Ronin

Masterless Masterclass

Ronin
USA/UK 1998 
Directed by John Frankenheimer 
United Artists Blu Ray Zone B

I haven’t revisited Ronin for years and so it was time for a Blu Ray upgrade of one of my all time favourite Frankenheimer films. John Frankenheimer will always be best remembered for some of the classic Hollywood films such as Seconds, Grand Prix and French Connection II but this one, made just four years before he died, is the one which I think is his most clever and compelling watch. 

The title of the film is a metaphor for a bunch of ex-secret service/military individuals who are brought together by Natascha McElhone’s Diedre... who you assume is working for the IRA, to steal (with deadly force) a case containing something which you never find out. Yeah, that’s right, the case is a classic Hitchcockian McGuffin and is unimportant in itself, other than it completely drives the action of the movie relentlessly forward. So, the team she puts in place is almost iconic... we have Robert DeNiro, Jean Reno, Sean Bean, Stellan Skarsgård and Skipp Sudduth. And they, almost, could all be the Ronin of the title... a term which, in ancient Japan, meant a masterless samurai who would often pick up jobs from various sources... apart from one character but, to reveal who that character is would be a spoiler. You don’t find out until the end anyway. 

And there is action, betrayal, unexpected deaths and one of, to my mind, the best car chases in cinema history (the second one of the two in this film). It moves along at a fair lick with the first half an hour setting up the characters and revealing all you need to know about them, as they plan their method of attack and then, of course, we have ‘the heist gone wrong’ trope which leads to all the shenanigans of the rest of the movie. That’s all I’m saying about the plot. 

The film is up there with The Quiller Memorandum almost (reviewed here), in terms of how clever the various characters are written and, I reckon a lot of that must be due to the uncredited script doctoring by David Mamet. So highlights in that regard would be the opening, where DeNiro hides a gun behind a cafe he is supposed to be meeting up in and then, making a point of going to the toilet so he can ensure the back door is open so he can get out if the going gets tough. By the way, that scene switches from the streets of France to a studio replica of the same cafe by use of a travelling matte shot which is, I think, impossible to spot unless you know it’s there (the old DVD version of this had a commentary track by Frankenheimer, revealing things like this). 

Other things of interest are DeNiro’s use of a cup of coffee to first deliberately spill to test the reflexes of Skarsgård’s character and, later, to ‘ambush’ Sean Bean’s character to prove a point to the people he’s working for. And there’s one scene where DeNiro is talking to an old colleague where they are using coded dialogue, pretending to be strangers, so DeNiro can get some information. It’s not until the end of the movie until you realise that the conversation was also deliberately ‘loose’ to an extent and serving as a kind of ‘double blind’ should any of his new colleagues be listening. 

Another interesting thing is that the film has three James Bond villains in it but, bizarrely, they never appear in any scene together. So we have Sean Bean who was the villain in Goldeneye (reviewed here), Jonathan Pryce who was the bad guy in Tomorrow Never Dies (reviewed here) and, in a wonderful scene following on from a really well done bullet removal sequence, Michael Lonsdale, who played the villain in Moonraker (reviewed here). Lonsdale has an especially important scene with DeNiro as he is working on a model of a scene from the famous story of The 47 Ronin, explaining things to DeNiro and pushing certain metaphors home. 

This is still one of the great ‘caper’ action movies by my book and I would love to see this in a cinema again because I remember it looked great on a big screen. And especially for how it sounds... the car chases are noisy and everything is really spot on and intense during certain scenes. Also... and I don’t see this in a lot of films, to be honest... there are a lot of civilians being killed or injured during the various shoot outs and car chases on the streets of whatever country the central characters happen to be in at the time. Not to mention the spectacular ice dance death fall of world champion ice skater Katarina Witt, as the inadvertent girlfriend of one of the bad guys of the movie. 

