Samurai Spy (1965)

Stop me if I’ve told you this one before (actually, don’t).  I was the youngest of six children.  I grew up with four brothers and a sister, all of whom loved nothing more than bedeviling their chunky (and much cooler) baby brother.  If you recall from my story about Brigantine Castle, you’ll recall that my family used to vacation in Long Beach Island, New Jersey every summer.  On the main strip was, conceivably, my favorite place in the whole, entire world: an arcade/snack shop which had the single greatest video game ever created: Xevious.  Adjacent to this pleasure palace was my second favorite place in the whole, entire world: a trampoline park.  For those who don’t know, these were places where you could rent time to risk life and limb and bounce on a giant trampoline.  When your time was up, your name was announced over a loud speaker, and you were invited to leave.  Like last call at a bar, just without the bouncers and alcohol and beer goggles.  Places like these have vanished; I’m sure due more to an increasingly litigious society than to any actual physical danger to children.  

At any rate, I used to love Trampoline World (this particular park’s moniker, if memory serves), but of course, I was too young to go there by myself.  This task of handling me fell to my brothers.  One fiendishly clever day, they took me over for my midday, spring-loaded constitutional, and I proceeded to go through my routine, lost in that magical act of leaping.  As my time drew to a close, the loudspeaker crackled to life, “Pyew Stinky on Six, Pyew Stinky on Six.  Your time is up.”  Go ahead and guess what the number of my trampoline was.  Suffice to say, I was miffed, nay, livid.  But I got over it.  Had I been more aware at that time of the usage of trampolines and the like in performing the acrobatics in films like Masahiro Shinoda’s Samurai Spy (aka Ibun Sarutobi Sasuke) and countless other Martial Arts and Science Fiction films, I probably would have pulled off some sweet midair maneuvers that would have firmly denounced the fetid nickname with which my trampolining prowess had been besmirched by my lowlife siblings.

Following the historic Battle of Sekigahara, Japan is still torn between the Toyotomi and Tokugawa clans, though the balance of power is inclining toward the latter.  Naturally, there are other clans, and they have their own networks of spies.  These clans generally align themselves with either the Tokugawas or Toyotomis, and their spies wander the country, collect information, and send it back to their superiors.  The Sawada clan, however, is neutral but leans Toyotomi.  Sasuke is one of their most renowned agents, and he soon finds himself embroiled in a search for a Yagyu agent turned traitor, as well as a mysterious young Christian man who is somehow tied up in all this.

The film has elements of the superheroic at various times.  Men have the ability to leap great distances (but not necessarily tall buildings) in a single bound.  Their skill with shuriken and wakizashi are accurate and deadly effective.  These extraordinary skills are usually distinguished in the film by the use of slow motion.  Not only is the action being slowed down for the benefit of the viewer to delineate what is happening, but this break from normal film speed signifies that what these people are doing is special.  Normal people and warriors move in normal time.  The elite of the superhuman spy set move differently, because they perceive action differently.  The flick of a blade may appear as a flash of light to the normal human eye, but to these masters, they follow the gleaming edge from the start of the draw to the final, bloody end of its arc, and along the way, they will notice and hit exactly what they intend and nothing more.  These types of scenes are important in the film, but they are not a focus.  In other words, these people have incredible powers, but they are ancillary to the central conceit of the film.

Which brings us to the sense of mystery intrinsic to the film’s point, and it is basically conveyed using two visual motifs.  The first is the image of fog or smoke.  The first time we meet Sasuke, he is wandering around, lost in a literal fog and sensing like something is following him.  In fact, the character is constantly wandering in and out of fog-shrouded climes.  This symbolizes not only the murky plot Sasuke is trying to unravel but also the interior confusion he feels about what type of person he is and what he needs to do.  Early on, he tells fellow spy Mitsuaki that he has stopped asking why he does what he does.  His persona is subjugated by his job, and he does it very well.  Nevertheless, he does know that there are questions he should be answering and isn’t (“No one seems to give any thought anymore to the meaning of death.  Or the meaning of life, for that matter.”).  When all has finally been made clear to Sasuke, the fog clears for a short time, but it well re-emerge shortly with a different function.  Now it is a source of tension which will remain muddy until Sasuke’s fate has been lethally determined.

