PORTRAIT OF HELL (1969)

Japan's answer to The Agony and the Ecstasy is heavy on the agony. Shiro Toyoda directed this adaptation of a story by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, whose fiction also provided the basis for Kurosawa's Rashomon. This story gives us a tragic clash of monster egos between a cruel and decadent ruler (Kinnosuke Nakamura) and a stubborn, fatally literal-minded artist (Tatsuya Nakadai). While you might think original author, screenwriter and director should naturally favor the painter, it's a closer call than you might expect.

Hosokawa (Nakamura), aka "the Paramount Lord," wants the ethnic Korean painter Yoshihige (Nakadai) to decorate a lavish Buddhist temple he's building with art glorifying the Buddha and his teachings. Yoshihige wants the fame that will come from painting the temple walls, but refuses the recommended subjects because he only paints what he knows. Lately he can't get out of his mind the sight of an old man who was trampled by a bull that had broken loose from the Paramount Lord's Chinese carriage during a festival. Yoshihige paints a portrait of the corpse, disgusting the PL who orders it destroyed. The painter reluctantly complies but warns the PL that he'll most likely paint it over again.

 

Another issue divides the two men. Yoshihige has kept his daughter (Yoko Naito) on a tight leash and resents her seeing his one non-Korean student. The young man has nothing to do but become a brigand after Yoshihige drives him from the studio. When Yoshika runs away from home in search of her love, she ends up in the PL's custody, now destined to become his concubine. She becomes a pawn in their artistic negotiations, which seem finally to end in compromise. Yoshihige will paint a scene of the Buddhist hell on a large screen. If PL accepts this as a masterpiece, he'll let the painter do a larger version of the scene in the temple.

 

It's good to be the Paramount Lord (left) but Yoshihige (second from right) isn't beaten yet.

While Yoshihige boasts of his high Korean culture (and the Japanese, as usual, despise Koreans), he seems to have attended the Coffin Joe School of Art. Realizing that he can't quite paint a portrait of Hell according to his own paint-what-you've-seen principles, he subjects one of his assistants to torture, chaining the lad, hanging from the ceiling, then leaving him laying on the floor bound and helpless while Yoshihige cracks open an urn full of live snakes. At this point most viewers might judge the painter slightly ahead in the "who's worse" race.

Paramount Lord closes the gap soon enough. Yoshihige tells him that the screen painting is almost done, except for one detail. The thing that'd really pull the painting together is a burning Chinese carriage with a man screaming inside, so would PL please provide a carriage to burn? PL is happy to make some sacrifices for art, but he has a bad feeling that Yoshihige would like him to pose personally inside of the burning carriage. Having convinced himself of this, PL figures that a cool way to turn the tables on the arrogant artist would be to have the role of the doomed passenger played by Yoshika. This really seems to be all about the carriage as far as PL is concerned. Ha ha! he says; you don't really want the carriage burnt now that she's inside, do you? He's taken aback a bit when Yoshihige practically dares him to do it -- we learn later that Yoshika had warned PL about this possibility -- and PL can't lose face by refusing the dare. So the pretty young woman burns, cursing both men, while Yoshihige writhes in despair until he hears her last words -- she cries the name of her art-student lover. Then he turns crazy calm and gazes at the pyre with an artist's icy eye, promising ultimate victory to himself.

The denouement gets into spooky territory and I won't spoil it. But it got me thinking about the challenge of adapting literature about art to film. Literature can get away with attributing awesome if not supernatural powers to works of art because it can leave the details of the artwork to the imagination. The author can get away with saying the art has this fantastic effect on people pretty much because he says so. Put that same story on film and you probably have no choice but to show us the piece of art that has such a stupendous effect -- and then you risk the audience questioning whether the art they actually see can have the effect the original writer imagines. The studio artist you hire is most likely not the equal of the fictional artist in their common field, so the attempt to show never can live up to what the writer tells.

 

Shiro Toyoda helps himself out of this trap by establishing that Paramount Lord is already in a highly-agitated, suggestible state of mind when he finally sees Yoshihige's finished work. Then he takes our minds off the adequacy of the painting by bombing us with special effects. On top of that, he's got a master thespian in Nakamura putting over PL's madness. This was Nakamura's second 1969 team-up with Nakadai, but while Hideo Gosha's Goyokin is the better film, Portrait of Hell, in which Nakamura gets top billing, gives him more opportunity to cut loose. For that matter, since both actors are stoic heroes in Goyokin Nakadai is also more intense if not hammy here, but the material demands that both men go over the top and they do it with grand style. They're the heart of the film's horror, and their implacable, irreconcilable egoism is ultimately more hellish than any vision Toyoda can whip up. Thanks to his actors, Toyoda made a memorably horrific picture.

