Zatoichi The Fugitive (Zatôichi Kyôjô-Tabi)

Dice, Dice, Baby.

Zatoichi The Fugitive (Zatôichi Kyôjô-Tabi)
1963 Japan
Directed by Tokuzô Tanaka
Daiei/Criterion Collection 
DVD Region 1/BluRay Region A

Warning: Yeah, some spoilers on this one too.

Here we are on the fourth of the Zatoichi films already, crammed into the same year and shot by the same director who did the previous movie, New Tale Of Zatoichi (reviewed here). Curiously enough, the way the shots are designed and function appeared, at least to me as I was watching it, to be the work of another director entirely... or perhaps a different cinematographer? It’s certainly not the same kind of approach this director took previously, although he does still exhibit a fondness for slicing up the scope frame into sections.

The film starts boldly with a shot of the sky which is quite peaceful looking, until Zatoichi walks straight into the frame from the side. This is not long shot, either, it’s quite up close and “in your face” with the character, so the effect is quite unsettling and must have been terrific when shown at cinemas.

We then have a nice change of pace for a Zatoichi movie in that, instead of gambling his way into some money to keep himself going, he here volunteers to be next challenger in a “who can beat the current champion” style wrestling match. Of course, his enhanced senses never fail him and he leaves heavier and more energetic victims in the dust of their defeat while he collects his cut of the money.

Then something happens.

As Zatoichi is enjoying a quiet, riverside siesta, a man who is obviously ignorant of his swordsmanship skills... attacks Zatoichi. Our hero tries to not get into a fight and offers ample chances for the man to back down but, in the end, Zatoichi slays his antagonist. As the man lays dying, Zatoichi finds out the name of his mother and takes her the reward money he finds has been offered on his own head. So here we see a trend beginning in the movie which relays to us that Zatoichi has now become both famous and infamous, depending on the side of the coin you are looking at. Dealing, as it does, with the idea of the tales of Zatoichi's exploits being retold in taverns and making him a kind of working class hero to various villagers. And, of course, his reputation with his sword also brings unwanted trouble from the constant amount of people who want to pit their own mettle against his.

What’s interesting is that the story cunningly sets up a constant threat to the lead character by putting a price on Zatoichi’s head, so that an action sequence can pop up at any time to change the pacing of the movie when required... but then doesn’t rely on this as the sole cause of conflict in the narrative. Instead, it shows us the side of the hero who is left, once gain, dealing with the consequences of the people he’s slain and the guilt he feels over that, especially when he was obviously attacked by someone who had no idea of the measure of the adversary he faced.

All this is done to some mighty fine camera work and shot design, it has to be said... the director splitting the shots quite strikingly in a horizontal manner. Indeed, most of the time, he deliberately subdues the vertical parts of the shots, strangely enough. Knowing the standard construction of the building interiors in this kind of cinema, this couldn’t have been the easiest task but he does this again and again throughout the movie by putting groupings of people across the obvious vertical patterns, in order to neutralise them somewhat, it seems to me. He also splits this into diagonals but, again, long horizontal oriented angles which cut nearly the entire widescreen frame into two sectors... top and bottom Often, one of the sectors, horizontal or diagonal, is deliberately just a large block of space to focus you on the area of the screen where something is happening and to highlight the importance of certain conversations or key bits of information etc.

Another interesting thing the director does, and this is even true at the very start of the film in the description I gave in the second paragraph, to some extent, is to have some pretty short establishing shots and then either force a different perspective into the shot, like in that opening sequence, or just cutting away immediately to extreme close ups of the characters within the scene. This can be extremely disorienting at times but... also, fun.

This director certainly loves playing with the juxtaposition of shapes and elements within a frame. There’s a beautiful shot where Zatoichi passes someone going up a flight of stairs and they both stop for a moment, directly next to each other, without looking around. Seen in close up of their profile, their bodies form a single mass as though a single trunk is sprouting two heads, each head looking outwards towards the opposite edges of the screen... before it cuts to a perfect reverse shot of exactly the same thing. Ingmar Bergman often used to play with bodies and faces within frame space in his films in this manner and he would have appreciated this particular composition, I’m sure.

Camerawork aside, this film has some classic moments of interest in it.

