Along With Ghosts

Chanbara Of Horrors

Along With Ghosts
aka Tôkaidô obake dôchû
Japan 1969
Directed by Yoshiyuki Kuroda & Kimiyoshi Yasuda
Daiei Blu Ray Zone B
From Arrow’s Yōkai Monster Collection Blu Ray set

Along with ghosts is the third and final part of the loose Yōkai Monsters trilogy from the late 1960s, following 100 Monsters (reviewed here) and Spook Warfare (reviewed here). As far as I know there have been at least two more Yokai Monsters movies made since these, the first of which is also included in Arrow’s Blu Ray set Yōkai Monster Collection.

This one has very little in common with the previous entry in this series. Indeed, almost none of the various Yōkai in this movie have anything to do with those in the previous two movies. The one exception being the early appearance, with an even briefer screen time than its last appearance, of the big cyclops bear of a creature, the Tsuchikorobi. Other than this quick cameo, the other spooks on show here are pretty much new (maybe some background creatures used as ‘extras’ could be recycled but certainly none of the main creatures you associate with the first two parts of the trilogy, it seems to me). However, where it differs greatly from Spook Warfare, it does share one small DNA link with 100 Monsters... and that is in terms of the story content.

The story, such as it is, follows what happens after a boss kills both two rival clan members and an old man, the latter warning them not to kill anyone on the sacred ground of the forest less the inevitable curse follows them. The boss is after an incriminating document and after two of the bodies are disposed off, they chase after a seven year old girl who has witnessed events and who steals the document but soon throws it away. The old man, mortally wounded, returns to his house and dies but it turns out he’s her grandfather, who let the father believe his daughter had died seven years prior, because he was a ‘no good’ sort of gambler. The grandfather gives the daughter specific dice made from her dead mother’s bones so her father will recognise her and, just before dying, sends her off to find him, pursued by the evil gang. From then on it becomes a kind of road movie with the girl meeting various heroes and villains on her quest to find her father. There is also a slight twist in the identity of the father (of course) and, towards the end, the Yōkai monsters intercede although, frankly, the wandering ronin she befriends could just have easily taken care of matters himself.

And this is where it harkens back to the original movie. Unlike Spook Warfare, which has a plot revolving around the Yōkai themselves as they fought against an invading, foreign demon... this film, like 100 Monsters, has a standard kind of chanbara plot and the monsters themselves just seem to be plugged in here and there to remind everyone that this is a Yōkai movie. They are not at all integral to the plot and, honestly, don’t really do much other than turn up in a few instances where the little girl, finding herself in trouble, suddenly appearing in deus ex machina moments which aren’t, I have to say, a patch on the previous films.

That being said, the spooks in this one do feel a lot more sinister and aggressive... so tonally having things like the umbrella demon in this one might have detracted massively from the more serious tone the film seems to be going for. This film also happens to have a flying head attack... two flying heads, in fact. Which is strange because I’m not used to seeing flying heads in Japanese films. I mean, severed heads flying off necks in various directions sure but, honestly, self powered floating heads drifting in for a bite is a trope I’d more expect to see in the rich legacy of Indonesian cinema than in films like this, I would say. Not that this was an unwelcome occurrence... it certainly helped pep up the muted supernatural shenanigans of this one, for sure.

The film is well shot with some nice, smooth sequences with moving camera and also a few shots where the action of the movie is shot behind other things, such as bushes, to add a sense of depth to the composition. There are, once again, no great gouts of arterial spray when anyone gets slashed with a samurai sword but, at the same time, the directors don’t shy away from using blood to show the aftermath of various bits of sword violence throughout.

So, yeah, really not much to add to this third in the trilogy, which seems to have more in common with a Zatoichi movie than it does with anything else. Along With Ghosts is certainly not my favourite of the original Yōkai films (I think that would be Spook Warfare) but it’s certainly not a bad movie and fans of standard chanbara should get along with it just fine. Certainly, the Arrow box set collecting these three plus the first of Takashi Miike’s modern takes on the Yōkai is worth picking up.