Masaki Kobayashi's BLACK RIVER (1957)

Kobayashi's black river is an asphalt road servicing an American military base in occupied Japan. On one side, the sort of establishments that attract soldiers looking for a good time, almost a stripmall of sleaze. On the other, the small timers, the losers, the hustlers. Along this street of dreams and nightmares two men vie symbolically for the soul of Japan. Nishida (Fumio Watanabe) is a poor but earnest engineering student with a cartload of books. He meets cute with Shizuko (Ineko Arima) when she picks up some of the books that fall of the wagon as he moves into the neighborhood. But Joe, aka Joe the Killer (Tatsuya Nakadai) has eyes on her as well. He's the local gangster fattening off the corruption around the base. He wants to cut a deal with the landlady across the street (Isuzu Yamada) to buy her property, drive out Nishida and the other poor tenants, and build a "love hotel" for the GIs. He wants Shizuko for himself and he's got enough dangerous charisma -- this is reportedly the part that made Nakadai a star -- to get what he wants. Joe's old girlfriend makes it a quadrangle by latching onto Nishida, leaning on him like a crutch in the woozy quasi-chase scene that climaxes the picture, just as Joe leans on Shizuko further up the road.

Modern jazz plays over the Shochiku logo and the abstract, collage-like credits. The funky shapes of the English-language clippings may remind you as much of Picasso as of Saul Bass, and we see and hear it all as cool -- but does Kobayashi see it the same way? Black River is a loathing portrait of an abject nation or people on the make or on the bum, where getting someone to stand up for someone else is like pulling teeth. In defeat, solidarity is dead. You can't even get a wife to give blood to her dying husband without her throwing a fit of protest. Even Nishida, our nearest thing to a good guy, is reluctant to give blood. The miasma of desperate selfishness is catching. The efforts of a Korean tenant to rally his neighbors in defense of their rights are hopeless. Culture is dead; America's mark is everywhere. A neighbor asks to borrow some of Nishida's books, but he doesn't care which ones. He just wants to make an impression on his visiting dad. Another neighbors idea of a housewarming gift is a nudie poster. You get the idea.

 

Ineko Arima and her suitors:

Fumio Watanabe (above) and Tatsuya Nakadai (below)

Amid the grime Nakadai is radioactive, though it's another character who identifies himself, in a belligerent mood, as Godzilla -- and that's twice in two movies in the Criterion Eclipse box set that Kobayashi has invoked the Toho blockbuster of just a few years before. You can see why Nakadai caught fire here; next to his thuggish sexuality Watanabe looks feeble, and in the end it's Nishida but Shizuko who destroys Joe. She pushes the drunk in front of a truck, metaphorically drowning him in the black river that keeps on flowing despite the demise of the scapegoat. They killed the bad guy but the tractors still knocked down the apartments.

 

This is half Streetcar Named Desire, with Nakadai as Brando, and half Grapes of Wrath, with Watanabe as an intellectual, ineffectual Tom Joad. You get the poverty and wretchedness and demolition scenes without the speechifying about the people, so maybe some will like this better. There's plenty to like in this noirish skid-row screed against a nation of sellouts, but there's something generic about it that Kobayashi and Nakadai would transcend in their greatest films together and other directors would top when contemplating the corruption of occupation. This jazzy jeremiad may be too cruel to be cool but Nakadai gives it the juice to stand the test of time.

THE HUMAN CONDITION (1959-61)

Once upon a time in Hollywood, Erich von Stroheim wanted to release a literary adaptation that ran more than eight hours, but Hollywood shot him down. About eighty years later, English-language audiences happily sat through nine hours' worth of literary adaptation from Peter Jackson, who figured out that reasonable spacing between installments (Stroheim had anticipated audiences coming in for two consecutive nights to get through Greed) made the whole easier to swallow. Jackson's idea was no innovation, however. Back in 1959, the Shochiku studio released Masaki Kobayashi's adaptation of Junpei Gomikawa's novel in three parts between January 1959 and January 1961. The Human Condition clocks in at 9 hours, 34 minutes, and I first learned about it from a Guinness Book of World Records that listed it as the longest film ever made. I'm not sure if that's an accurate description given the three-episode format (and each episode is divided into halves by an intermission), since to my mind the longest feature film would be the one that requires you to sit for the longest stretch at one time. In any event, Human Condition and Lord of the Rings are two of a kind, if only in format, but that should be enough to shame people who hesitate to try the Kobayashi due to its length. You don't have to watch it all at once, and as far as I know no one ever has. But it's definitely worth watching as a critical epic of the Japanese occupation of Manchuria during World War II.

