But Kudo is clearly much more than the efficient action director he’s been known as (when he’s been known at all). He’s an extraordinary stylist and wicked ironist with an ambivalent attitude towards most of his characters. To call him a skilled action director is to understate the power of his set-pieces, especially furious, climactic battles whose bloodlettings occur in elaborately conceived environments within moral gray zones.
Kudo showcased his skills to their best advantage in an informal samurai trilogy he made in his mid thirties: Thirteen Assassins (Juusan-nin no shikaku) (1963); The Great Killing, aka The Great Melee, aka The Great Duel (Dai Satsujin) (1963); and Eleven Samurai (Ju-ichinin no samurai) (1966). The three have similar plots (a disparate group of samurai band together to defeat a larger force; part of a post-Seven Samurai subgenre) and overlapping character types, while the first and third take place within the same period (the Tempo era), and the first two share visual and storytelling strategies. All three are examples of that curious technical hybrid, the black-and-white Scope movie. But there’s only a superficial sense of repetition; the overwhelming sense is that of a filmmaker exploring myriad, profound variations.
Thirteen Assassins opens with a voice-over narration, setting the time (1844, late in the Tokugawa Shogunate), place (Edo, the future Tokyo), and cause of the action. The younger half-brother of the shogun, Sir Naritsugu (Kantaro Suga), who has been “adopted” into the wealthy and lordly Matsudaira clan for the sake of propriety, has been running amok, raping and murdering vassals, including samurai. In a final, desperate effort to force the shogunate to bring the rogue noble to heel, the Matsudaira chamberlain has committed seppuku on the doorstep of Edo Castle.
Cornered into doing something about Naritsugu, but unable to do anything openly lest the ruling house’s own reputation fall into disrepute, the government’s chief minister convinces hatamoto (high-level) samurai Shinzaemon Shimada (Chiezo Kataoka, a star of period samurai films since the 1920s) to gather a band of fellow warriors and murder Naritsugu when he makes his annual journey from Edo to his domain, a journey which should take at least a week. (The shoguns forced Japan’s nobles to spend one half the year in Edo, and one half in their home territories. The sumptuousness of their Edo residences and the size and make-up of their entourages were matters of official fiat, all the better to keep potentially restive lords spending money and time on their obligations.)
Shinzo, as he’s called, gathers together a band culled from trustworthy hatamoto, as well as his cynical young nephew Shinrokuro (Kotaro Satomi), and an acquaintance he’d been sheltering for several years, Kujuro Hirayama (Kô Nishimura). Kujuro is a masterless samurai, or ronin, but he’s taken advantage of his duty-free status to develop his skills as a swordsman, a compensation in an age when far more samurai are bureaucrats, mere retainers, or starving bumpkins than they are fighters.
Arrayed against them on the other side are over a hundred infantry and horsemen under Naritsugu’s control. The lord is impetuous and foolish, unaware even that his life is in jeopardy. Luckily for him, his new chamberlain is Hanbei Onigashira (Ryohei Uchida), a politically savvy samurai who not only understands tactics, but recognizes when they’re being used against him, even secretly.
Hanbei is intensely loyal to his lord, not because Naritsugu is personally worthy of it, but because the samurai code demands unquestioning fealty to the clan leader. This is a commonly celebrated virtue in samurai films, as you can see in any of the versions of The 47 Ronin. Kudo doesn’t reject this commonly-held regard, but he does undermine it. When a furious Naritsugu murders his former chamberlain’s widow and children (a chilling scene, no less so for occurring mostly off-screen) and Hanbei can’t get to the scene of the crime in time to stop it, he can only say, “How cruel” and steel himself to perform his more routine duties. The fact that he’s clearly disgusted, though, doesn’t enhance, as it often did, his character’s sense of honor.
Many post-war samurai films examined the plight of loyal, honorable samurai caught up in the contradictions of a corrupt political system. No matter how heroically or practically the samurai responded to circumstances, they were depicted with a substantial amount of sympathy. So, ultimately, is Hanbei, but with clear reservation.
