Samurai Films by Roland Thorne Read Free Book Online Page B

to bring just the right amount of pathos to the more dramatic scenes of Samurai Saga , without descending into melodrama. The final scenes of the film are handled very well by Toshiro Mifune and Yoko Tsukasa, whose convincing performances make Kamaki and Ochii’s fate all the more tragic.
    The cinematography in Samurai Saga is up to the usual high standards of Inagaki’s films, containing many memorable images. Inagaki and Mifune handle Komaki’s death scene especially well; he challenges death among the falling petals of a cherry tree, creating a beautiful image, evocatively capturing the sadness and inevitability of the act.
    The action scenes in Samurai Saga are quite unusual, and accompany a tonal shift in the film itself. The action that takes place in the first half of the film is largely comedic and bloodless, such as Komaki’s amusing humiliation of Nagashima’s samurai on the kabuki stage, and Jurota’s battle with a large group of samurai, watched gleefully by Komaki. No one is hurt in these scenes; fallen samurai simply get to their feet and run away. This all changes after the Battle of Sekigahara sequence, which utilises some of the gritty battle scenes shot for Miyamoto Musashi . The scenes where Komaki, Jurota and other survivors of the losing side are gunned down by Nagashima’s troops are brutal by comparison. The choreography of Komaki’s last battle is also a contrast to the earlier scenes; he dodges among alleys, using the close quarters to dispatch his multiple opponents one at a time, and, in these scenes, they actually stay dead.
    This shift in tone is very effective. Inagaki creates a gentler, whimsical mood in the first half of his film, which is shattered by the war and its subsequent violence. The earlier comedic violence causes the audience to let their guard down, which makes the real violence all the more effective.

THE VERDICT
     
    Cyrano de Bergerac , samurai style. In the hands of a skilled director like Hiroshi Inagaki this works very well, and proves the flexibility of the genre.

    † Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto’s highly informative work, Kurosawa : Film Studies and Japanese Cinema , contains a fascinating, in-depth discussion of the evolution of the jidaigeki genre, and is the source of the information in this summary.
     

THE 1960s
     
     
    The 1960s saw an explosion of excellent samurai films, which forever changed the genre. This trend was brought about by Akira Kurosawa and two of his early 1960s films, Yojimbo and Sanjuro . Both starred Toshiro Mifune as Sanjuro, a ronin with a wry sense of humour and a quick draw. They featured graphic violence as it had never before been seen in samurai films; arms were cut off and shown falling to the ground, and in one particularly notable scene, blood spurts in a fine mist from the chest of one of Sanjuro’s fallen opponents. Furthermore, Kurosawa’s films had a wonderfully dark sense of humour, with Sanjuro fashioned as a callous but immensely likeable anti-hero. The moments of violence were used sparingly and to great effect in Kurosawa’s films, and clearly audiences approved. Yojimbo and Sanjuro were both very successful commercially, so much so that Toei and the other companies were forced to take notice.
    The commercial success of Kurosawa’s work meant that the 1960s samurai films were free of the formulaic plots and slow choreography that had plagued many throughout the 1950s. This shift in focus ensured their popularity throughout the 1960s, with many released each year. This gave directors such as Kenji Misumi, Kihachi Okamoto, Masaki Kobayashi and Hideo Gosha a great deal more freedom, and resulted in consistently high-quality films throughout the 1960s. These samurai films were characterised by Sanjuro-style anti-heroism and graphic violence, but many also told moving stories, and were far more than the simple genre films they appeared to be.

    The 1960s also gave birth to Daiei studio’s famous Zatoichi series. Featuring a