The Human Condition is mainly the story of Engineer Kaji (Tatsuya Nakadai), who avoids military service at the height of the war (1943) by taking a management job at a Manchurian mining camp. Kaji is humane and conscientious to the point that colleagues and military people think of him as a "Red." A certain obsessive contempt for "Reds" among the Japanese is a point of identification for American audiences, and while Kaji himself sometimes expresses faith in a socialist future, the film itself (I can't speak for the novel) takes a less optimistic viewpoint. From an early point, Kobayashi establishes that Kaji's good intentions will benefit him and his Chinese charges very little. He is given a work crew of POWs who've been crammed into cattle cars and starved en route to the mind. In the film's first big set piece, the survivors surge toward a grain wagon like a horde of zombies despite Kaji's warning that gorging themselves so soon could be fatal. He's forced to use a whip to drive the wretches away, looking no less the slave-driver than his less humanistic comrades.

The first installment puts Kaji at odds with the Japanese military police, who despise his humanism. This conflict climaxes when the authorities accuse him of allowing POWs to escape and try to torture a confession out of him. Not for the last time will Kaji suffer for his country's sins, but the first installment ends with him jumping from the frying pan to the fire, resigning his mine job to join the regular army.

 

The second installment (released in November 1959) puts him through a cruel boot camp, tormented by veterans who assume a license to abuse rookies both physically and psychologically. Far from folding like a soft civilian, Kaji thrives in adversity while others collapse and kill themselves. He proves a better soldier than most, becoming a leader after his unit is decimated during the Soviet invasion of Manchuria in August 1945. The biggest battle scenes of the story take place at the end of the second installment, and they are pretty hellacious. The front-line Japanese are hopelessly outgunned and barely barricaded against the Soviet tank and artillery assault, and the actors look authentically imperilled by huge explosions going off around them. Somehow Kaji survives this first wave, sustained in large part by his determination to reunite with his wife Michiko (Michiyo Aratama).

 

 

The final installment sees Kaji and the other suriviors desperately trying to cross Soviet lines and reach Japanese-controlled territory, acquiring a motley band of civilian refugees along the way. Of this Stagecoach-like assemblage a prostitute, despised by the others, proves the most hardy and the only civilian to survive the ordeal alongside the soldiers. Her reward is to be killed (and raped?) by Chinese partisans who find the band squatting on their farm. Kaji's crew encounters foolhardy die-hard soldiers and a refugee village of lonely women and one old man, where the other soldiers satisfy longstanding urges while Kaji continues to pine for Michiko. When a Soviet unit stumbles upon the village Kaji is ready to make a last stand, but at the urging of one of the village women he surrenders to the Russians. To this point he had an idealized view of the Russians as progressive Socialists, dismissing atrocity stories as the transgressions of the usual bad apples. Now he sees them exploiting and abusing helpless prisoners, whom Kaji feels should not be blamed for Japanese atrocities, and hypocritically granting privileges to the same vicious officers who, if anyone does, deserve to face retribution, all in order to meet the usual unreaslistic production quotas. In prison, abused by Japanese and Russians alike, Kaji's idealism is exhausted at last. Ever resourceful, he manages to escape, but by now, despite all his righteous humanism, he has become everything he never wanted to be, a war criminal and a cold-blooded murderer of his own kind. At the same time, he remains self-consciously self-denying to an ultimately insane degree. Having stolen a dumpling from a Chinese village and kept it despite a beating, the starving Kaji refuses to eat it, saving it as a present for Michiko, whom he still expects to meet again but who may be long dead for all we know. To bring Greed back into the discussion, Human Condition closes on as grim and fatalistic a note as the Stroheim film, the wintry wastes of Manchuria comparing quite nicely to Greed's Death Valley.

 

Needless to say, Kobayashi's view (or the novelist's) of the human condition is not a nice one. The film is a damning indictment of Japanese militarism if not of Japanese culture in general, the sort of thing the Japanese got good at, perhaps of necessity, after losing the way, and the sort of thing we wouldn't see in American cinema until the Vietnam era. The title leaves open whether the film's sentiments are self-loathing or all-encompassingly misanthropic -- it's not The Japanese Condition -- and the story forces the question whether any individual can maintain personal integrity in the midst of a collective crime. Throughout, we can always say that Kaji is a better person than many other Japanese (or Russians, or Chinese), but he's still an exploiter and a killer who can't escape the brutalization he despises in others. Kaji has no rivals for main character status and the role is a huge challenge to which Tatsuya Nakadai (best known in the U.S. as the star or Kurosawa's Ran) responds tremendously. Purely on a quantitative level it's probably one of the greatest performances in film history, but it ranks qualitatively as well.

