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The Sword of doom (1966) Okamoto
B-B-B-Bad to the bone
The set-up? The film begins on the eve of a routine competition between rival fencing schools in a small village in the year 1860. The featured bout involves Ryunosuke---he's not a happy camper, he's being pressured from all sides to throw his fight. His opponent is a young man who has staked his entire future on the match; a loss would exclude him from becoming the head trainer at the school, and with no economic opportunities in the area, he'd have to leave and make a life elsewhere. So, a win would assure his little family of a comfortable life.
Ryunosuke, on the other hand, seems to come from a wealthy family. He doesn't need the win. He certainly doesn't want to become a permanent instructor. His own father also tells him he must throw the match. Unfortunately, Ryunosuke already envisions a life lived on the edge (of his sword)---not to fight to the best of his ability would be the greatest dishonor and disgrace. And since he's an extremely gifted swordsman, it's a luxury he can completely afford to indulge in: he won't be dying anytime soon. The opening part of the film sees Ryunosuke deliberately burning his bridges and ironically not following his beloved bushido, but cynically manipulating the warrior code to achieve his own ends.
When Tatsuya Nakadai (Ryunosuke) is on screen---you can't tear your eyes away from the guy---he's such a train wreck. After the bloodiest of fights, the tiniest of smiles will briefly caress his face, yet Ryunosuke remains a beguiling cipher at the center of the film, as one who lives and breathes the complete nihilism of his life. And all his brooding and aloft sullenness seems to strangely suggest a constant inner turmoil. Take the opening match; since he was champion of both fencing clubs (expelled from one, joined the other, rose quickly to the top of that club) he essentially represents both sides and for a brief instant we get the idea he's fighting himself.
But that same duality extends to a lot of the characters in the film. The only Shogun or (Lord of war) we see in the film, could care less that his whole world going to hell in a hand basket; he seems content to enjoy the ride and be a closet sadist with his servants. Ryunosuke's own father, so disheartened that his only son has become an evil man, sends the brother of one of the men he killed after him and even coaches him how to kill his son. Shichibei who---on the surface is a mild mannered traveling salesman, is in reality a successful bandit and thief. He confesses late in the film, that rescuing Omatsu was the only act of decency in his entire life.
The time period is interesting. After a very long period of (relative) stasis; the Shogun empire where the country was parceled out into individual fiefdoms is collapsing, and with it, their private armies are now flooding the peaceful countryside.
I really liked the kind of novelistic thing happening in the background with the different characters such as Omatsu, the orphan. At the beginning of the film, a minor character named Seriwaza is in the crowd at the fencing match as a spectator and a recruiter; he's just joined a fledgling paramilitary organization that is going to police the troublesome ronin. After a break in the action he turns and finds Kondo sitting behind him in the crowd, he will become his second in command. At the end of the film, these two will have climbed to the very top of the organization; with Ryunosuke doing all of the dirty work. I liked that Ryunosuke's past is never that far away, it returns out of nowhere again and again through-out the film, like a black cat to nuzzle and purr at his feet.
"The Sword of Doom" was the first film in a proposed trilogy---of which the other two were never shot---so the film gains a lot from the ellipses (more than a few things go unexplained) and loses only a little from the episodic structure of the film---for instance, a couple of showdowns never materialize. We can't be sure if Ryunosuke's story would have continued on in the subsequent films or if his character ended with this film.
The director Okamoto has a nice recurring visual motif, where a figure in the foreground deliberately obscures another in the background. The soundtrack is dramatic. The film appears to have thematic bookends: it begins on hallowed ground, the sacred shrine on the mountain top and ends on the unhallowed ground, the abandoned room where a despondent concubine ended her life.
There's enough action here for fiends who like their samurai flicks, sliced and diced with a decent body count---although the three brawls in the film are highly poetic in their own ways: the first one where Ryunosuke achieves his notoriety; the second one where he watches a night fight with a master swordsman during a snowfall and foresees his own death; and the last one where he seems to literally descend into the depths of hell before our eyes, taking on all comers, past, present and future: from the innocent people his sword has made a ghost of, to the small army of assassins sent to end his brief and brutal life; to the snarling demons he'll meet further down below.