Most of Kudo’s characters live out a moral quandary, unable to conceive an ethical system that doesn’t reflect the cynicism of the shogunate. The typical alternatives offered by supporting characters – either to live for pleasure or for a chance to kill as many officials as possible – always risk tipping over into nihilism.
The whole of Kudo’s depictions reflects this sense of moral imprisonment, no less in Thirteen Assasins than anywhere else. Its opening scene of seppuku is framed in perfect symmetry, starting with two rectangles. The lower and larger shape is the ground in front of the castle, which holds the lonely figure of the suicidal official; the second is the sky, which is blotted out by the castle itself, which stretches nearly from screen’s edge to screen’s edge. The composition is perfectly balanced, but defiantly out of proportion, the squeezed castle visually bearing down on the isolated human being who, despite occupying the larger spatial field, has nowhere to go.
When the action moves inside to the plotting of the government ministers, who are already assembling their band of killers (in such as way as to disavow them when necessary), Kudo replaces the larger geometric compositional blocks with strong, bold vertical lines. Everything and everyone is compartmentalized, stuck in a space that is also a role.
Kudo changes his compositional focus twice more; one of those times, only the accompanying emotional devastations of the sequence in question keeps the sheer technical brilliance from being. Shinzo listens to a vassal samurai describe the rape and murder of his son-in-law and murder of his son during a visit from Naritsugu. Shown in flashback, the movie alternates the prevailing visual realism with an encompassing blackness that, at moments of high intensity, leave the characters marooned in a nightmarish darkness that comes right up to the edge of their silhouettes. Remarkable, Kudo effects some of the dramatic lighting changes within a single shot or during camera movements.
The biggest change, though, maintains the sense of realism while altering the dominant design of the images. Simply, when the action moves from Edo Palace to the outdoors as Shinzo and his men race to get ahead of Hinbei and Naritsugu and set an ambush, the vertical and looming compositions give way to wide open exteriors that are dramatically horizontal. So that this change won’t be overlooked, Kudo sets an early part of the movie at a river ford where Shinzo had hoped to catch Hinbei napping. But his opponent has marshaled his caravan to cross the river earlier. Using the passing river as the key element in the frame, the director cuts quickly between shots of galloping riders, skulking warriors, and other types of motion that expand the visual field both side-to-side and deeper into the image itself. It’s absolutely astonishing work.
Thirteen Assassin’s climax occurs in a tiny village which Shinzo and his men turn into a maze of deadly traps that should let them overpower that larger force and murder Naritsugu. It’s here that Kudo can pull one more amazing feat – or series of feats – as the shape and geography of narrow lanes and alleyways dictate the very form of the screen. Lastly, when Shinzo meets Hinbei mano a mano, Kudo uses exactly one shot to invoke the repressive vertical lines of the early sequences, actually incorporating Shinzo’s very body into the composition by shooting it with perfect exactness through wooden slats. It’s a devastating irony, capturing the movie’s hero at his greatest moment of triumph, but undercutting it so that his slashing swordsmanship, while it may kill an enemy almost arbitrarily set against him, cannot free him himself from lethal manipulations from the palace.
This is also where we should pay attention to the time period: 1844. That was two years after the western naval powers had imposed their combined will on China, effectively wresting control away from the imperial government. Now, the Dutch (who had once held and then lost trading concessions in Japan) had sent a fleet across the sea to try and pry open their former trading partner’s ports. They’d fail for the moment, but just the attempt showed that the shogunate, which expended so much military power against suspected domestic opponents, would ultimately have no answer to western guns. So all the backstabbing and plotting – as in murdering a member of the royal family only because his sins might breed a scandal – would be for naught.
The Great Killing was inspired by two historical events, one contemporary and one historical. At the time of the film’s production, university students and police had been battling in the streets. The unrest had begun as a protest against a rise in educational fees but grew to include the treaty governing relations between Japan and the United States which had been approved by the Japanese Diet in 1960 and which was known by the Japanese acronym ANPO. As was the case with many Japanese liberals and leftists, Kudo had a great deal of sympathy for the students’ cause and turned his film into a reflection on the present. The movie’s plot follows the activities of a group of samurai who take on shogunate forces over the issues of oppression and abuse of power rather than out of political calculation.