Cinematically, I could see how some might see The Human Condition as a sort of pretentiously middlebrow endeavor akin to Schindler's List. There's a certain self-important pretension to it all, a self-conscious classiness compared to the more concentrated outrage of a contemporary war film, Kon Ichikawa's Fires on the Plain. Kobayashi's eye for composition is perhaps too masterly, Yoshio Miyajima's monochrome cinematography perhaps too brilliant. But such pictorial ambition is probably appropriate to the filmmakers' epic intentions, and the results should prove indelible for anyone who makes the epic effort to watch it all. Human Condition is heroic cinema and indisputably one of the world's great war movies. It's worth nine hours or so of any true movie lover's time.

THE WOLVES (1971)

Hideo Gosha's 1971 film is the second yakuza film in a row that I've seen set during the early Showa period, i.e. the late 1920s, early in the reign of Emperor Hirohito. I don't know if that's an especially popular period to set these films in, or whether it reflected a nostalgia for the Twenties equivalent to what Americans have often felt. Like many Japanese period pieces, the sense of period isn't really that strong. The music score is noirish rather than simply jazzy, more appropriate for a movie set in the Forties or later. It may simply be that Japanese writers and audiences find these years important, since the nation was on the brink of the adventurism that led to Nanking and Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima. In both The Wolves and Seijun Suzuki's Tattooed Life Manchuria is described as a land of opportunity where businessmen or ordinary people out for a fresh start -- not to mention the army -- can make a killing. The period atmosphere, such as it is, may be that of dread, such as Americans might feel when a movie evokes any of the many moments when their nation supposedly lost its assumed innocence. For the Japanese, The Wolves adds the irony of yakuza thugs being manipulated by malignant forces beyond their control, with destiny against them.

The Japanese government celebrated the ascension of Hirohito (i.e. the Showa emperor) by declaring an amnesty for many convicts, including members of two rival families who'd feuded over railroad labor contracts. A representative battle of this war is fought in a movie theater, the mayhem interrupting the narrator's presentation of a silent movie. While Iwahashi (Tatsuya Nakadai) and Ozeki (Noboru Ando), representing the rival gangs, cool off in stir, a powerful politician brokers a truce between the clans, ushering in changing times and visions of a national yakuza network in league with Japan's expansionist militarists. Released by the amnesty, Iwahashi and Ozeki both feel that they were let out too early, before their clans' rivalry could resolve itself naturally without their complicating presence. But events are evolving rapidly and not according to nature or tradition. Iwahashi's brother was in love with the daughter of their boss, but she's now being pushed into an arranged marriage with the new boss of Ozeki's gang -- yet the brother can't keep away from her. Meanwhile, a mysterious sister-act of parasol-toting assassins are attacking people in a manner that looks like a cleanup of loose ends.

Something more has gone on while Iwahashi was away than he initially noticed, including an unthinkable betrayal of the yakuza code of honor and loyalty. Once enemies, he and Ozeki become allies, upholding a fragment of the honor code that both clans seem to have abandoned....

A visual highlight of The Wolves is Gosha's staging of the climactic action during a wildly colorful night-time festival

The Wolves has the kind of intrigue that fascinates many fans of gangster films. Gosha's effort is more like a Godfather movie than the grittier, more cynical yakuza films of Kinji Fukasaku, and Gosha aspires to more picturesque compositions than Fukasaku's handheld hurlyburly. Wolves ends up often seeming overproduced whenever Gosha tries too hard for the beautiful moments on the beach. His complex narrative lacks the suspenseful energy of his earlier samurai film, Goyokin, and the final fight between Iwahashi and his treacherous boss is protracted beyond all reason. He gets good menace from the parasol girls, but they're eliminated from the story too early after it seemed that they were being built up for the hero's final battle. But if Wolves lacks Goyokin's near-perfect pacing, it gets by on the reliably strong performances of Nakadai (who must have been to Gosha what Mifune was to Kurosawa) and Ando (a real-life ex yakuza who became a star by playing himself), along with a solid supporting cast. As a yakuza filmmaker Gosha may not measure up to Fukasaku or Suzuki -- on the evidence I've seen he was better at samurai stuff -- but he still put together a solid story that'll resonate with global crime film fans despite its flaws.

ONIMASA: A JAPANESE GODFATHER (1982)

Animeigo has released Hideo Gosha's film on DVD this month on the strength of a well-received theatrical showing during a Tatsuya Nakadai festival in New York two years ago. The American title makes Nakadai's yakuza boss the title character, which is a little deceptive. On the other hand, the original Japanese title translates to "The Life of Hanako Kiryuin," which is equally deceptive. The true main character and narrator of the story is Onimasa's adopted daughter Matsue, played by the tragically short-lived Masako Natsume. Nakadai inevitably dominates the film with a flamboyant performance, but we see his career and the life of his natural daughter Hanako through Matsue's eyes. This is a Toei production, from the studio I regard as Japan's answer to the Warner Bros. of the 1930s. But this feels more like a 1940s Warner film if the American studio had attempted a merger of its gangster and women's picture genres.