All this and a knock out score by Elia Cmiral which really serves the film well and is also a great listen as a stand alone CD. Honestly, I can’t say enough good things about Ronin and, I’m surprised there aren’t a load of books written about this particular movie. I also wonder, since their chemistry is just so good in this, why DeNiro and Reno were not put in any more movies together... they both knock it out of the park here and play off each other really well. Definitely add this one to your hit list if you’ve never seen this marvellous gem before. 

Annual Cryptic Movie Quiz 2023 Answers

Annual Cryptic
Movie Quiz 2023
The Answers

Thanks once again to all who braved my annual cryptic movie quiz over the Christmas and New Year period... I hope you got a lot of fun out of it. This year’s winner is, embarrassingly for the third year running, Steve Braham in Australia, who got all 14 answers correct.

The answers are pictured above in the grid and this is how you break them down to solve them.

1. Somebody visually recorded Italy’s capital city.
When someone visually records someone these days we usually say ‘videod’. Italy’s capital city is Rome. So... Cronenberg classic Videodrome.

2. 16th Century firearm demonstrating one more organ of auditory processing than the average human.
The firearm is a musket. An organ of auditory processing is an ear, of which humans have two... so one more ear would make three. So... The Three Musketeers.

3. The monster maker swore at his creation.
Swearing is sometimes called cursing so... Hammer classic The Curse Of Frankenstein.

4. Using oars to steer the author of Delta Of Venus towards the shore.
Using oars to stear is when you Row something. The author of Delta Of Venus was Anaïs Nin. So... Row Nin... Ronin.

5. It got kinda scrambled by the hello.
Hello with By scrambled into it gives you... Hellboy.

6. If the four lettered town in Switzerland started and ended with the same two letters.
The town I’m thinking of is Chur. So put the first two letters at the end again and you get church so... Italian horror movie The Church.

7. Enthusiastically expelled breath on a device manufactured to give out light.
Enthusiastically expel breath is blow. Past tense, expelled, changes it to Blew. A device manufactured to give out light could be lamp. So... Blew Lamp... The Blue Lamp.

8. Auditory organ sandwiched in a backwards, long playing record album.
And ear again. A long playing record was always referred to as an LP. LP backwards is PL... put EAR between the two letters and you get last year’s slasher prequel Pearl.

9. The cannibal ate his girlfriend. He was...
A classic Ridley Scott film. The cannibal ate his girlfriend. He was “glad he ate her” so... Gladiator.

10. What you get if a Pokémon goes down with a nasty skin condition... from a certain point of view.
Well it could get a rash. Combine it with a famous tale about contradictory viewpoints and you get Kurosawa’s Rashomon.

11. Family tribe of the light coloured James Bond car in The Spy Who Loved Me.
A family tribe is a clan. The car James Bond drives in The Spy Who Loved Me is, famously, a white Lotus Esprit so, put that all together and you get Shaw Brothers classic The Clan Of The White Lotus.

12. “Oh, Mr. Neeson!” called John Thaw’s Detective Inspector.
Morse is the Inspector. Liam is the Neeson. Calling him as above is Oh, Liam. So, Morse Oh Liam... 80s horror movie Mausoleum.

13. Daniel goes for a walk next to The Bridge On The River.
The famous River Kwai, of course. Dan is short for Daniel so the answer is... Kwaidan.

14. This version of the International Space Station is powered entirely by the sun.
Something powered by the sun uses Solar power. The International Space Station is ISS. So it must be... Solaris.

And, of course, give yourself an extra point if you figured out the background to the grid was from Santa Claus Conquers The Martians. Thanks to all who played... I hope you had fun.

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.

Yurusarezaru Mono (Unforgiven)

Ronin Scared

Yurusarezaru Mono (Unforgiven)
2013 Japan
Directed by Sang-il Lee
Playing at UK cinemas now.

Okay then.

Yurusarezaru Mono is a new Japanese samurai remake of Clint Eastwood’s film Unforgiven. I should probably warn you of the fact that the IMDB is reminding me that it’s 22 years since I last saw that film at my local cinema... Cinema: now deceased. Reviewer: Not quite deceased yet.