Blade Of The Immortal

Chanbara Sauce

Blade Of The Immortal
2017 Japan/UK Directed by Takashi Miike
London Film Festival - Sunday 8th October 2017

Okay, so quickly onto the second of the films I’m seeing in this years festival. I always find Takashi Miike one of those directors who makes movies that you will either love or hate but, whichever polar opposite of that kind of Marmite spectrum you are sitting on with one of his movies, they are always, at the very least, extremely interesting. And, it has to be said, almost always interestingly extreme too.

At the grand old age of 57, Takashi seems to be somehow directing and financing between 2 - 6 films a year and this one, Blade Of The Immortal, based on the series of Manga strips by Hiroaki Samura, is his 100th movie. Does this guy ever sleep? Miike was actually at the festival for this premiere and, although I couldn’t stay to see his Q&A after the movie (alas, I was suffering from ‘last train home syndrome’), I was at least able to see his introduction where he told us that the series of manga this is based on spans a 15 year, serialised period and that this movie, although clocking in at an impressive 2 hours and 20 mins, was his attempt to encapsulate and compress the themes and ideas of the entire ‘decade and half story arc’ into one feature film. Well that’s a pretty tall order but I have to say that, for me at least, the film didn’t jump around or seem too episodic in light of this revelation and it never once seemed to me to be anything other than a coherent whole (albeit with a lot of new characters being introduced at various points in the story).

The film starts off in the way in which a typical chanbara (which, to be fair, this is) might finish.

 Opening in black and white, which reminded me a lot of those old Kurosawa samurai films of the 1950s and 1960s, we meet the main protagonist, Manji (played by Takuya Kimura) and his sister (played by Hana Sugisaki). They are on the run due to  a misdeed of Manji’s recent past but, rather than commit ritual suicide over his indiscretions, he has to stay alive to look after his kid sister. And then we get that typical 1970s chanbara ending where he alone has to fight a group of 50 - 70 men, the leader of whom gives him some motivation by cruelly slaying Manji's sister. So it's ‘Crazy 88 massacre time’ for this lot and Manji does the usual lone wolf samurai act of cutting down every opponent and leaving nobody else standing. However, unlike a lot of the classic chanbara I've seen, Manji actually gets quite badly damaged during the melee and is about to die of his wounds (which includes his right eye being stabbed out and his left hand parting company with his arm). However, a mysterious and unexplained sorceress woman drops blood worms into Manji’s wounds and he becomes immortal. His nearby hand is, kind of, organically knitted back on by the blood worms although, for some reason, his eye isn’t ever regenerated (yeah... it’s okay to have a scientific system for your film which regenerates your life etc but... oh no... don’t let it mess with the look of the character, right?). Finally, the title of the movie comes up and we jump into colour for the remaining running time.

Jump fifty years later and the rest of the plot is then set up as a young girl sees her father killed by a bunch of villains and her mother taken to suffer a fate worse than death. In the best traditions of movies like True Grit, she goes to find someone who can revenge her father as a salve for her grief and the wandering sorceress (for want of a better term) tells her about Manji... so off she goes. Of course, we have the usual, stand offish reluctance of the hero to take up the quest but the young girl, called Rin, reminds Manji of his long dead sister... which would make sense since she’s played by the same actress.

Once he’s got over his ‘it’s not my fight’ problems, the rest of the film involves, strangely, very little travelling (the two seemed to be based in the same place with the villains often just happening to be in the vicinity, for some strange reason... or at least within walking distance) but lots of swordplay and also, I’m glad to say, some time spent on giving little character sketches of other important characters (many of them villainous) and working them and their background into the plot. It’s refreshing that Miike takes time to do this when a lot of modern directors might not have approached the material in this way and the pay off is that certain characters have an emotional resonance on the story at key times during the course of the film (often when they die, as it happens).