There’s a nice little moment where our blind protagonist throws a dice into a man’s saki bottle. He then flicks his sword and the bottle slowly falls apart from a vertical slice which splits the bottle into two halves and splits the dice in the bottle in half, all without hurting the man, who is still holding the bottle. This is where the Zatoichi films start to get a little over the top with their depictions of the lead character’s mystical sword skills... and why not? It's all great stuff and a welcome change of pace to some of the more poe faced characters inhabiting some of the more traditional chanbara movies.

The fight sequence at the end really piles on the sword fodder as a trapped Zatoichi begins a brilliant fight that starts in a deserted house, then continues outside, then into some water (a nice bit of sword and splashery here), then into some long grass and then back into some sand before Zatoichi takes on the lead strongman (which most of these movies seem to have). Actually, the samurai in question bears a remarkable resemblance, to these Western eyes, to a young Toshiro Mifune when he was appearing in films like Yojimbo and Sanjuro, although it would of course be several years before Mifune would guest star in this series of films to go head to head with Shintarô Katsu’s beloved blind swordsman.

In the final fight, the new guy is almost a match for Zatoichi and, in a rare display of mortality for the Zatoichi character, nearly defeats him. In fact, he even breaks Zatoichi’s sword cane so it’s useless, something which I still think contradicts the continuity of a later film in the series (I’ll let you know and shout it out in no uncertain terms when I get there again). However, Zatoichi isn’t finished yet and, as the big guy comes in for the kill, Zatoichi strikes with a small dagger he has as a hidden extra in the top of his cane... something which I don’t seem to remember seeing in Ichi’s arsenal either before or after this film, to be honest. The film is a little more graphic in a way, at this point, as the up-close-and-personal killer thrust leaves Zatoichi’s brow spattered with his adversary’s blood. The films kinda leap between graphic goriness and more subtle approaches, almost randomly, throughout the entire run of films if I remember, and this certainly isn’t the most graphically violent of the Zatoichi movies by a long shot (Takeshi Kitano even stole a most memorable piece of violence from one of the later films for his own take on the character, decades later, if I’m remembering correctly).

The film is well scored by series semi-regular Akira Ifikube and also very leanly spotted*, like a lot of Ifikube’s scores. This allows him to really emphasise certain points in the movie, such as this end fight where Zatoichi is wounded in the arm to a flurry of Ifikube bombast on the score. A kind of protracted musical sting that works very well. And, of course, that means the four note Zatoichi theme, in a slightly different variation, gets a work out too, throughout the course of the picture.

What more can I say? Zatoichi The Fugitive is a classic Zatoichi movie and we even get to hear some of his one-line wisdom... “Life's dirt sticks to everyone” although, to be fair, it really doesn’t go down too well in the context of who he says this to in the film. Definitely a great watch for Zatoichi and chanbara fans alike. One of the best in the series.

*Spotting is where a composer will sit down with someone, usually the director, and work out which parts of the movie will be scored, where and when the various cues for each section will start and finish, and discuss other things like the intensity of the music and its purpose in a scene. Quite often, and Hollywood composer Jerry Goldsmith was a master of this, it’s as much about working out where you don’t put music, as where you do.

New Tale Of Zatoichi (Shin Zatôichi Monogatari)

Love Is Blind

New Tale Of Zatoichi 
(Shin Zatôichi Monogatari)
1963 Japan
Directed by Tokuzô Tanaka
Daiei/Criterion Collection 
DVD Region 1/BluRay Region A

The third in this series, The New Tale Of Zatoichi was the first of these movies to be shot in colour. Despite the title implying that the film is a brand new adventure for Zatoichi, there are still lingering elements from the story arc in the previous two movies which are brought back into play alongside any new ingredients in the plotting.

After a brief and, curiously, irrelevant pre-credits sequence leading into the titles, the film begins with three armed goons coming after Zatoichi. They have ties to Kambei (one of them being his brother), who Zatoichi killed at the end of the last movie, presumably following on from that abrupt cut (both physically and in terms of the editing) which provided the movie with an extra denouement after the typical end battle sequence was already over. Zatoichi kills one of these antagonists and the other two run off.

