Zatoichi: Guest Stars and Black Holes

This is the fourth of a five part review of all the movies contained in the Zatoichi Box Set from Criterion. You can read part three here: Zatoichi: The Golden Years. 

18-22 Guest Stars and Black Holes

While I can't say this with any certainty, it seems likely that after seventeen movies audiences were either losing interest in Zatoichi or the studio was afraid that the end was nigh. Zatoichi fans were growing up and they wanted more blood in their fight scenes. The biggest names in Japanese (and Hong Kong) film were being recruited to attract box office yen, but their star power wasn't being utilized in the service of great storytelling. Thus we enter a stretch of films with good moments, but not enough to sustain the golden age. In fact, only two of the next five even managed to achieve a three star rating. 

18: Zatoichi and the Fugitives **

Any movie guest starring Takashi Shimura has a chance to rise above given the gravitas he was capable of lending to a film. Yet despite a promising storyline featuring Shimura as a goodhearted doctor who has been estranged from a violent son with slightly more of a conscience than the ruffians he has fallen in with, this entry actually slips below the median. Where does it go wrong then?

The problem isn’t seeing Zatoichi living with the doctor’s family and helping administer to the local villagers. Ichi-san looks so genuinely happy, you could almost see him settling down here. Nor is the problem seeing the extent to which he is challenged by the fugitives when he sustains a serious injury before overcoming them in the end. For me, the movie turns on the scene when they cut to a music video while Ichi-san wanders along the road. It’s an odd interruption to the flow of the final act that exists purely for the sake of featuring a Katsu song that already bookends the movie. When the action resumes, we are reminded that this movie has been curiously lacking in dramatic tension despite having some potentially compelling story elements. Even in the climactic scene when Ichi discovers the ronin he has killed was a member of the family who took him in, there is little emotional impact. A more conflicted prodigal son who didn't murder a village headman in cold blood might have saved this movie, but we'll never know.

19: Samaritan Zatoichi **

Samaritan Zatoichi starts on a tightrope between formula and standalone filmmaking. Zatoichi is asked to follow the yakuza code and perform some dirty work for a “good” boss who has shown him hospitality. As expected, the boss is not as good as he appears, but by the time Zatoichi realizes it, he has killed the brother of a woman who agreed to work at a brothel to earn 30 ryo to pay off his debt. It is in the moment when Zatoichi realizes what has happened that the viewer's belief in the movie’s premise is earned. Katsu’s ability to act genuine remorse makes it a movie worth watching to the end.

Along the way though, we are asked to endure too many inexplicable events (to wit, when the heroine hides from pursuers in a conveniently located abandoned cabin, they run right by without checking it AND a sexually predacious ronin happens to be lounging in the cabin as though he knew she was a fly bound to fall into his web anyway) and poor decisions from the heroine (really, you’re going to keep heading out on the road alone when Zatoichi can protect you? You’ve got no other options than to return to the brothel you escaped from?). Fortunately, these improbable events set up a genuinely interesting series of confrontations between Zatoichi and the twisted ronin, and we get to see nearly every yakuza actor from the previous movies filling out all the different gangs Zatoichi crosses but for once does not have to completely eliminate.

20: Zatoichi Meets Yojimbo ***

This is a movie that wants badly to rise above the typical Zatoichi entry but falls far enough short of the Kurosawa Yojimbo duology (Yojimbo & Sanjuro) to undermine a collection of interesting performances (Masakane Yonekura as the outcast son Masagoro makes a particularly good flawed villain) and a storyline that attempts to show the effect greed can have on a family. Even knowing that Yojimbo is working deep undercover, there is still something unsatisfying about how Mifune reshaped the character outside of Kurosawa’s influence.

While there is some interest in watching a movie that is not told from a strong point of view of either Zatoichi or Yojimbo, it really forces the viewer to judge the movie against the entire chanbara genre and not just the Zatoichi series itself. It seems like they just tried to stuff a bit too much in. For every 4 star moment, there is another scene that undermines it or which seems to have been inserted out of context. While this is a better movie than I gave it credit for the first time I saw it, one suspects that if talented director Kihachi Okamoto (Kiru!) had been given the power to execute his vision he might have been able to do more with the material and the stars than make a spaghetti western. 

21. Zatoichi Goes to the Fire Festival ***

If Zatoichi Meets Yojimbo capped the 60s samurai movie era with a rehash of plot elements and characters from the decade’s best movies, Zatoichi Goes to the Fire Festival announced that the 70s were going to be different. Very different. While I haven’t seen any “pink movies” per se, I have read an essay on the genre that suggests that Zatoichi Goes to the Fire Festival was responding to its influence. More male and female skin is shown than ever before, the sexual relationships between characters are more clearly established, and Peter (Ran) guest stars as the gender ambiguous Umeji who has an “are they or aren’t they” scene with Zatoichi.

The more brazen sexuality aside, it’s the storytelling (or lack thereof) that really sets this movie apart from the 60s flicks. Frequent series director, Kenji Musumi, assumes everyone knows what to expect from a Zatoichi film and essentially dispenses with exposition, stringing together a collection of scenes that would baffle someone new to the series but make sense as a form of mild experimentation to anyone familiar with the Zatoichi formula. For all of its camera gimmicks and interesting twists (e.g. a blind yakuza nemesis, a naked sword fight, and a truly inventive assassination attempt against Zatoichi), the film just does not add up beyond the sum of its parts. As much as it attempts to play with the formula, in the end it reverts to it with no apparent underlying message to distinguish this entry. Oh yeah, and Tatsuya Nakadai plays the ronin, inevitably following Toshiro Mifune as he seemed doomed to play the second fiddle in all samurai movies in which they were linked. A bit of a shame really, for as magnetic as Mifune could be, Nakadai had more range as an actor.

22. Zatoichi Meets the One-Armed Swordsman *

The introduction of some Chinese characters and culture plus a dash of Hong Kong style action film making are about the only elements that make this movie interesting. Throw in a corrupt, authoritarian monk character and that’s about it for fresh elements in this one. The problems are signalled early in two scenes when Wang Kang and Zatoichi engage in some awkward miscommunications. Nobody trusts anybody and every conflict between a pair of sympathetic characters is based on a misunderstanding that no one seems willing to clear up via observation, communication, common sense, or the realization that there are bigger enemies to unite against. When they finally have a chance to figure out that they each eliminated half the bad guys and have a couple sympathetic women along who could act as mediators, an attempt to communicate is again conveniently overlooked for the sake of an action sequence. Given it’s a Japanese movie, Ichi unsurprisingly triumphs in the end, but it makes a cynical viewer wonder if Katsu returned a guest star favour and died in a Chinese version co-starring Jimmy Wang.  Even worse, it takes a mortal wound from Ichi for Kang to realize that the blind swordsman was actually a good person—huh?

Read the fifth and final part: Zatoichi: The Renaissance

Appendix: The Rating System

***** Classic (The most representative movies of the early, middle, and late years.)

****   Excellent (Innovative and enjoyable, with some formulaic elements that are just enough to fall short of a Classic rating.)

***     Good (Professional, entertaining efforts that did not push the boundaries.)

**       Fair (Coincidence-driven or otherwise flawed films. Some high points, but not enough to save the movie.)

*         Poor (Total bombs. Unfit for inclusion in the canon)