The swordplay is ferocious and lively and is very much the kind of ‘one against many’ that you see in some of the later Zatoichi films, not to mention the fairly typical exploits of both Lone Wolf and Cub and Sleepy Eyes Of Death. Indeed, the first pre-credits fight I mentioned earlier is more or less a template for the various skirmishes throughout the movie but, of course, as the story builds to a climax, so does the number of opponents increase so you eventually have one man against whole armies, etc. There are two things which made these kinds of scenes a little different. Other than being shot by Miike with a nice attention to the way elements of the battles are framed and the incredible sense of the way the various shots are edited together, so you don’t lose your place in the combat scenes...

The first of these is that the fights seem a whole lot less bloody than I am used to seeing in a Japanese film and, of course, this goes doubly so considering that it’s Miike, the man behind such extremely, violently ostentatious movies such as Ichi The Killer (if you’re going to see that one, get a Dutch copy as they’re definitely uncut). Sure, there are lots of body parts flying and there is literally a small, almost river of blood formed in the middle of the battleground at one point... but you don’t get the huge gouts of blood and arterial spray that I tend to typically associate with any Japanese movies since Kurosawa first started that trend in the very last scene of his excellent Yojimbo follow up, Sanjuro. Instead, the brutality of the violence is somehow less comic book in its depiction here... although I’m really not sure whether I preferred this choice from the director or not.

The other thing about the various fights involving Manji is that he does tend to get cut up quite a lot in each and every fight he’s in and, too be honest. I was getting kinda tired of watching him being sliced n’ diced and then, slowly and painfully, regenerating each and every time he gets in trouble. I kind of felt like yelling... “He’s immortal, we get it!”... at various points because, it struck me that compared to many of the great swordsmen in Japanese cinema, he’s wasn’t that skillful that he couldn’t come away unscathed on occasion.

However, that’s a minor grumble and, in all honesty, I really enjoyed Blade Of The Immortal and it’s reminded me that, in terms of Takashi Miike, I’ve barely scratched the surface of his work and I need to see more of it. This is a nice slice of chanbara goodness which, perhaps, isn’t as unique or unusual as you might at first think but certainly pays homage to the genre and it should satisfy fans of this type of cinema. I’ll certainly be picking this one up on Blu Ray if this gets a UK release and look forward to seeing it again. A solid swordplay movie from one of Japan’s modern, master directors. Not to be missed.

On The Road (Zatôichi kenka-tabi)

Ichi Keen

On The Road (Zatôichi kenka-tabi)
Japan 1963 Directed by Kimiyoshi Yasuda
Daiei/Criterion Blu Ray Zone A 
 
So I’ve been inadvertently neglecting my Zatoichi watching and reviewing of late. Hopefully I can get back into the swing of that with this, the fifth of the 26 Zatoichi films starring Shintarô Katsu as the blind swordsman (not including his 100+ episodes of the TV show) and the first of the films to be directed by Kimiyoshi Yasuda.

The film opens, pre-credits, with Zatoichi rumbling a gambling con. He slices a candle down the middle, extinguishing the light so he can get the upper hand, and deals with the whole roomful of gambling antagonists stating, in a shout out to the subtitle of a much later Zatoichi film in the series, that “Darkness is my ally.” As he finishes with his enemies, the title of the movie comes up and composer extraordinaire Akira Ifikube’s four note Zatoichi theme swells on the soundtrack. As the music and credits play out, we then follow Zatoichi’s progress 'on the road' as he encounters a fellow traveller and stops at the Edo period equivalent of a roadside diner with him to eat as the opening titles finish.

The traveller is on a mission to take Zatoichi to his boss so that said boss can negotiate for Zatoichi to join his side in a stand off against another boss in his town. Alas, it’s not long before this man becomes a casualty as three swordsmen kill him trying to take out Zatoichi. The blind man learns from the widowed wife of one of the men he has just despatched that they were just hired on the spot to get rid of Zatoichi. She seeks vengeance on Zatoichi but is obviously in no position to do anything about it... at least not right now.