Fashions of Tatsuya Nakadai

"The Life of Hanako Kiryuin" opens with the discovery of Hanako's corpse in 1940. Matsue identifies the body and that launches a film-long flashback. In 1918 she and a brother were purchased from a poor and overpopulated family by Onimasa, aka Masagoro Kiryuin, and his barren wife Uta. The kids aren't keen on this idea and the brother runs away, but little Matsue sticks it out, in part because her father might die if she doesn't. She expects life to continue as before, but when she tells her new dad that she has to go to school, he tells her that education is no good for girls. Instead, he'll take her out for a good time -- at the dog fights.

Onimasa has no dog in this fight, but he takes the side of an upstart trainer whose dog scores an upset over the champion beast of rival boss Suenaga. When Suenaga and his wife cry foul, Kiryuin tells them to shut up and go home. When they later murder the winning dog, Kiryuin takes up the owner's cause and demands satisfaction from Suenaga, who has skipped town, leaving his wife to offer her body for sex to satisfy Kiryuin's grievance. He passes, preferring a man-to-man fight that gets broken up by the police and arbitrated by the bosses' common patron, Sir Suda (Tetsuro Tanba). This feud will simmer through the whole picture before coming to a boil toward the end.

Onimasa emerges as a charismatic, capricious character. He has a small harem of concubines in the hope of getting a true child, driving his sickly yet steely wife to drink. The concubines feud with each other, with little Matsue often ending up in the middle. In one typical over-the-top scene, Onimasa decides that a dispute between Matsue and one of the concubines should be decided through a trial-by-bitchslap. When another concubine intervenes on her side, Matsue pleads with Onimasa to make them stop fighting while he looks on with amusement. To top the scene off, Matsue gets her first period on the spot.

Matsue is a willfull and defiant child. Against Onimasa's wishes, she continues her education to the point when she can become a schoolteacher. We begin to notice that Onimasa admires her defiance. He admires defiance in general, a whimsical idiosyncracy that gets him in trouble. One of the less glamorous tasks of a yakuza is strikebreaking, and Sir Suda assigns Onimasa to break up a traction strike. He confronts a labor leader, Tanabe, who denounces him as Suda's pet dog. Onimasa dares him to say it again. Tanabe keeps saying it even as Kiryuin puts his head through a window and beats the crap out of him. Onimasa now respects his defiance and thinks hard about Tanabe's claim that the self-described "chivalrous" yakuza should take the side of the poor and helpless against their oppressors. He ends up taking Tanabe's side, defying Suda and putting his rackets in danger. He even decides that Tanabe, temporarily imprisoned, should marry his now-grown daughter Hanako when he's freed. But when Kiryuin sends Matsue as a messenger, her intellect (she reads the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke in the original German) so impresses Tanabe that when the time comes for him to ask any favor he likes of Onimasa, he asks to marry Matsue, not Hanako. The boss freaks out, assuming that Tanabe has already been screwing the young woman. To defend her honor, Tanabe offers Onimasa one of his limbs, but the boss is content with the usual yakuza portion of flesh, the pinky.

Onimasa has a like-hate relationship with labor activist Tanabe (Eitaro Ozawa, lower right)

There's more to this than people messing up Kiryuin's marriage arrangements. How much more emerges when Matsue is sent to tend to a drunken Onimasa, who suddenly grabs her and attempts a bit of situationally incestuous rape. Only when Matsue threatens to cut her own throat with a broken glass does he relent, a little petulantly. "Do you really hate me so much?" he grumbles, "Well, sorry."

Despite this, we see a bond of genuine familial affection develop between father and adopted daughter, just as one develops between Matsue and her initially harsh and occasionally abusive mother, whom Matsue nurses through a fatal bout of typhus that nearly takes Matsue herself. For all his occasionally monstrous outbursts, we're supposed to like Onimasa. Even Tanabe, who has reason to hate the man, ends up admiring the down-to-earth sincerity that makes him strong. Gradually, we see the same quality in Matsue, who proves to be a better daughter to Kiryuin than Hanako, who develops into a childish ninny and ultimately betrays her father.

This is Her Life: Kaori Tagasugi as Hanako Kiryuin, the title character for Japanese audiences.

