From the beginning of film production in Japan, the samurai had been a staple of period films, or jidaigeki. Samurai - or chambara - films were as common a fixture of Japanese film as Westerns had been in Hollywood. While the two genres are often compared, more than one critic has observed that the central action of a samurai film - the sword fight - is immeasurably more cinematic than a gunfight.
Of course, there had been dissenting voices all along from Japan that tried to remind us, in films like Kobayashi's Seppuku, a scathing attack on bushido - the samurai code, that being a samurai wasn't necessarily such a good thing. And by the time the filmmakers of the Japanese New Wave were done, the image of the heroic samurai was in tatters. Kihachi Okamoto's 1968 film, Kill!, accelerated the decline.
In Japanese Cinema: Film Style and National Character, one of those reference books that, in the 1970s, was considered "indispensable" for any student of Japanese film, Donald Richie wrote: "Kihachi Okamoto made the satirical comedy Age of Assassins (Satusujinkyo Jidai, 1966) and then went on to make such ordinary period films as Kill (Kiru, 1967-68) and such unexceptional war films as Human Bullet (Nikudan, 1968)."(1) So much for Kihachi Okamoto. Except that I have seen both Kill! and Human Bullet, and though they are not up to the level of the best films of the Sixties, pace Donald Richie, they are neither ordinary nor unexceptional.
Richie must have seen dozens of period films to have arrived at a definition of what was "ordinary" that is far more exact than my own. But I have seen enough Japanese period films to know just how boringly ordinary they can be in the hands of an uninspired director. (Hiroshi Inagaki's stylistically petrified version of Chushingura [1962] heaves to mind.)
A formulaic samurai film is one that indulges in clichés rather than avoids them, that adheres strictly to the terms of the genre without attempting to expand them or explode them. For me, a good illustration of the difference can be found by comparing two films made back to back by Akira Kurosawa: Yojimbo and Sanjuro.(2) The first is a direct and brilliant send-up of the genre, while the second, which was a sequel to Yojimbo with the same scruffy samurai played by Toshiro Mifune, is a almost a self-parody. In Sanjuro, Kurosawa was clearly capitalizing on the success of Yojimbo. Audiences expecting him to repeat himself didn't realize that such a feat was beyond even Kurosawa's powers. In artistic terms, Sanjuro is a pallid shadow of Yojimbo.
By the time Kihachi Okamoto made Kill!, he had already distinguished himself as a versatile director in multiple film genres and was sought after by the biggest names in Japanese film. He had what can only be called a jaundiced view of Japan's past and present. Age of Assassins, the title of his best film, could be the same title of many of his films of the Sixties. He made Samurai Assassin (Samurai, 1965) with Toshiro Mifune and Sword of Doom (Daibosatsu Toge, 1966) with Tatsuya Nakadai. In the latter, Okamoto was challenging the popular version of the well-known tale of Daibosatsu Pass (which first appeared as a serial novel by Kaizan Nakazato), made in color in 1960 with the screen idol Raizo Ichikawa in the role of Tsuke Ryunosuke. Okamoto's version was shot in freezing black & white and is uncompromisingly inky black in tone, making no concession to audience sympathies. As performed my Tatsuya Nakadai, Ryunosuke is an obvious psychotic murderer, made worse by the total absence of motivation for his evil deeds.
With Kill! Okamoto made a direct assault on the samurai as an institution in Japan. The film opens in a dusty, deserted outpost called Joshu in the year 1833 with a chance encounter between Hanjiro, a farmer who wants to be a samurai, and Genta, a samurai who quit his position two years before to become a yakuza. Both starving (we can hear their stomachs growling - at one point in harmony), they become embroiled in the criss-crossing plots of a murderous chamberlain named Ayuzawa trying to consolidate his power over a provincial fiefdom.
Hanjiro has taken the name "Tabata" (rice paddy) because he sold his land for a sword. "Two years ago," he tells Genta, "There was a riot near my town. I saw peasants die like ants. I won't be an ant." But Genta is taking an opposite trajectory. Two years before, he was ordered to kill his best fiend for the sake of the clan. "I was disgusted with samurai life, so I left it." He watches as Ayuzawa orders his men to kill one another and recognizes it as familiar samurai treachery.
There seems to be a single prevailing message in so many samurai films - that the samurai as a class is corrupt and oppressive and it is better to be a poor farmer (or, in the case of Genta, a lowly yakuza). You find this message at the end of Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, The Hidden Fortress, and in Yojimbo. At the beginning of Yojimbo, an old man tries to stop his young son from running away and becoming a gambler. "Who wants to be a gambler?" the father pleads. "Stay at home and farm!"
"Who wants a long life eating mush?" his son replies. "A short, exciting life for me!" Near the very end of the film, this same young man is confronted by the nameless samurai played by Mifune. Screaming for his mother, he cowers as Mifune approaches him. "A long life eating mush is best!" Mifune tells him, as he lets the young man run away.
The same message also appears in Kill! At the film's climax, which takes place on the day of the spring equinox, all of Ayuzawa's plots end in a bloody melée. But just as Hanjiro learns of Genta's heroism and calls out for him in vain, a crowd of peasants arrive to celebrate a life-affirming festival. Ecstatic, hysterical life in the midst of death. Ending where the film began, in the same deserted outpost town (where it is now raining), Hanjiro tracks down Genta. After finally becoming a samurai, Hanjiro complains to Genta that his formal clothes make his shoulders ache and that his shaved head is "freezing." Then he tells Genta that he quit and wants to go with him, wherever he is going. Hanjiro, too, has learned what Genta knows - a very un-Eastern philosophy. As E. M. Forster put it, "If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country."
The film is superbly and quite elegantly constructed. Okamoto deploys a masterful technique, using the widescreen (2.35:1) with surprising ease. Tatsuya Nakadai is once again brilliant. Japanese film acting is often difficult to gauge by Western standards, but Nakadai, who was a favorite of so many great directors, including Ichikawa, Kurosawa, and Kobayashi, is remarkably versatile and a pleasure to watch. The same cannot be said, however, of Etsushi Takahashi, who plays the farmer Hanjiro. Evidently trying to imitate a horse, especially when he runs (or gallops), his facial expressions are too broad even for a partial comedy like Kill! One feels - or hopes - that no one could be that stupid. Masaru Sato's music is virtually a character in the film. Though it sometimes "telegraphs" some of the action, with a sound effect slightly anticipating the image it accompanies, it is as carefully intertwined with the action as Sato's music had been in Yojimbo and Sanjuro.
I couldn't help noticing some references to Kurosawa: there are seven young samurai (shichi-nin) who hole up on a mountain called Toride (Toride-yama, the word means "fortress," like The Hidden Fortress); Genta finds that he must defend the young samurai "to find out what I lost as a samurai," just as Sanjuro did; and, like Mifune in Yojimbo, Genta is captured and severely beaten before he triumphs using - instead of Mifune's knife - a pair of small sharpened fire tongs. These "references" may have been unintentional, but I noticed them - a clear sign that I've probably seen too many Japanese films.
(1) The Human Bullet, which Okamoto made for the Art Theater Guild, is like Soldier Svejk in the Pacific War. A young man is conscripted in the Imperial Army, but is found to be so useless, he is chosen to be a "human bullet" - piloting a surface torpedo in a suicide attack. At the close of the film, set today (1968), his skeleton is still at the controls of his torpedo, heading toward a beach crowded with unsuspecting bathers.
(2) The story that Okamoto used as the basis of Kill! was derived from a collection of stories by Shūgorō Yamamoto - the same collection of stories that provided Kurosawa with the story for Sanjuro.
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