violation of the turn-the-other-cheek rule. Once the fighting is underway, it threatens to get out of his control when a charismatic ronin offers his assistance and more ronin join him. Still straddling the fence, Shiro defers to the ronin on military matters until several setbacks -- including the hostility of European military advisers to the shogun and an alleged excommunication from the Catholic Church -- forces a decisive three-way choice on the Christians. Shall they continue to fight the samurai head-on, as the ronin wants, disperse into smaller inconspicuous groups, as some others want, or fortify themselves in one place to resist a samurai assault, as Shiro wants. When Shiro is finally driven to assert himself violently in a showdown with the ronin, who has called him out as a coward, the feeling is unmistakable that there's nothing left for him to do but die -- and take thousands with him....

Oshima maintains a critical but not negative attitude toward Christianity, but constantly reminds us of the samurai cruelty that drove so many to become Christians as well as revolt against the social order. While many of the "history of cruelty" movies made in Europe focus on the atrocities perpetrated by Christians on others -- witches, heretics, etc. -- in Oshima's film the shoe is on the other foot. The effect is largely the same, however, since for the Japanese filmmaker Christians are the other made objects of empathy. His film really transcends my theoretical genre, rising from a litany of torture to the level of epic tragedy, filmed in appropriate long-take tableaux with theatrical intensity and chiaroscuro cinematography. Scenes often develop in slow-burn fashion, but the payoff, especially in the final confrontation between Shiro and the ronin, is tremendous.

Transcending his historical subject, Oshima also invites his audience to question whether his eloquently exquisite or brutal images can truly capture the spirit of the time or the personality of the players. This proposition is put forth explicitly in Emosaku's explication of the relative virtues of Japanese and European art. He tells his patron that Japanese painting is best for landscapes and "beautiful figures," while the European style is best for portraiture that evokes a subject's true self. Over the course of the film, it becomes clear that Oshima himself is testing these premises, switching frequently from huge close-ups designed to catch profound emotion to vast landscape long shots that reduce armies to ants against the mountains.

Cinema itself is a third thing entirely, and in one sequence of visually "rhyming" shots Oshima implicitly asks whether cinema can catch emotional truth any better than painting.

Between the subject and its representation stands the subjectivity of the artist, and that's what Emosaku really seems to stand for. Does his portrait show the truth of the lord -- the lord himself asks, "Are you trying to say I look repulsive?" -- or only Emosaku's opinion of the man. The question rises again when, after repeatedly refusing to paint a straw dance, Emosaku appears to have a real religious experience during the crucifixion of Shiro's mother and sister, along with Shiro's one samurai ally and his wife on either side of a single cross.

Oshima has illustrated Shiro's reaction, and that of the other Christians, by bathing them in floodlights and leading the camera through a lengthy tracking shot of dozens of despairing or prayerful close-ups.

The painter responds to the scene with a picture of Christ crucified amid a field of crosses as doves rise heavenward and the Virgin watches in the sky. Depending on the witness, his may have been as "true" a report of the event as Oshima's cinematography -- Shintaro Kawasaki did the brilliant actual work. In the same way, perhaps, Christianity is one thing to Shiro, another to his mother, and something else yet to someone else. All of this is a possibly pretentious way of saying that there's a lot going on in Amakusa Tokisada Shiro to make it interesting if not compelling for people without any special sympathy for Christianity. It seems to be a relatively unknown item for Americans in Oshima's filmography -- ignored even by the otherwise Oshima-rich Criterion Collection -- but its neglect is unjustified. The Christian Revolt is a dark epic that deserves wider renown.

No English subtitles on this trailer -- uploaded to YouTube by WorldCinemateque -- but it'll give you some idea of the moving images and the terrific score by Riichiro Manabe.