Although the movie disclaims any resemblance to fact, its background reflects some actual occurrences. Around 1680, as the rule of fourth shogun, Tokugawa Ietsuna, was coming to an end, a great lord and top government minister, Sakai Tadakiyo, tried to block the succession of Ietsuna’s younger brother, Tokugawa Tsunayoshi, and conspire to place another claimant (and, presumably, puppet) as shogun. Although Sakai was widely believed to be corrupt, you can’t blame him in a way; Tsunayoshi, who did succeed his brother, is supposed to have been of sub-normal intelligence. His most well-known accomplishment was the promulgation of a voluminous, complex and punitive (to humans) set of laws concerning the treatment of dogs. And so he became known to subsequent ages as “the Dog Shogun.”
The Great Killing opens in 1678, a time when the fourth shogun’s rule had been shaken by a series of farmers’ and samurais’ revolts over food costs and corruption. Kudo’s first shot is a nighttime, gutter-eyed view of the street in front of Edo Castle, the heavy forms of the street and building distorted by the sharp diagonals created by the camera lens. We’re in a paradoxical world of massive, immovable structures that have somehow lost their correct proportions. Inside the palace, where the lordly minister Sakai Yutanokami (Kantaro Suga) rules, troops of samurai are being quickly assembled. Their assignment is to comb the city arresting samurai who have been exposed in yet another rebellious plot; any resistance, which is practically inevitable, is to be met with death.
To an extent, these castle interiors repeat the strict compositional order of the opening interiors in Thirteen Assassins. The difference is that though the compositional lines are still heavy, they run in different directions, overlap, and deliberately obscure some views. We see some order, but can’t discern its organizing principle. The only one who can see it is the scheming Sakai, who plans to use his ruthless suppression of the uprising as a covert prelude to a coup of his own making. As surely as the images themselves do, Sakai uses order to subvert order.
From this deceptive rigidity we pass into transparent chaos. The samurai Jinbo (Kotaro Satomi)has returned home to his wife after spending a day at his non-martial job within the shogunate bureaucracy, a common professional niche for educated, well-to-do samurai. But an old friend bursts into the house seeking shelter from Sakai’s soldiers. Jinbo seems on the verge of acquiescing after first turning his friend down (unlike him, Jinbo was not involved in the conspiracy), when all of a sudden soldiers charge into the house. They quickly kill a protesting Jinbo’s friend, but in the confusion, Jinbo’s wife breaks free and is cut down in the street. Jinbo is aghast to see her body lying there and even more so when he learns it’s to be left there as a warning.
Overcome with grief and anger, Jinbo is quickly recruited by the remnants of the rebels, but they’re a questionable crew. Their former leader has suffered a catastrophic failure of nerve and wants to turn himself in. One undefeated spirit has started to succumb to a combination of religious mania and sexual aggression, eventually raping the group’s lone swordswoman. Another fighter is a devoted family man but, just as he is about to leave home for a climactic showdown, he murders his wife and children in their sleep in order to “spare” them the suffering that would follow his death.
The rebels, thus, live in a world in constant turmoil, unlike Sakai and his loyal samurai deputy, the Great Inspector Hojo (Ryutaro Otomo), who have a well thought-out plan and a disciplined force. The only hope the rebels have is to trick Sakai and his forces into succumbing to chaos themselves when, with the ground unsteady under their feet, they will lost much of their advantage.
Kudo introduces the sense of disorder during the first fight in Jinbo’s house, which he films with a hand-held camera. This contrast with the precisely locked-down camera placements of the castle scenes continues throughout the movie, as Kudo alternates between seemingly placid and apparently rushed set-ups and movements.