The other main story  element of this movie involves trouble when Zatoichi returns home to the original village where he grew up... he even gets to stay with his grandma for a few nights. However, when he becomes the guest of the sensei who taught him his skills with the sword, and the sensei’s sister, things take on a sinister turn. It seems that his former tutor is involved with a group of fugitives called the Tengu Gang, and is helping him work a scam by kidnapping a particular student of his school where he knows he can get a large ransom. He’s also trying to marry his sister off to an “appropriate” partner, but she is resistant of his choice, which seems to be mostly based on wealth and good standing in the community.

This is a movie which shows Shintarô Katsu’s Zatoichi like we rarely see him in the series. For example, for a good deal of this film, he doesn’t bother using his cane sword to get around, instead keeping it holstered on his back, ready for a quick underhand draw when required... the sword cane comes back in use as an actual cane for a little while about half way through the movie but it’s a curious absence through most of it and I wonder if certain people in the studios were trying to lose it as a character prop... which would have been a shame since it’s such a notably iconic artefact of the Zatoichi movies. Obviously, though, this idea didn’t stick... thankfully.

Another way in which this title differs a little to the other films shows itself in a scene where Zatoichi roughhouses a villain, with his hands, to confirm information... never once drawing his sword in the encounter. This is an unusual move for a cunning fox like Zatoichi and it seems totally out of character for him. I don’t remember him doing this in any of the other movies but I may be proved wrong in time as I go through them again... watch this space.

Once again, Zatoichi is asked by a girl to marry her in this one. This seems to be happening a lot in the very early films for some reason. Zatoichi finally agrees and vows to give up his yakuza lifestyle, at exactly the wrong moment as he is once again caught up by Yasuhiko, the brother of Kanbei from the previous films. Zatoichi throws down his sword but Yasuhiko doesn’t want to kill an unarmed man, so they have a wager in front of Zatoichi’s bride to be. On a roll of the dice, Zatoichi will either be left alone or give Kanbei’s brother his arm. When Zatoichi loses, Kanbei’s brother has been so moved by the plight of Zatoichi and his bride to be that he lies to Zatoichi about the roll and pretends to lose, leaving our hero to his fate. When Zatoichi’s new love confirms the suspicion that Yasuhiko let him live, he goes to thank him and talk to him to make things right... too late though because his former sensei has already killed Yasuhiko. Now Zatoichi realises what’s going on and leaps to the rescue of the kidnapped student, with a series of incidents which will have repercussions for him as he realises his ultimate fate is as a wandering yakuza, and not with his suitor.

As usual with these movies, the direction and cinematography is really great.

This one has a fair few static shots of Zatoichi in long shot wandering the landscape, walking from one side of frame to the next and occasionally encountering people along the way. This would become a kind of staple shot to emphasise the character’s travelling/wandering status as the series progressed, of course.

The director works hard to include diagonal lines in the compositions, using them to separate various elements on the screen and sometimes introduces details composed of such angles within cuts of shots. For example, a cut from Zatoichi and some fellow travellers forming three uprights to a closer, mid shot of the same grouping from a different angle, shows the director utilising the heights of the characters to make a diagonal composition running down from the right to the left of the screen. To do this, he has to have one half of a married couple go past Zatoichi on the road before the cut, and then using that character being closer to the camera from the alternate angle to make sure this person is higher than Shintarô Katsu on the frame. This is all good stuff but never seems laboured... things just happen seemingly naturally, although this is obviously not the case.

This director, like Kenji Misumi in The Tale Of Zatoichi (reviewed here), also makes good use of verticals to split the screen. This is obviously evident with the interior architecture of the period being depicted, as you would expect, but he also manages to carry this on, as he does his diagonals, in some of the exterior locations too.  One way he does this, for instance, is by having the faces of two characters having a conversation in close up at the extreme edges of the scope frame, with diagonal vertical trees of a forest taking up the dead centre space between the two. Another sequence where this kind of compositional bent is nicely displayed is in an early fight scene in long shot, where almost all of the action takes place on the left half of the screen, the design only broken when one foe stumbles from the left hand into the right of the centre. Really interesting use of space throughout this film... and in a fair few of these particular movies, to be sure.

Other points of note for Zatoichi afficionados are as follows...

This is the first of the films to show off Shintaru Katsu’s aspirational musical skills... as he starts playing a borrowed shamisen and begins singing along with it, the lyrics echoing the plight and strife of his lowly character. A few of the films have similar scenes written in for Katsu to display his prowess with the instrument, but this is not as elabourate as some of those scenes get in later films.