But all the things that make Onimasa arguably more admirable as a man are weaknesses in a yakuza boss, and the enemies he's made finally destroy his family, though not before he finally settles scores with Suenaga in a bloody showdown. By this time Matsue is a widow, but her time in Onimasa's household have made her tough and self-reliant. While Hanako spirals toward an early death, Matsue moves on with her life, but not before what the liner notes call the movie's most popular moment. Determined to pay her respects at Tanabe's funeral, she runs afoul of his aristocratic dad, who refuses to let her have some of his son's ashes. After a struggle she shoves him aside and faces down his flunkies. "I'm the daughter of the chivalrous man," she tells them, "I'm the daughter of Onimasa ... you better not fuck with me!"

Like father, like daughter: they don't take crap from anyone.

Onimasa is a colorful melodrama with multiple moments of Scorsesean excess that threaten to topple across the border of soap-operatic camp. This is not the film to see for a realistic portrayal of yakuza life. The main reason to see it is for Nakadai's flamboyant performance as the mercurial oyabun. Kiryuin is a showcase role that lets the great actor roam across a wide emotional range, from bloodstained badass to poignantly pathetic. Nakadai feasts like a gourmand on every opportunity, and Masako Natsume holds her own with him, winning a Best Actress award for her work here, three years before leukemia claimed her at age 27.

As a crime film this doesn't come close to Kinji Fukasaku's masterpieces of the Seventies, but Gosha isn't trying to make that kind of film. It's really a women's picture with yakuza trappings, with bits of intense yakuza violence included to keep men interested. The American title Animeigo's using may lead some viewers to be disappointed with what they actually see, but if you understand what you're going to get going in, you may well find the film quite entertaining. It's no classic, but fans of Japanese and global cinema who've admired Nakadai's work in films from Harakiri to Ran (not to mention his spaghetti western Today It's Me, Tomorrow You) should like what they see here.

The trailer uploaded to YouTube by evilwrenchman is pure Japanese, but the above should give you some clue as to what you're seeing.

TODAY IT'S ME...TOMORROW, YOU (1968)

In his Spaghetti western survey 10,000 Ways to Die Alex Cox calls Tonino Cervi's film "a near perfect revenge Western." But Cox had reached a point in the survey where he was beginning to give perhaps too much credit to fairly ordinary films that at least didn't insult his intelligence, as too many "circus westerns" that depended on technical gimmicks or outlandish stunts were doing at this point in genre history. I'm not saying that Oggi a me...Domani a te is a completely ordinary film -- it's far from that -- but it's also further from perfect than Cox cares to admit.

The thing that bugs me right away is that our avenger hero, Bill Kiowa (Montgomery Ford a.k.a. Brett Halsey), spends the first third of the movie putting a gang together. It just seems to me that a nearly perfect revenge Western should have a lone avenger. Maybe I wouldn't be bugged by it if his gang had more going for it. It's a collection of types: a dandy, a gambler (William Berger), a veteran sheriff, and Bud Spencer doing here for what Cox says is the first time his standard spaghetti character of a big lummox. Spencer and Berger have a certain charisma, which explains why they became spaghetti stars, but the other two characters are ciphers; the one interesting thing the sheriff does is quit his job when Kiowa offers pay in advance and appoint his one prisoner as the new sheriff. Berger doesn't have much to do apart from delaying the plot a bit when he runs away from the gang, but he gets one good line later when he complains about bloodstains on his frilly white shirt. "I paid five dollars for it," he laments, "and I only got two years' use out of it." Ford/Halsey/Kiowa himself is dull (Cox euphemizes this as "unsmiling and obsessed") and we only gain interest in him when we learn what he's really out to avenge.

Montgomery Ford as Bill Kiowa (above and center below) and his gang in Today It's Me...Tomorrow, You.

At the beginning, Kiowa is finishing a stint in prison, having been framed by erstwhile pal James Elfego, a comanchero bandit. Kiowa needs extra men, I suppose, because Elfego has a small army of bandits to hit stagecoaches with. But he wants to deal with Elfego himself because, as a sepia flashback shows us, the wiry little cuss congratulates Kiowa on his wedding by raping Mrs. Kiowa and gunning her down in front of him.

The interesting, if not extraordinary thing about Today It's Me... is that Elfego is played by Tatsuya Nakadai, one of the titans of Japanese cinema. It's an incredible bit of stunt casting that nods to the genre's sources, since Nakadai played Toshiro Mifune's gun-toting antagonist in Yojimbo. More recently, he had scored hits in such diverse samurai fare as Harakiri and Sword of Doom, and bringing him to Europe was a coup just short of getting Mifune himself. Ironically, Mifune had already played a disreputable Mexican in a Mexican film, and he would finally confront the West on his own terms, as a samurai teamed up with Charles Bronson against Alain Delon, in the awesome-on-paper Red Sun. Probably by this point playing a bandit doomed to be dispatched by "Montgomery Ford" was beneath Mifune's station, but Nakadai, not so well known in the West, was game and gets into his work as the leering, sort of nervous seeming bandito.