The movie’s climax brilliantly thrusts home the point. The setting is Yoshiwara, the Edo district the shoguns had set aside for courtesans and brothels. While prostitution was not exactly illegal at the time, it was tolerated only within purpose-built areas within large cities. Like everything else under the Tokugawas, prostitution was hierarchical, with delicate, highly educated and pampered oiran, or courtesans, at the top and cheaper prostitutes down the scale. Even the oiran, who only left their homes accompanied by large retinues taking sl-o-o-o-w-w steps, had gradations: The fancier the hair and its ornamentations, the wealthier and more powerful the courtesan’s patron.
Here, then, is literally a site where desire meets regimentation, and where Jinbo and his few comrades intend to trap Sakai and his military escort and murder, for justice and vengeance, the evil, manipulative grandee. The rebels don’t really have a plan beyond that. As their senior member says, samurai don’t fight anymore, so even a moderately skilled swordsmen (and some of the rebels aren’t even that), should be able to take down four or five of Sakai’s men. If that happen s, and they get lucky, the samurai might manage their killing.
The final battle scene is terrifically exciting, one of the best of any period samurai film. Kudo’s sense of space, of the dynamic shifting of forces within a frame, and the ability to jump between shots and different types of shots are brought to a zenith. Emotions jostle as much as fighters, especially terror and uncertainty as many men, who, as predicted, cannot fight, must try to and then die.
This unflagging movie, then, ends with physically, emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually exhausted men and women sacrificing their lives for something, anything, which is greater than those lives. As always, Kudo can render only an ambiguous judgment on their actions. Certainly Sakai in particular and the shogunate in general were unworthy to rule. Even in the face of daunting odds against them, the samurai were right to rebel. But many of their costs were those they imposed on themselves. Many of their ethical values were, if better than the shogunate’s, too often dubious.
In the end, Kudo lets the individual’s intuitive sense of justice carry the day. A pleasure-loving samurai who had temporarily sheltered Jinbo but refused – out of cynicism – to join the rebels, happens to be in Yoshiwara enjoying himself when he sees the attack. When the dust clears, it’s one of the better human instincts which has triumphed, if only for a little while and for very little gain.
Eleven Samurai is the most stinging of the three films as well as the bloodiest. It’s too astringent to be bitter, as if Kudo had only reluctantly reached for the ultimate implications of his story essentials. Here he finally pulls down the last façade of stoic heroism and nearly eliminates the potential for human choice to effect historical outcomes. But his stubborn insistence that character and private behavior still count confirms his status as one of cinema’s leading ethicists.
Unlike the previous two movies, Eleven Samurai opens with the offense that sets the lethal plot in motion. Shogun’s son Lord Nariatsu (Kantaro Suga again, making it a hat trick of sleazy nobles) is a self-indulgent maniac who’s been quietly hidden away in the countryside with his own title and lands. Out hunting, he strays into the neighboring fief and when its lord asks him to leave the property (for riding down a couple of elderly peasants), Nariatsu kills him by shooting him in the eye with an arrow. Back in Edo, informed shogunate officials decide that to protect the reputation of the Tokugawas, they’ll blame the offended party, the Abe clan, claiming that they attacked Nariatsu first. They are to lose their hereditary lands – which will revert to shogunal properties – and their titles and be dispersed.
This shocks the Abe chamberlain, Tatewaki (Koji Nambara), who persuades Minister Mizumo (Kei Sato), to hold off on the news. Tatewaki hopes for time to maneuver backstage at the shogun’s court, but in the meantime, Nariatsu visits Edo from the countryside in an effort to have the Abe properties transferred to him personally, rather than to the government.
This straightforward, if mildly complicated set-up thrums from Kudo’s pounding treatment. The first of the three films to open with an extended outdoors sequence, it still begins with a strong, linear-based compositional strategy. But instead of vertical or horizontal lines propping up the screen, we get a slashing diagonal, represented by a trail down the side of a large hill. The line runs from the top left to the bottom right of the screen and Kudo manages to maintain that line even as he pans left to right, following the galloping horseman (Nariatsu, it turns out) who is descending. It’s as if the image is being torn apart, the surface view of a country idyll overrun by violence, murder, avarice, pride and selfishness. Kudo even finally discards the notion that the villain’s loyal retainer could somehow be an embodiment of virtuous, if tragically misplaced faith. Gyobu (Ryutaro Otomo), Nariatsu’s chamberlain, plots without euphemism or subterfuge with Minister Mizumo to insure that the two wind up on top, regardless of what happens to anyone else, including Nariatsu.
