Chiyari Fuji AKA A Bloody Spear on Mount Fuji, Bloody Spear at Mount Fuji - 94 min
As decisively as Kurosawa before him, Tomu Uchida broke the conventions of the chambara or swordfight film with his witty, loose-limbed A Bloody Spear at Mount Fuji, about a young samurai, Shojuro Sako, delivering a teacup to Edo. Travels on the Tokaido to Edo with his two servants, Genta and Gonpachi. Gonpachi has been told by Shojuro's mother to prevent his Master from drinking. The road is not safe. On the way, they meet a young orphan boy, Jiro, and many other travellers. It's an affable samurai road movie with a focus on unglamorus characters, such as the dim-witted young samurai and his two loyal servants traverse the Tokaido highway.
Bloody Spear marks Uchida's postwar return to Japanese cinema and to progressive principles, but this homecoming is markedly ambivalent in its values.
From its shambling "on the road" opening, scored with jaunty jazz and marked by a flagrantly artificial setting and proliferation of incident, to its Shane-like ending, the film takes in a remarkable range of characters and classes, tones and traditions. Its narrative has a peculiar stalling quality, as though Uchida were determined to suspend the expectations of the samurai film by deferring the violence forever.
Full of subplots and spin-offs, scatology, sentimentality, and social satire, this simple tale becomes a sprawling epic whose culmination-a fight to the death among gushing sake barrels-shocked Japanese audiences of its time with its sheer.
A team of great directors, including Yasujrio Ozu, Hirochi Shimizu and Daisuko Ito, assisted Uchida with his remarkable post-war comeback film.
Much of the film is played as comedy, making the brilliantly staged violent climax all the more shocking.
A very down-to-earth without the stereotyped and the traditional glorification of the Samurai but full of colorful common decent kind people, thief, blind massageur, poor father selling his beautiful daughter to be prostitute, woman doing the road shows with her young daughter, an orphan who dreams to be a samurai lancer....
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!