This films also has a repeat of Zatoichi’s “candle trick”, which he demonstrated in the first film. This time there are four candles in question, with Zatoichi sitting in the middle of the four which are arranged as the corners of a square. A fast flick around him with his sword which he instantly sheaths gives us another jokey replay of the old “fastest draw in the West joke” (“Wanna see it again) in that, over a period of ten seconds or so, the heads of each candle slowly drop to the floor to give the impression Zatoichi has sliced through them at speed without knocking them over... one fallen candle on the floor left curiously alight... to allow lighting for the camera, of course. I never get tired of these kinds of gags as they come up throughout the series.

Legendary composer Akira Ifikube returns for his second of many outings with the character (he had previously scored the first movie in the sequence too) and he once again uses the four note Zatoichi theme he created in that first one as leitmotif for the character, being a kind of downbeat parody, almost, of the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. There are some nice organ solos of this main theme present in one or two of the scenes too. The Ifikube scores in this particular film series aren’t my favourite ones for the Zatoichi character but they are solid and give the character a consistency with previous installments that the music doesn’t give him in the ones composed by other people.

And that’s about all I’ve got to say about this one. Once again, the film ends of a note of tragedy with the foes vanquished but at a moral cost to the characters who are left behind to watch the dust settle. So far the films series has been consistently good and it’s no wonder that they became so popular, so quickly. However, if memory serves me right, the best is yet to come. Stay tuned in to this blog for more Zatoichi goodness soon.

The Tale Of Zatoichi (Zatôichi monogatari)

Blind, Sealed & Delivered

The Tale Of Zatoichi 

(Zatôichi monogatari)

1962 Japan

Directed by Kenji Misumi

Daiei/Criterion Collection 

DVD Region 1/BluRay Region A

I’ve loved the Zatoichi movies ever since I became aware of the character on the cinematic release of Takashi Kitano’s modern update back in 2003. I bought the, by then very cheap, UK releases of a few of the original movies in a sale at HMV and, after having watched those and realising why the UK versions were so cheap (you just wouldn’t believe the prints and transfers on the old Artsmagic DVDs at the time) I then proceeded to upgrade, and also buy the remaining films, on the two US labels who were issuing them around then... Home Vision Entertainment (a kind of sister label to Criterion, from what I can understand) and Animeigo (who also released the first, and sadly only the first, season of the Zatoichi TV show).

The one bone of contention was the film Zatoichi’s Pilgrimage. 

It had never been issued in either the USA or the UK, although many people thought it had been released a couple of times over here in England. This assumption is quite understandable, given the fact that a film “called” Zatoichi’s Pilgrimage was indeed released and, I believe, re-released in the UK. However... and this is bad enough on the first release but totally inexcusable on the reissue... the film being released as that title in the UK was actually Zatoichi At Large with an incorrect title on the packaging and subtitles. How they managed to screw it up quite so badly is anyone’s guess. Go figure!

So, up until now, the only way of getting a decent print of Zatoichi’s Pilgrimage was by getting it from Japan. Which I promptly did at the time but, yeah you guessed it, there are no English subtitles on that edition. Normally this wouldn’t be too much of a pain with a Zatoichi movie, because they do get quite formulaic from film to film and you can usually figure out what’s going on in them without necessarily needing to know what’s coming out of the various actors’ mouths. However, when I tried this approach with Zatoichi’s Pilgrimage, I found that the film deviated from formula enough that I really wasn’t getting all of it... so that has been a thorn in my side for a while.

And now, the always reliable Criterion Collection has come to the rescue with a big and beautifully packaged boxed set including all 26 of the original Zatoichi movies in a combination DVD/Blu Ray set and, despite the high price for this item, it was well worth it for me to finally lay this ghost to rest. So I’m going to be re-watching the entire series and reviewing them on here starting from... now.

Zatoichi was a minor character referred to in a story by Kan Shimozawa and developed for Daiei studios with Shintarô Katsu in the lead role. This may have partially been due to the success of a film made the year before and also starring Shintarô Katsu, where he played the main lead and antagonist in The Blind Menace (reviewed here). If you’ve seen this, you’ll know the character he plays in that one is a much more sinister and selfish character than the Zatoichi character he developed over the decades... but the fact that he was studying and picking up the body language of a blind man probably helped him quite a bit when he started building on that for his Zatoichi role, no doubt. 