We then stumble into another unrelated, at this point, subplot where our hero finds a dying man in a forest. A group of samurai are looking for a lady called Omitsu and have mortally wounded him as he was protecting her. The dying man begs Zatoichi to see Omitsu safely to Edo, just before he passes away. Zatoichi stumbles into her and, eluding the chasing samurai, takes her under his protection.

Like pretty much all of the Zatoichi films starring Katsu in the title role, as far as I can remember, Zatoichi always talks to himself, rendering his inner dialogue as an external monologue. Voice overs are rarely used in the Zatoichi movies, to let you know what he is thinking... Katsu always does it himself, in shot. This always has the trick of making him a much more likeable, easier to identify with character from the audience’s point of view, I suspect. Having these things rendered as such on the surface makes him seem less devious and more friendly... at least that’s how I always interpret these many instances of talking to himself that the character exhibits in the Katsu versions and he’s enough of a great actor to pull this stuff off without the audience, as far as I know, ever once questioning it. Works for me, anyway.

That being said, I think I spotted a rare, slight mistake in this one because, after Zatoichi has killed two of the pursuing samurai, he reaches around for Omitsu’s hand to lead her out of harm’s way. Since she is holding her hands up near her head, one wonders how Zatoichi would know to reach up there rather than drop his hand to where her hand would normally be expected to be. Now one could, of course, argue that the deductive radar system he has set up in his head from having his sight taken from him and which allows him to avoid or block the killing blows of his self-styled enemies could, in fact, easily tell just where someone’s hand is when they are at rest. I don’t know though... I think this is a bit of a stretch and a rare slip in the actor’s concentration which just got by the director at the time. Frankly, who can blame him or begrudge him that. Katsu does such a great job of playing a blind man over the decades that I think you have to cut him a little slack in the odd moment like that.

After this, of course, the two different sub plots become linked and Zatoichi is left to fight both sides of the big fight with one of the bosses, as they both try to gain the girl, who they believe is of some value, to use for either a reward or as a bargaining chip to buy the services of Zatoichi. It all gets integrated with various other plots threads dropped down in the early stages of the film and, of course, the widow of the samurai Zatoichi was forced to dispatch also plays a hand in the unfolding drama.

It’s a nice enough story with big flashes of action and Zatoichi taking out a heck of a lot of opponents towards the end... the majority of both warring factions. However, it’s not as flashy or overt in its cinematography as some of the more visually spectacular episodes in the film series and although there are some nice touches like a dragonfly taking off of a plant and then landing again (in reverse footage), bookending the flash of Zatoichi’s sword as he effortlessly takes out one or two of his enemies... the majority of the direction and camerawork is pedestrian. It doesn’t detract from the pacing and intrigue in any way... although I have to say that the actual through line on the story does seem a little fragmented and jumpy in certain stretches of the film. Almost like there were supposed to be more connecting scenes which never made it into the movie.

That being said, I did notice the occasional interesting shot at certain points. There's a cool shot on a transition where the camera is looking up and around the tops of the trees, almost as if searching for a sense of focus of the shot before meandering down to Zatoichi and Omitsu and then cutting to a tighter frame of them. That’s a pretty wild way of doing an establishing shot and I wonder what the reasoning behind shooting this one like that was. Another interesting visual flourish I noticed or, visual method at any rate, is that a fair few of the external location shots are taken from very low down, like the camera is in a ditch or a specially dug hole, to mask the bottom of frame with the landscape while the action plays out in top fifth sliver of the screen. It’s kinda interesting but it didn’t particularly, to my mind at least, gel with any of the other camerawork used in the movie, which seemed less special or focussed to a particular artistic expression than those sequences I just described.

At the end of the day, though, this is still a solid Zatoichi film and the director went on to helm a fair few more as the series progressed. The performances, as you would expect from this, are all pretty much faultless and Ifikube’s music, one of many scores he did for this series of films, while not particularly inventive or striking as some of the other composers who worked on these, is pretty reliable and packed full of emotion. On The Road is a pretty watchable entry in a truly magnificent series of movies about the blind swordsman. As I’ve noted before, the Criterion Blu Ray/DVD combination box set is the way to go when watching these films. If you haven’t seen these classics of Japanese cinema before, then... it’s definitely worth a purchase.