After Mizumo hands down his devastating edict, the movie switches to conflicts within the Abe family, especially one between Tatewaki and a young, recently married samurai, Hayato (Isao Natsuyagi). Tatewaki wants Hayato to assemble quietly a small group of samurai (oh, say, about eleven) to avenge their lord’s death by killing Nariatsu. Until he comes up with a good plan, though, Hayato is to keep Abe hotheads from going off half-cocked, since fouled-up assassination attempts would guarantee only a harsh military response from the shogunate.
This half-in, half-out circumstance causes an emotional malaise among the Abe samurai, best expressed when the action transfers to Edo, notably the Tokugawa redoubt, Edo Castle, and the Abe hiding places in Yoshiwara. Although Kudo’s compositions are as striking as ever, actions are sometimes pushed the background, with highlighted foreground elements making it even more difficult for characters to see what’s going on. Streets are crowded and apparently lead to or come from nowhere in particular. Apartments and hiding places have an unknown geographical relationships. The Abe aren’t even sure of what their fellow clansmen are up to, a series of misunderstandings that culminate when Hayato’s wife, Orie (Junko Miyazono) arrives unexpectedly and thinks her husband must have gone to Edo to have an affair with Lady Nui (Keiko Okawa) – who is in fact a swordswoman and part of Hayato’s troop of killers. The only character without illusions or misapprehensions is a ronin named Daijuro (Kô Nishimura), a practiced killer (as he easily and frequently demonstrates). Daijuro had overheard Hayato and his men plotting and attached himself to their group, explaining, “it’s good to kill as many nobles as possible; I hate them.”
Hayato devises a scheme to kill Nariatsu when he, Gyobu, and a small military detachment, return to their domain from Edo. The setting is to be a forest of towering pines and when we get there, the return of strict linearity in the shape of these straight trees – whose tops go beyond the limits of the top of the frame – seems an indication from Kudo that a resolution is at hand.
But it’s not. Confusion among the Abe has become so profound, that Kudo shows us the ambush scene twice: One as a fantasy in Hayato’s head and once as it actually plays out. The actual climactic battle occurs in the fog and rain at a riverside where the Nariatsu party is waiting to ford on a few small boats. Water and earth have met and merged into acres of oozing mud while thickening fog cuts down visibility.
In the face of Abe indecision, some larger force has intervened to hamper Nariatsu’s party and set them up for slaughter. And slaughter – mutual slaughter – does come in the most desperately violent action set-piece of the three films (which is saying something).
What that force might be comes at the end of the action when Kudo finally reveals the year of occurrence. It’s 1838, one year after the accession of what will be the last shogun. Kudo’s protagonists finally get to take part in an historically successful sacrifice, landing a bloody fist against a ruthless military dictatorship headed, unknown to itself, for disaster. But it all happened nearly by chance. A thoughtless, almost casual murder giving way to dithering until something finally pushes the opposing parties together and lets character rule the day.when he learns it’s to be left there as a warning. Hanbei is intensely loyal to his lord, not because Naritsugu is personally worthy of it, but because the samurai code demands unquestioning fealty to the clan leader. This is a commonly celebrated virtue in samurai films, as you can see in any of the versions of The 47 Ronin
Overcome with grief and anger, Jinbo is quickly recruited by the remnants of the rebels, but they’re a questionable crew. Their former leader has suffered a catastrophic failure of nerve and wants to turn himself in. One undefeated spirit has started to succumb to a combination of religious mania and sexual aggression, eventually raping the group’s lone swordswoman. Another fighter is a devoted family man but, just as he is about to leave home for a climactic showdown, he murders his wife and children in their sleep in order to “spare” them the suffering that would follow his death.