Cervi was quite self-conscious about the stunt casting, and it shows in the Asiatic-sounding gong included in Angelo Lavagnino's score and in the way Elfego wields a machete like a samurai sword. This makes for one of the most peculiar fight scenes in spaghetti history, something you wouldn't expect to see outside one of those computer simulation scenarios that pit Spartans vs. Ninjas: Nakadai with the blade vs. Bud Spencer with a tree branch.

Spencer already has a bullet in his belly, and Nakadai carves a few rashers off of him before the rest of the good guys arrive to save the big man's bacon. I suppose that's another of the things that annoys me about this movie: given the number of expendable assistant heroes, not one of them is killed. And Dario Argento co-wrote the thing! You'd think he would have come up with some way to get rid of some of these guys. Not doing so leaves the impression that the deck is stacked in favor of the good guys.

Apart from the unique contribution from Nakadai, Today It's Me (also known as Today We Kill, Tomorrow We Die) didn't live up to Cox's admiring review. It's not a terrible film -- we're not talking about White Comanche here -- but it struck me as fairly uninspired beyond the stunt casting. It lacks intensity for a large portion of the story and the action is too one-sided for it to be very suspenseful. On the other hand, I only paid $1.97 for it at a local FYE, the sort of store where you can still find obscure items that have long since vanished from other store shelves, so I don't feel that let down. It should throw Alex Cox's critical standards open to question, however, for anyone planning to buy that book.

Here's a mixed trailer with Italian dialogue and English titles, uploaded to YouTube by LindbergSWDB

HARAKIRI (Seppuku, 1962)

One fine day in 1630, a masterless samurai, a ronin, turns up at the gate of the courtyard of the Iyi clan. He has an unusual request: rather than live a deteriorating life of poverty, he would like the use of the courtyard to commit seppuku in a manner befitting a onetime samurai. Actually, this isn't the first time someone like this has shown up with this sort of request. Not so long ago, another ronin, in fact from the same disbanded clan as the new man, turned up with the same story. Already, by this time, the Iyi had grown suspicious of such stories. Word's got out that a ronin went to another clan, supposedly for the same purpose, but the saps in that clan were so soft hearted that they made the bum a retainer. Now the Iyi work under the assumption that anyone who turns up on their doorstep asking to kill himself is actually looking for a job or a handout. Rather than tell them to hit the road, the Iyi try to make examples of them by holding them to their word. They made sure that the last guy killed himself, the new arrival is told, even though all he had in the way of weapons was a bamboo sword. It's damn hard to disembowel yourself with a bamboo sword, and director Masaki Kobayashi illustrates this point in excruciating detail.

With a bamboo sword you can barely penetrate your flesh, much less disembowel yourself. Akira Ishihama demonstrates in Harakiri.

The latest sucker seems more determined to follow through on his desire to end his life. All he requests is to choose his second, the man who'll decapitate him once he's finished disemboweling himself. He has a specific person in mind, a known master of the sword, but it turns out that this individual is indisposed due to illness. The ronin goes through a second and third choice, both of whom are also too ill to come, before the Iyi counselor gets tired of the whole affair and tells him to accept the second that the clan had chosen. But if the ronin can't have the one thing he requested, the least the Iyi can do is listen to his life story. After all, he could kill a few of them if they try to force the issue. Fine, the counselor says, but make it quick.

It so happens that Hanshiro Tsugumo (Tatsuya Nakadai) is the father-in-law of the previous victim, Motome Chijiiya. He'd raised the kid since the kid's father killed himself after the disbanding of their clan. The new Tokugawa shogunate is shutting down a lot of the great clans, dumping the once-proud samurai on the street. Hanshiro himself has a little girl to raise as well as Motome, and he's been instructed not to kill himself, but live for both the kids' and his lord's sake. Fortunately, he's a kind of craftsman and develops a trade in parasols, making a living while other ronin struggle or starve. In time, Motome marries Hanshiro's daughter Miho and they have a child. They're a kind of success story, but things fall apart once Miho contracts the Movie Disease. Soon the child also grows sick while the men spend all their resources and let their business fall apart trying to get their loved ones proper medical care. Ronin were not allowed to carry over their daimyo's health insurance plans, apparently, when their clans were disbanded. It was at a moment of supreme desperation that Motome paid his foolhardy, fatal visit to the Iyi clan. The three swordsmen who are now very coincidentally ill were the ones who brought Motome's body back to Hanshiro, explaining with barely veiled contempt how he had honorably ended his life.