The Sword of doom (1966) Okamoto
B-B-B-Bad to the bone
The set-up? The film begins on the eve of a routine competition between rival fencing schools in a small village in the year 1860. The featured bout involves Ryunosuke---he's not a happy camper, he's being pressured from all sides to throw his fight. His opponent is a young man who has staked his entire future on the match; a loss would exclude him from becoming the head trainer at the school, and with no economic opportunities in the area, he'd have to leave and make a life elsewhere. So, a win would assure his little family of a comfortable life.
Ryunosuke, on the other hand, seems to come from a wealthy family. He doesn't need the win. He certainly doesn't want to become a permanent instructor. His own father also tells him he must throw the match. Unfortunately, Ryunosuke already envisions a life lived on the edge (of his sword)---not to fight to the best of his ability would be the greatest dishonor and disgrace. And since he's an extremely gifted swordsman, it's a luxury he can completely afford to indulge in: he won't be dying anytime soon. The opening part of the film sees Ryunosuke deliberately burning his bridges and ironically not following his beloved bushido, but cynically manipulating the warrior code to achieve his own ends.
When Tatsuya Nakadai (Ryunosuke) is on screen---you can't tear your eyes away from the guy---he's such a train wreck. After the bloodiest of fights, the tiniest of smiles will briefly caress his face, yet Ryunosuke remains a beguiling cipher at the center of the film, as one who lives and breathes the complete nihilism of his life. And all his brooding and aloft sullenness seems to strangely suggest a constant inner turmoil. Take the opening match; since he was champion of both fencing clubs (expelled from one, joined the other, rose quickly to the top of that club) he essentially represents both sides and for a brief instant we get the idea he's fighting himself.
But that same duality extends to a lot of the characters in the film. The only Shogun or (Lord of war) we see in the film, could care less that his whole world going to hell in a hand basket; he seems content to enjoy the ride and be a closet sadist with his servants. Ryunosuke's own father, so disheartened that his only son has become an evil man, sends the brother of one of the men he killed after him and even coaches him how to kill his son. Shichibei who---on the surface is a mild mannered traveling salesman, is in reality a successful bandit and thief. He confesses late in the film, that rescuing Omatsu was the only act of decency in his entire life.
The time period is interesting. After a very long period of (relative) stasis; the Shogun empire where the country was parceled out into individual fiefdoms is collapsing, and with it, their private armies are now flooding the peaceful countryside.
I really liked the kind of novelistic thing happening in the background with the different characters such as Omatsu, the orphan. At the beginning of the film, a minor character named Seriwaza is in the crowd at the fencing match as a spectator and a recruiter; he's just joined a fledgling paramilitary organization that is going to police the troublesome ronin. After a break in the action he turns and finds Kondo sitting behind him in the crowd, he will become his second in command. At the end of the film, these two will have climbed to the very top of the organization; with Ryunosuke doing all of the dirty work. I liked that Ryunosuke's past is never that far away, it returns out of nowhere again and again through-out the film, like a black cat to nuzzle and purr at his feet.
"The Sword of Doom" was the first film in a proposed trilogy---of which the other two were never shot---so the film gains a lot from the ellipses (more than a few things go unexplained) and loses only a little from the episodic structure of the film---for instance, a couple of showdowns never materialize. We can't be sure if Ryunosuke's story would have continued on in the subsequent films or if his character ended with this film.
The director Okamoto has a nice recurring visual motif, where a figure in the foreground deliberately obscures another in the background. The soundtrack is dramatic. The film appears to have thematic bookends: it begins on hallowed ground, the sacred shrine on the mountain top and ends on the unhallowed ground, the abandoned room where a despondent concubine ended her life.
There's enough action here for fiends who like their samurai flicks, sliced and diced with a decent body count---although the three brawls in the film are highly poetic in their own ways: the first one where Ryunosuke achieves his notoriety; the second one where he watches a night fight with a master swordsman during a snowfall and foresees his own death; and the last one where he seems to literally descend into the depths of hell before our eyes, taking on all comers, past, present and future: from the innocent people his sword has made a ghost of, to the small army of assassins sent to end his brief and brutal life; to the snarling demons he'll meet further down below.