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 Continues (Zoku Zatôichi Monogatari)

Ichi keen!

The Tale Of Zatoichi Continues 
(Zoku Zatôichi Monogatari)
1962 Japan
Directed by Kazuo Mori
Daiei/Criterion Collection 
DVD Region 1/BluRay Region A 

I mentioned in my review of the first film in this series that, at the end, Zatoichi leaves his cane sword behind in the town in which he reluctantly killed his samurai friend as a kind of atonement... but the studio presumably hadn’t counted on the success of that first movie because, within that same year, this sequel was already released into the world. Therefore, that last little bit is not referred to again in this story and, right from the outset Zatoichi has a, presumably, new cane sword to defend himself with (a fact I seem to remember may get contradicted later in the series... but I’ll let you know when I get there).

This story is, in some ways, a continuation of the first but, really, only in terms of details such as locations and recurring characters. The first half of the film is set in a different town and this movie really is the first to set up the idea that Zatoichi is a wandering masseur. In The Tale Of Zatoichi (reviewed here...) he did indulge his new samurai friend in this but, in this movie, he is clearly taking money for his services... and that part of his established character is now a constant throughout the series, as much as his blindness, his gambling hustles and his expert swordsmanship.

The atmosphere is slightly different from the start in that the soundtrack is not composed by Akira Ifikube, like the first and a fair number of the others in the series are, but by Ichirô Saitô, who also contributed to later films, plus some of the Sleepy Eyes Of Death series (many of which are also reviewed on this site). It’s a different vibe but I think I almost prefer it over the Ifikube and I’m glad both composers got to do work on this franchise.

The film has less to do than the first one in terms of the set up of the character and gets on with the story. Also, in this regard, in terms of having more action sequences placed at key points through the narrative and building towards a final, “all against one showdown”, for the end part of the film... or in this case, not quite the end. I’ll get to that a little later, though.

Curiously, the style used by the previous director, of keeping the camera close to the actors and following them around, is eschewed in favour of more master shots from a distance. There is still camera movement but this is obviously slower as the shots can, for the most part, take in wider parts of the environment the characters are cohabiting. This also, and I’d never thought about this properly before I rewatched this in comparison with the first movie, gives the film a more voyeuristic feel... you are watching the action from a distance and judging it, rather than being in the thick of it and reacting with the characters on screen. That’s kind of an interesting trick to use to change the pacing of a movie and the way it is perceived, I suspect. So in this film, the dynamics of the shot are created purely by the movements of the actors and the way they fill the space in the general composition of the shots... as opposed to the somewhat visceral but different approach of the first.

Another thing is that the compositions are not all based on verticals as the first one was. The film begins with Zatoichi being a ”blind” witness to something a gang doesn’t want generally known. As the gang try to kill him, they learn that he is going to the location of the first film, to pay his respects to the samurai he killed one year earlier. They team up with the boss who has survived Zatoichi’s intervention in the last movie and, by the time Zatoichi gets to the previous films location, in the second half of what is actually quite a short movie... that’s when we start to see some of the vertical style compositions revisited. These are often used to show the separation of attitudes or classes of characters split within the same physical frame... which is a good way to do it.

There are some really cool shot designs and elements of beauty like this found throughout the film. Such as a beach fight where the incoming tide gently laps at Zatoichi’s feet as he takes on a series of opponents... most of whom run when they figure out our hero’s prowess with a sword. And the vertical jutting objects motif is played out in the final big battle where all of the characters are dwarfed by the foreground details and seem almost like ants against this forced perspective. Very nice.