This first film is absolutely brilliant in terms of both the beauty of the shot design and the pacing of the story. It’s quite short in the action department, compared to the bloodbaths you would start getting fairly soon in the series, but it’s at no point a boring film and it’s a great introduction to the character. 

We are first introduced to him over a strange, posterised credits sequence, which might have worked well if this film had been shot in colour but which is fairly questionable in terms of a mono movie. Here we see Zatoichi doing his usual comic shenanigans of what a blind man traversing narrow bridges etc. would get up to in as hilarious a manner as possible... almost clumsy, in a way. This, of course, undercuts and contrasts with the expert sword skills and hypersensitised senses that we learn the character possesses through the course of the movie. It’s always a nice contrast and Katsu plays with this comic contradiction at various points all the way through the film series... he got it down to a fine art fairly quickly, in fact. 

We next go into what would be a typical Zatoichi scene as the series progressed... that of a blind man conning a gambling den out of their money, playing dice. In this first one, which establishes very quickly the cunning of the character, we see him set up the other players by making them think they’re taking advantage of his blindness. When he turns the tables after the stakes have grown, they are put in a position where any accusations of him cheating, which he technically isn’t, would admit their own complicity in trying to cheat him. So this is a nice introduction to the character and helps establish that, while he tends to act the fool a lot, he really is quite a shrewd person.

We also see his tender side as he tries to help various people and develops a friendly, mutual respect and admiration with a samurai dying of consumption, who he will have to fight at the movie’s end. The samurai doesn’t want to die of an illness so, when he forces Zatoichi to kill him at the denouement, we know that he has died exactly as he wanted to... although our hero is clearly upset with the way events have turned out. Upset to the point where he leaves his famous, hidden “cane sword” with a boy at the end of the movie. Actually, this is a sure sign that Daiei didn’t have any idea just how successful this film would be, since he would have to take up the sword cane once again for the next film in the series. There’s even one movie which has a story built around the tensile strength of the cane sword, if I’m remembering correctly... but that’s for another review.

The direction is strange on this one, but beautiful. For instance, the shot design is all built around verticals, which is a natural given the Japanese architectural style of the period in which this was set, I would guess. But, even so, the director uses this to frame both people and objects and, also, uses it to express shifts in perspective within a shot. He even, at one point, has the protagonist stop to monologue in the only gap visible to the camera in a line of bamboo poles. This is great stuff. 

The curious thing about the mise-en-scene though, to my mind, is the way in which the camera seems to follow everybody around in medium shot. The Tale Of Zatoichi is shot in a full width, 2.35:1, or close to that, aspect ratio but, rather than pull the camera back and take in the full extent of the action in slower moving or static shots, the director decides to follow the various characters around. I was scratching my head while I was watching this, trying to figure out why, and all I can come up with is that the extra movement in the shot adds a kind of dynamism which then offsets the need for full on action sequences, until we get to those properly at the end of the movie. It’s not that distracting, just strange when you notice it first. It’s as valid a way as any, of course... so good for him.

The musical score by the master composer Akira Ifikube, of Godzilla fame (he even invented the famous roar) is not a masterpiece but it’s engaging and does have a few, sit up and listen, stingers at certain points. He’s not my favourite composer for this particular series but he did develop a kind of leitmotif for the main character which he came back to time and time again on the Zatoichi films he scored. Definitely stuff to listen out for if you’ve only heard his kaiju eiga compositions.

And there you have it... a fascinating and strong, scene setting first entry in a very long running series of chanbara, released the following year after Kurosawa’s Yojimbo... and possibly riding in the wake of that one, to some extent. Daiei had a hit on their hands and Shintarô Katsu was destined to become... probably the most popular actor in Japan. Criterion’s new Blu-Ray print is sharper and much better looking than I was expecting this film could look. If you can afford it and you have a player which can handle either Region 1 DVDs or Region A Blu Rays, I would definitely recommend this beautiful set and certainly recommend this brilliant movie. I’ve been following this character’s exploits for over a decade now... don’t miss out on these epic films.