Nakayama shichiri

A gambler (Raizo Ichikawa) hopes to change his gambling ways when he meets the woman he's destined to marry (Tamao Nakamura), but fate steals her away from him. But years later, in an ironic twist of fate, he meets a girl who look just like his lost love, and vows to set things straight.

It's a very simple story, occasionally edited like a silent film, but this black and white drama with swordplay is thoroughly engrossing - especially in the unpredictable second half. What could have ended up as a tract against gambling and sin becomes a drama about redeeming the future by facing up to the past. Thoroughly satisfying, start to finish.

Raizô Ichikawa gets married to Tamao Nakamura and danged, but they're happy, until the Yakuza boss rapes her. She commits suicide, Ichikawa scars him, and the corrupt deputy tries to arrest him, so he goes on the run. A year later, he helps a girl in the street back to her home because she looks exactly like his dead wife, because she's played by Miss Nakamura. She's engaged to Kôichi Ôse, who's cheated into signing a note for 120 ryo. If Miss Nakamura will consent to be raped, the note will be forgiven. Ichikawa breaks them all out and they go on the run together, because the Yakuza guy and the guy who cheated Ôse are buddies. Fortunately, they figure they'll head to Ichikawa's old boss.... who, it turns out, is Ôse's estranged father.

That's an awful lot of coincidences to swallow in a movie that's only 86 minutes long, and I've recently seen two versions of SHIN GENJI MONOGATORI, where the resemblance of two women is a major plot point. I'm a little fed up with beautiful Japanese dopplegangers. There are hints that in the novel by Shin Hasegawa that this movie is based on, these matters are handled better, and the long trip through the forest that the three fugitives takes, as well as the abandoned town they hide in, speak of symbolic importance that is never ornamented. Good actors and good camerawork by Senkichirô Takeda, and I liked the big set-piece fight at the end. The story as it exists, however, winds up being B movie claptrap. Too bad.