The rebels, thus, live in a world in constant turmoil, unlike Sakai and his loyal samurai deputy, the Great Inspector Hojo (Ryutaro Otomo), who have a well thought-out plan and a disciplined force. The only hope the rebels have is to trick Sakai and his forces into succumbing to chaos themselves when, with the ground unsteady under their feet, they will lost much of their advantage.
Kudo introduces the sense of disorder during the first fight in Jinbo’s house, which he films with a hand-held camera. This contrast with the precisely locked-down camera placements of the castle scenes continues throughout the movie, as Kudo alternates between seemingly placid and apparently rushed set-ups and movements.
The movie’s climax brilliantly thrusts home the point. The setting is Yoshiwara, the Edo district the shoguns had set aside for courtesans and brothels. While prostitution was not exactly illegal at the time, it was tolerated only within purpose-built areas within large cities. Like everything else under the Tokugawas, prostitution was hierarchical, with delicate, highly educated and pampered oiran, or courtesans, at the top and cheaper prostitutes down the scale. Even the oiran, who only left their homes accompanied by large retinues taking sl-o-o-o-w-w steps, had gradations: The fancier the hair and its ornamentations, the wealthier and more powerful the courtesan’s patron.
Here, then, is literally a site where desire meets regimentation, and where Jinbo and his few comrades intend to trap Sakai and his military escort and murder, for justice and vengeance, the evil, manipulative grandee. The rebels don’t really have a plan beyond that. As their senior member says, samurai don’t fight anymore, so even a moderately skilled swordsmen (and some of the rebels aren’t even that), should be able to take down four or five of Sakai’s men. If that happen s, and they get lucky, the samurai might manage their killing.
The final battle scene is terrifically exciting, one of the best of any period samurai film. Kudo’s sense of space, of the dynamic shifting of forces within a frame, and the ability to jump between shots and different types of shots are brought to a zenith. Emotions jostle as much as fighters, especially terror and uncertainty as many men, who, as predicted, cannot fight, must try to and then die.
This unflagging movie, then, ends with physically, emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually exhausted men and women sacrificing their lives for something, anything, which is greater than those lives. As always, Kudo can render only an ambiguous judgment on their actions. Certainly Sakai in particular and the shogunate in general were unworthy to rule. Even in the face of daunting odds against them, the samurai were right to rebel. But many of their costs were those they imposed on themselves. Many of their ethical values were, if better than the shogunate’s, too often dubious.
In the end, Kudo lets the individual’s intuitive sense of justice carry the day. A pleasure-loving samurai who had temporarily sheltered Jinbo but refused – out of cynicism – to join the rebels, happens to be in Yoshiwara enjoying himself when he sees the attack. When the dust clears, it’s one of the better human instincts which has triumphed, if only for a little while and for very little gain.
Eleven Samurai is the most stinging of the three films as well as the bloodiest. It’s too astringent to be bitter, as if Kudo had only reluctantly reached for the ultimate implications of his story essentials. Here he finally pulls down the last façade of stoic heroism and nearly eliminates the potential for human choice to effect historical outcomes. But his stubborn insistence that character and private behavior still count confirms his status as one of cinema’s leading ethicists.
Unlike the previous two movies, Eleven Samurai opens with the offense that sets the lethal plot in motion. Shogun’s son Lord Nariatsu (Kantaro Suga again, making it a hat trick of sleazy nobles) is a self-indulgent maniac who’s been quietly hidden away in the countryside with his own title and lands. Out hunting, he strays into the neighboring fief and when its lord asks him to leave the property (for riding down a couple of elderly peasants), Nariatsu kills him by shooting him in the eye with an arrow. Back in Edo, informed shogunate officials decide that to protect the reputation of the Tokugawas, they’ll blame the offended party, the Abe clan, claiming that they attacked Nariatsu first. They are to lose their hereditary lands – which will revert to shogunal properties – and their titles and be dispersed.