The second visual metaphor imparting this notion of mystery is compositional in nature.  Shinoda employs high angle shots often in the film and especially during scenes involving action.  By doing this, he makes it more difficult to distinguish one character from another (the major exception to this being the person of Sakon Takatani; a Yagyu agent who dresses completely in white, effectively making of him a ghost and agent of death).  Thus, the masses of people move against each other, and the only true way to know what has happened is after it has occurred (slow-motion sequences notwithstanding).  Still, action is not always the focus of these types of arrangements.  Even quiet moments are mired in uncertainty, none more beautifully realized than the scene where Sasuke and his love interest Omiya are discussing their future.  The two are centered in the frame, beset on all sides by flowers to the point that they become lost in this pattern of nature.  Samurai Spy’s plot may be a bit much to take in, and it may sound like just another Jidaigeki, but it truly distinguishes itself as a perceptual journey, and it is as much influenced by the best Western Films Noir as it is by anything from its native East.

MVT:  The cinematography and general aesthetic of this film is impressive and sumptuous.  Masao Kosugi’s camerawork captures bottomless pools of black alongside searingly hot whites.  That it is so striking is almost as praiseworthy as the fact that it is not ostentatious.  To me, that makes it all the more remarkable.

Make Or Break:  The introduction of the film’s contagonist, Sakon is the Make.  After using his trademark grappling hook on a hapless victim, he emerges from one of the darkest shadows I have ever seen.  He is a spectre, imposing and awesome, a presence to be feared and a force with which to be reckoned.

Score:  7.75/10

Samurai Reincarnation (1981)

(Please note, the above image may have nothing to do with this film specifically [it may have to do with an anime based on the same source material], but I liked it more than what else was available online)

I absolutely love the video game The Legend Of Kage.  The premise is basic: rescue a princess from the bad guys, who happen to be other ninja and Japanese Buddhist monks.  However, you, Kage, are not a ninja of the traditional variety (at least visually).  You have no mask and full-covering outfit.  Instead, you have long hair, no mask, and shorts.  And did I mention the monks you have to fight can breathe fire?  The first time I played this game, it put me in mind of the film Ninja Wars, which I had seen a couple years before.  Up until this point in my life, I had seen a bit of Shaw Bros’ kung fu goodness here and there, but my experience with Chanbara/Jidaigeki was limited, and my experience with ninja was with the Kosugi/Cannon versions of the archetypes.  The first time I saw it, I didn’t quite know how to process something like Ninja Wars.  It is utterly bizarre and a bit sleazier than I was used to at that point in time.  Kage gave me a way to deal with what I saw in that film.  Jump, throw shuriken, beat firebreathing bad guys, and win the lady’s hand; the game and game play is simplistic in the extreme but so much fun.  To my adolescent mind, this was the video game adaptation of that outré film which had piqued my young brain’s interest, and I loved it, because I got to be a part of it.  Or, you know, as much as you can be a part of a video game you had no part in creating. 

Following the wildly unsuccessful Shimabara Rebellion of the seventeenth century, beheaded Christian leader Shiro Amakusa (Kenji Sawada) returns from the grave, denounces the God he feels is uncaring towards he and his people’s plight, and invites the power of the Devil and his minions into his body to take revenge on the Shogun (Noboru Matsuhashi).  Making his way around the countryside, Shiro assembles a collection of people with various evils in their hearts and regrets on their minds and transforms them into his coterie of evil ghosts.  Meanwhile, Jubei (Sonny Chiba), one-eyed son of the Shogun’s sword instructor, Tajimanokami (the Lone Wolf himself, Tomisaburo Wakayama), has taken on the task of bringing down the demons before they demolish the entire Tokugawa Shogunate.

Like Ninja Wars, the late, great Kinji Fukasaku’s (who most will remember as the director of such classics as The Green Slime, Battle Royale, and Message From Space) Samurai Reincarnation (aka Makai Tensho, the title of the book on which the film is based) was released by the Toei Company, and the two do share some obvious similarities.  They both have ninja who dress like Kage.  They both have Sonny Chiba, though I think his role is bigger in this film, if memory serves.  They both have evil Buddhist monks doing disreputable things to young women.  More than those things, they both mix Chanbara and Fantasy/Horror elements.  Consequently, fans of period films about samurai can enjoy them, though perhaps slightly less than Horror or Fantasy fans will.  