There’s also some great little moments where the writers build on Zatoichi’s character traits as the series starts progressing. For example, a man who sneaks up on Zatoichi to kill him has his thunder stolen when Zatoichi asks him the time... just as he is about to strike a death blow. Realising his blind opponent knows exactly where he is and could kill him in a snap, the man backs down and engages in conversation instead. This not only shows Zatoichi’s abilities well but also his compassion... he could have just cut the man down where he was standing but, instead, fashioned an excuse for the man so his would-be killer would not lose face and not have to engage him.

There’s also a brilliant piece of what people these days would call stunt casting. The plot also involves an outlaw on the run from the authorities who also wants to kill Zatoichi for some, at first, unspecified reason. He is embroiled in Zatoichi’s past somehow and the two were once rivals for the love of Zatoichi’s life. I thought the guy looked very familiar when he came on and the role turns out to be played by Tomisaburô Wakayama (credited in the film under the pseudonym of Jo Kenzaburo). You may remember him more for the role he perfected 10 years later, as the infamous Ogami Itto, the lead protagonist in the Lone Wolf And Cub (aka Baby Cart) films. In a twist moment in this movie (don’t read further than this if you don’t want to know) he plays Zatoichi’s long embittered brother... which is not so much of a stretch as it happens because, in real life, he really was Shintarô Katsu’s brother and, when you see him this young and with his hair significantly different, the resemblance between the two of them is much easier to see.

Wakayama’s character, Nagisa no Yoshiro, actually wounds Zatoichi quite badly during the end sequences of the film... one of the few times this happens this badly to the main character of this series (although there is a quite spectacular Django tribute in one of the later films, if memory serves me correctly... I’ll get to it when I rewatch). The battle between Zatoichi and various opponents near the end sees the start of the “overwhelming odds” battles that mark both this and the Baby Cart series of films. Zatoichi’s body count in this final battle is around 15 on-screen kills, which is quite modest for him... but this is where this kind of battle spectacle really starts in this series of films, I think.

The end of the film is abrupt and leaves a few loose ends. After he finds his romantic interest from the first film is going to be getting married to someone we are on edge, wondering what will happen to the two of them. Will they get together? The question is never answered because the next battle scene gives us a very abrupt ending which finishes just before the battle properly starts. A very angry Zatoichi, for reasons I won’t reveal here, is surrounded by a bunch of men including the boss who he didn’t kill in the first movie. However, he has made up his mind now that this man must die. He lunges ostentatiously at the opponent, he might have sliced him or he may not but, knowing Zatoichi like we now do, it’s pretty much inevitable that every other man in this confrontation is going to lose their life. It is, however, a confrontation we never see...

The film abruptly cuts there, leaving the battle to play out in our imagination... not to mention leaving a few loose ends too. It’s both a powerful ending and a let down at the same time. We really want to see Zatoichi in action again but, honestly, the fury we imagine for ourselves is surely greater than anything the director could have captured on celluloid here. As I watched it, I was reminded of a movie I’d recently seen at the cinema... a little thing called The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (reviewed here). If you remember the ending of that movie, you’ll realise that this is exactly the same tactic that the director of that one has employed as we have here in this one. In The Amazing Spider-Man 2, we see Spidey throw the first punch (well, metaphorically) at the Rhino, the credits roll and we play out in our minds the rest of the battle. We know Spider-Man’s going to win... it’s moot. It’s purely used to give a dramatic punchline to the film and I suspect the ending of The Tale Of Zatoichi Continues involved a similar creative decision. Whatever.  For the Zatoichi movie at least... it kinda works.

This would be Zatoichi’s last black and white film... his popularity pushing him into colour stock from his third feature. As always with the Zatoichi movies, or most of them, this one is a definite recommend but I would add the caveat that you should probably check out the first movie before sitting down with this one... since this particular entry in the series is very closely linked to it and makes references to the first which you would want to know about when you are watching. Another great Zatoichi film and, once again, Criterion’s new blu ray transfer is the absolute best way to watch this other than seeing an actual print in a good cinema. Another good entry in the chanbara genre, I think.

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.