Happier times for Hanshiro's family

What's the moral of this story, the Iyi counselor asks impatiently. The moral, Hanshiro suggests, is, don't you guys think you were a little hard on Motome? Don't you want to admit that maybe you should have asked why he wanted a sudden reprieve before forcing him to torture himself to death with that bamboo sword? Hanshiro was hoping that he might be able to tell Motome, when he meets him in the afterlife, that these Iyi creeps were just a little sorry for what they did. Not a chance. While Hanshiro dares claim that the samurai code of honor is now an empty facade, the Iyi insist that they've restored the code by forcing these losers to live up to their words by killing themselves. Anyway, the counselor asks Hanshiro, if you think the code is so much bull, why would you think we'd apologize?

Probably he didn't think they would. But before we wrap things up, Hanshiro has some lovely parting gifts for the Iyi. They are clumps of hair with name tags: samurai topknots. As flashbacks reveal, Hanshiro has already avenged his family by defeating the three swordsmen but sparing their lives, only taking their topknots. Doing that, however, is the supreme, unendurable humiliation. Those three swordsmen should have killed themselves, but instead they're hiding at their homes pretending to be sick. So much for the honor of the Iyi clan. And so much for the counselor's patience, as he orders his retainers to cut Hanshiro down. But this is a Sixties samurai film, no matter how subversive of the genre and its social context, so you know that Hanshiro isn't going down without a long, bloody fight....

Harakiri reminded me a lot of American films from the Depression era like William Wellman's Heroes For Sale, which is also a tale of a warrior kicked to the curb and left to fend for himself in times of peace. In a way, it also reminded me of Ted Kotcheff's First Blood, especially since the spurned warrior in Harakiri finally fights back against the oppressive society. Some people could read the Kobayashi film as an indictment of Japan's treatment of World War II veterans, but critic Donald Ritchie in his filmed intro to the Criterion DVD describes it as a frontal assault on the samurai genre itself. There's a tendency in Japanese cinema to attack the conventions of their own popular fiction, to debunk the myths they helped to create. Kinji Fukasaku did it with yakuza stories, and Kobayashi probably isn't the only one to debunk the values promoted by more conventional samurai pictures. Harakiri's slow-burn structure may be part of the subversive effort, since it denies us a real samurai swordfight until nearly two hours into the movie, and the only violence we get before that is Motome's gruesome death scene. After all, it's because there are no proper occasions for fighting anymore, thanks to Tokugawa, that ronin are reduced to their pitiable state. So Kobayashi and his writers delay the gratification samurai fans presumably craved, repeatedly going back in time, first as the Iyi tell Hanshiro their version of Motome's fate, then as Hanshiro tells them his version.

But when Kobayashi finally relents, he delivers one of the greatest samurai fight scenes I've ever seen, pitting Nakadai against Testuro Tanba in a windblown grassy field beneath an overcast sky. The editing and outdoor cinematography are brilliant in this long battle by samurai-cinema standards. This fight is structured by editing rather than choreography, with an emphasis on pictorial effect rather than seamless flow of action. I want to call it expressionistic in the same way that some of the boxing scenes in Raging Bull are expressionist rather than realist. Camera angles, light and shadow, and the poses of the actors add to the emotional intensity of the moment.

This epic one-on-one encounter, related in flashback, is followed by the big finish as Hanshiro fights his way into the Iyi headquarters and desecrates their ancestral armor. By the standards of insane, Wild Bunch-style bloodbath finales of films like Sword of Doom, Hanshiro's final rampage is relatively modest in keeping with Kobayashi's social-realist intent. We're actually given a final body count of only four killed and eight wounded, when Zatoichi in similar circumstances might have wiped out dozens of men. But the odds are against Hanshiro, and you're never allowed to forget that or really believe that he might somehow fight his way out or avenge himself on the Iyi counselor. In any event, Kobayashi's point seems to be that Hanshiro has already won his battle, by showing the counselor how his men had failed to live up to their vaunted code. But power gives the counselor the last word of the story, and the final irony is that history will record that Hanshiro actually did commit seppuku the way he supposedly meant to -- and that a lot of Iyi retainers suddenly got sick and died.

Harakiri is a film that rewards patience. If you like non-linear narratives you should have no problems with the first third of the film, while the middle section is the piecing together of a puzzle, and the final acts are all-out samurai mayhem. If action's what you want, the last half hour will make Harakiri worth the wait. Enthusiasts of Japanese cinema in general probably won't have to wait long before recognizing this as a great film.

Here's a subtitled trailer, uploaded by WorldCinemateque