Bearing in mind I saw the film only once, I’m remembering that I thought it was an okay film but not enough to ever bother watching again. As such, I really can’t remember much of anything about it so, if you’re after a review which can compare and contrast this new version to the original, then you might want to go and read somebody else’s review with that specific agenda instead.

Now then, the fact that this is a chambara remake of a gritty American Western, which in itself was a throwback, in some ways, to the old revisionist Westerns by the likes of director Sam Pekinpah, is a bit of a twist. Usually it’s the other way around, isn’t it?

Well, yes and no, to be honest... in fairly equal measures.

Let me take the example of Akira Kurosawa because, quite apart from him being my favourite director, some of his films have quite famously been remade as Westerns... and also because some of his work seems to be directly referenced in Yurusarezaru Mono... but I’ll get to that part later.

Three of Kurosawa’s chambara were famously remade as Westerns. The Italian giant Sergio Leone remade Kurosawa’s Yojimbo as A Fistful Of Dollars (which hugely helped establish Clint Eastwood as a movie star and helped him make the crossover from television) and two American directors remade Rashomon (as The Outrage) and Seven Samurai (as The Magnificent Seven)... so there is an established and easily recognisable legacy of period samurai and ronin movies being recast into an “old West” setting (in fact, Yojimbo was also later remade again, as a 1930s gangster movie starring Bruce Willis in the role originally played by Toshiro Mifune and then Clint Eastwood, in a film called Last Man Standing). However, you might want to ask yourself just why these films, especially those of Kurosawa, have been picked on as source material in this manner.

Well, one reason may be the similarity in the village/wilderness setting and the commonality of the archetypal hero/outsider who travels to a place, fixes things and then leaves it behind as he/she goes on to the next port of call... or dies trying. That’s one thing these two genres have in common, to a certain extent. But let me get back to Kurosawa for a minute...

To the Japanese people, certainly in the 1950s and 1960s at any rate, after the global recognition bestowed on Rashomon at various film festivals including, famously, the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival... Kurosawa was always looked on as a bit of an outsider. In his own country, his films were perceived as having a very Western flavour to them (in the sense of not seeming like they were a product of the East). This attitude was best summed up by one of his friends, Donald Ritchie, who I was lucky to catch as part of an all day Kurosawa seminar event at least a decade or so ago at the National Film Theatre. He basically said that this attitude from Kurosawa’s Japanese audience seemed to stem purely from the point of view that Rashomon, and much of his later work, was such a success worldwide. The Japanese had always thought of themselves as inscrutable and incomprehensible to the Western mind, and were proud of that part of their worldwide reputation. The fact that Kurosawa was acclaimed on a global scale meant, to them, that he must be directing his films in a way which was compatible to the tastes of Western audiences and, therefore, not truly Japanese.

Which is kind of a load of hogwash when you think about it. All directors are influenced by the huge range of films they have seen from all kinds of countries and the Japanese, including Kurosawa, were no exception. This is as it should be with an artist.

Now indulge me for a minute while I get back to Kurosawa again because it is, I promise, relevant to the film in question... somewhat.

Kurosawa was a life long fan of the famous Western director John Ford. When they met once, Ford said to Kurosawa of his films... “You really like rain.” The two got on famously and, from what I understand, Kurosawa even started to dress like Ford did on set after this meeting. So the point I’m trying to make here is that all directors are equal in their multi-cultural influences and, though it’s not been done that often in reverse (at least not being identified as such... I’m sure a lot of Japanese films may have been influenced by things such as the classic Hollywood Western), the fact that we have a samurai film which is a remake of a 1990s Hollywood Western, especially one which was originally directed by and starring Clint Eastwood, really shouldn’t be a surprise and certainly not an issue. So now I’ve spent all that time pointing out that there’s nothing new here... let’s just forget about that for a while, yeah?

Yurusarezaru Mono is quite spectacular in its execution. It’s a small story of a group of prostitutes who want revenge on the two men who cut up their colleague and who are blocked on the reward they are offering by the local “sheriff” who has his own agenda. This includes beating up and making an example of anyone who wanders into his village to try to make good on claiming that reward and killing the two men who he let go.