This mixing, however, is something which feels more organic in Japanese cinema than it does in Western cinema.  There are not a lot of Weird Westerns which are all that successful either on the level of audience satisfaction or box office (or any, come to think of it, though the wretched Wild, Wild West came close monetarily, and the animated series Bravestarr was a lot of fun if fairly one-note).  Perhaps this is because, for as much as the country has changed technologically, the Japanese spirit has forever been perceived in the same traditional manner since the West became aware of it.  Therefore, there is a general viewpoint that, no matter how much Japan develops in reality, its spiritual link to the land it’s built upon makes it easy to believe the confluence of nature and the supernatural.  Thus, the inclusion of uncanny elements is exactly that: inclusion.  Unlike in the Western world, the Japanese spectral and corporeal realms crisscross with one another, affecting and reacting to each other in a matter-of-fact fashion.  I admit, these are my own conclusions based upon my experience with cinema on both sides of the pond, so by all means, feel free to disagree.

The film has a theatrical air about it, which Fukasaku plays up at every available opportunity.  The very first scene takes place with the Shogun’s samurai watching a performance (in the Noh form of Japanese theatre, if I’m not mistaken), presumably after having slaughtered about thirty-seven thousand Christians (the timeline is unclear).  The evil Shiro possesses the body of the play’s main actor.  Afterwards, he dresses in a fashion which is extremely flamboyant (and importantly recalls a more Western archetype of sorcerous sartorial cooptation).  The director also makes heavy use of frames within frames, and this is a technique I have always found extraordinarily appealing.  Here, whether the frame is the pillars holding up a roof or the separate sections of a stained glass window, they evoke the proscenium arch of a stage, separating viewers from performers.  Aside from the heavy use of makeup on the ghosts’ faces, Fukasaku further distances the film from the realm of naturalism in his treatment of flashbacks, most notably those involving the master swordsman Musashi (Ken Ogata).  While sitting in full armor, his thoughts are spoken aloud to the audience.  His past youthful triumphs in battle are then recounted via a series of cuts to black and white photographs.  This bit of self-reflexivity reminds the viewer that they are watching a film, as well as very effectively conjuring the same sense of nostalgia anyone may get looking over the pictures they have amassed over the course of a lifetime.  

The settings of the film switch between natural and soundstage (I can only assume as a means of controlling scenes which have a large amount of special effects work in them), but in whatever environ, Fukasaku  goes out of his way to create a strong sense of depth within the frame, mostly via the use of overlapping objects from foreground to background.  Combined with strong, atmospheric light schemes throughout, the filmmaker creates a mildly nauseating mood in line with the sense of tragedy and borderline revulsion the film is intended to evince.  It is, after all, one thing to defy one’s Higher Power after feeling betrayed.  It is another to do so by deliberately sticking one’s finger in the Almighty’s eye and wallowing in the fetid crapulence of one’s basest appetites.  It’s like the difference between breaking up with one’s lover and breaking up with one’s lover and then having really deviant sex with every one of their friends and family on which one can lay one’s hands.  And while the film’s episodic structure does rob it of some much-needed momentum, and the ending itself is a trifle anticlimactic (I’m unsure if there was ever a sequel; perhaps Ninja Wars was it?), it’s the admixture of Samurai Reincarnation’s disparities which makes it as entertaining as it is.

MVT:  I have to give it to Fukasaku.  The man had a sense of style and composition as strong as that of any more well-known director.  Even when working on some less than prestigious projects, he brought his every talent to bear, and Samurai Reincarnation is no exception (though I don’t mean to imply it’s not a piece of work to be proud of, merely that it’s hardly ever mentioned in the same breath with some of his other films, like, say Graveyard Of Honor, though if Wikipedia is correct, Samurai Reincarnation won two of the three “Awards of the Japanese Academy” for which it was nominated).

Make Or Break:  Towards the film’s climax, there is a duel inside a burning building.  From the very first shot of the scene (which has risen to being possibly one of my favorite images in cinema of all time), the fight is staged and filmed remarkably well.  If there was matting used, I couldn’t spot it.  I also couldn’t spot any stuntmen standing in for the actors, so kudos across the board for the bravery and dedication this scene puts on display.  Plus, it’s a cracking good action setpiece.

Score:  7/10