This shocks the Abe chamberlain, Tatewaki (Koji Nambara), who persuades Minister Mizumo (Kei Sato), to hold off on the news. Tatewaki hopes for time to maneuver backstage at the shogun’s court, but in the meantime, Nariatsu visits Edo from the countryside in an effort to have the Abe properties transferred to him personally, rather than to the government.
This straightforward, if mildly complicated set-up thrums from Kudo’s pounding treatment. The first of the three films to open with an extended outdoors sequence, it still begins with a strong, linear-based compositional strategy. But instead of vertical or horizontal lines propping up the screen, we get a slashing diagonal, represented by a trail down the side of a large hill. The line runs from the top left to the bottom right of the screen and Kudo manages to maintain that line even as he pans left to right, following the galloping horseman (Nariatsu, it turns out) who is descending. It’s as if the image is being torn apart, the surface view of a country idyll overrun by violence, murder, avarice, pride and selfishness. Kudo even finally discards the notion that the villain’s loyal retainer could somehow be an embodiment of virtuous, if tragically misplaced faith. Gyobu (Ryutaro Otomo), Nariatsu’s chamberlain, plots without euphemism or subterfuge with Minister Mizumo to insure that the two wind up on top, regardless of what happens to anyone else, including Nariatsu.
After Mizumo hands down his devastating edict, the movie switches to conflicts within the Abe family, especially one between Tatewaki and a young, recently married samurai, Hayato (Isao Natsuyagi). Tatewaki wants Hayato to assemble quietly a small group of samurai (oh, say, about eleven) to avenge their lord’s death by killing Nariatsu. Until he comes up with a good plan, though, Hayato is to keep Abe hotheads from going off half-cocked, since fouled-up assassination attempts would guarantee only a harsh military response from the shogunate.
This half-in, half-out circumstance causes an emotional malaise among the Abe samurai, best expressed when the action transfers to Edo, notably the Tokugawa redoubt, Edo Castle, and the Abe hiding places in Yoshiwara. Although Kudo’s compositions are as striking as ever, actions are sometimes pushed the background, with highlighted foreground elements making it even more difficult for characters to see what’s going on. Streets are crowded and apparently lead to or come from nowhere in particular. Apartments and hiding places have an unknown geographical relationships. The Abe aren’t even sure of what their fellow clansmen are up to, a series of misunderstandings that culminate when Hayato’s wife, Orie (Junko Miyazono) arrives unexpectedly and thinks her husband must have gone to Edo to have an affair with Lady Nui (Keiko Okawa) – who is in fact a swordswoman and part of Hayato’s troop of killers. The only character without illusions or misapprehensions is a ronin named Daijuro (Kô Nishimura), a practiced killer (as he easily and frequently demonstrates). Daijuro had overheard Hayato and his men plotting and attached himself to their group, explaining, “it’s good to kill as many nobles as possible; I hate them.”
Hayato devises a scheme to kill Nariatsu when he, Gyobu, and a small military detachment, return to their domain from Edo. The setting is to be a forest of towering pines and when we get there, the return of strict linearity in the shape of these straight trees – whose tops go beyond the limits of the top of the frame – seems an indication from Kudo that a resolution is at hand.
But it’s not. Confusion among the Abe has become so profound, that Kudo shows us the ambush scene twice: One as a fantasy in Hayato’s head and once as it actually plays out. The actual climactic battle occurs in the fog and rain at a riverside where the Nariatsu party is waiting to ford on a few small boats. Water and earth have met and merged into acres of oozing mud while thickening fog cuts down visibility.
In the face of Abe indecision, some larger force has intervened to hamper Nariatsu’s party and set them up for slaughter. And slaughter – mutual slaughter – does come in the most desperately violent action set-piece of the three films (which is saying something).
What that force might be comes at the end of the action when Kudo finally reveals the year of occurrence. It’s 1838, one year after the accession of what will be the last shogun. Kudo’s protagonists finally get to take part in an historically successful sacrifice, landing a bloody fist against a ruthless military dictatorship headed, unknown to itself, for disaster. But it all happened nearly by chance. A thoughtless, almost casual murder giving way to dithering until something finally pushes the opposing parties together and lets character rule the day.