Ken Watanabe plays Jubei, the Eastwood character who is pulled out of retirement to kill the two men and claim the reward by an old war buddy. He is backed up by some fantastic character actors who I know I’ve seen many times before... but I have no idea who they are because the IMDB, appallingly, rarely puts photo avatars next to the names of actors and actresses unless they’re English, American or “extremely famous”. But everyone in this is absolutely excellent and, although it’s a small story, it’s a visual treat which, coupled with the excellent acting and sense of drama, maintains a certain pace that ensures you are not going to be getting tired of any of the on screen antics while it’s playing out.

Now, it doesn’t contain a great deal of action in terms of spectacular swordplay, which many of the chambara lionised by Western audiences tend to display, with the few action scenes in this one being much more up close and personal than you might expect from this kind of cinema. And also, there’s a strong emphasis on gunplay too, which goes hand in hand with the use of swords and daggers (this is set early on in the Meji period in Japan) but this, also, is something of a tradition in this kind of cinema and, although the gun play is pushed a lot more forward into the mix, this movie is definitely an Eastern, as opposed to a Western.

Two scenes echo famous scenes by Kurosawa... the first being the introduction of a character who accompanies Ken Watanabe’s character Jubei and his friend (depending on which translation you are reading of the names). An introduction which mirrors the boisterous and drunken antics of Toshiro Mifune’s character in Seven Samurai to a great extent (and later Horst Buchholz in The Magnificent Seven). The character is even from a certain clan/race of people who are seen as primitive and out of step with the other protagonists in the film... just like the alienated Mifune character was in Kurosawa’s classic.

The other big reference to Kurosawa goes back to the weaponry used in this one. In Yojimbo, much is made by Tatsuya Nakadai’s character Unosuke about the bullet being faster than the sword. It’s all about the contrast and the battle between the new age of weaponry pitted against the “old guard”, represented in Yurusarezaru Mono by Jubei and his war buddy but, more specifically in this instance, by a bounty hunter who is used in the first half of the film to demonstrate the deadly ruthlessness of the main antagonist. This is good stuff but definitely a nod to classic Kurosawa... which is nice actually and not something which would have come up in the original 1992 version of Unforgiven.

Like most films of this type, the character building and dramatic tension is ratcheted up to a resolution expressing itself in a final conflict, where Jubei faces down the villain and a whole roomful of his henchmen on his own (and that’s not a spoiler, honest guv!). I won’t tell you the circumstances leading up to this small scale battle royale, nor the final outcome, but I will say that, as I touched upon earlier, that this is not the spectacular ballet of kinetic violence you would expect from, say, a Zatoichi or Sleepy Eyes Of Death or Lone Wolf and Cub movie... or even a Hanzo The Razor installment. Nor is it the swift and deadly final cut of Kurosawa’s Yojimbo sequel Sanjuro. This is a battle which, like most in this film, is all shot tight in on the main protagonist and which dislocates you by not showing the periphery of his battle, as he hacks and punches his way through it, to any great degree.

Also, the director plays with slowing down and speeding up the action at will, altering and enhancing the sound design as he does this and, although that sounds like it’s a hard line to walk, the director manages to pull off this kind of fight choreography exceptionally well, against all odds, with the result that... although maybe not as pretty to look at, it’s certainly a kind of violent conflict that you, as an audience, feel more in your gut. It’s not my preferred choice, by a long shot, but it’s a perfectly valid artistic direction to take and, as I said, the man in charge manages to really make it work well.

So there you have it. A quite lovely, sometimes gritty film with a surprizingly American style soundtrack which, again against all odds, works unusually well with the on screen action. Most everything about this movie works, to be honest. It’s damn near perfect. Whether you’ll like it or not depends on your appreciation of the conventions of either the chambara or Hollywood Western film genres but, as far as I’m concerned, this ones got everything going for it. Unlike the original movie it’s based on, this one is definitely a film I’ll happily pay a few return visits to in the coming years.