Cinema of Swords

Viking Women and the Sea Serpent
Rating: *
Origin: USA, 1957
Director: Roger Corman
Source: Lionsgate DVD

Well, there went sixty-five minutes I’ll never have again. In the late fifties, movies about giant monsters were popular, many of them produced by the shlock-house of American International Pictures, and filming a bevy of half-clad starlets had never gone out of style, so producer-director Roger Corman combined the two in this miserable would-be epic. Its pompously-overlong full title is The Saga of the Viking Women and their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent, which is the only thing the least bit clever about this dud. In Norway, which you probably didn’t realize looks exactly like southern California, at a village whose men went off a-Viking and never returned, the women are voting on whether to go search for them by the traditional Nordic method of hurling their spears into the “Yes” tree or the “No” tree. The deciding “Yes” vote is cast by the priestess Inger, the only non-blonde, who is suspected of wanting to go on the mission so she can get her hooks into one of the missing men, a Viking who belongs to the blonde woman with the ponytail. (Since none of the blonde women have been granted distinctive personalities or dialogue, the only way to tell them apart is hairstyle.)

The women go to sea in a cheesy-looking fake drakkar, a prop so crappy that pieces are visibly falling off it as it’s launched. (Apparently the whole crew of Viking women damn near drowned when the guy piloting the tow-boat fell asleep and they were all carried far off-shore.) Once they’re at sea the only subject the women want to talk about is men, so you know this is a fantasy. Fortunately, the only man left in town, a shirtless blond surfer dude, has stowed away, so there’s somebody trustworthy on board who can make important decisions and deliver exposition like, “It’s the monster of the vortex!” Said monster is the worst sea serpent ever back-projected in Hollywood, but it’s monster enough to swamp the crappy drakkar, which for good measure is set afire by gratuitous lightning. The crew abandon ship, and we’re treated to the sight of a flaming six-inch model of an entirely different longship swirling down into a tiny whirlpool.

The crew wash ashore somewhere on the coast of Malibu, where they’re promptly captured by a tribe of mounted barbarians and marched off to an unconvincing matte painting of a generic castle. There the barbarian chief tells them with a leer that they are now slaves who must do whatever the barbarians wish—but first there must be a boar hunt, so the Viking women are given horses and spears, and off they all go. (Don’t ask about the sad fake-tusked porker that plays the boar.) The rest of the film makes just as much sense. There’s a rowdy feast with “exotic” dancing, gratuitous woman-whipping, escape, betrayal by Inger (never trust the dark-haired one!), recapture, reunification with the lost and enslaved Viking men, more escape, more recapture, and a flaming sacrifice of the Vikings to the barbarian gods that is dowsed in a literal deus ex machina when Inger redeems herself by calling on the god Thor to save them. That leaves only the final battle with the titular sea serpent, who has apparently been able to terrorize the coast of Malibu for generations because nobody ever thought to stick a sword into it. Well, I never.

Throne of Blood
Rating: *****
Origin: Japan, 1957
Director: Akira Kurosawa
Source: Criterion DVD

This is a stark, brutal, black-and-white adaptation of Macbeth that relocates the story from medieval Scotland to samurai Japan, replacing Shakespeare’s sonorous language with the stylized imagery of classical Noh theater—so, yeah, it’s not a movie for everybody. It’s a fast ride to Hell on the horses of greed, ambition, and betrayal, with few (if any) sympathetic characters, shorn of even the lukewarm reassurance found in Shakespeare’s moralistic finale. Bummer.

But if you can get past, or even embrace all that, you’ll find that director Kurosawa’s third samurai film is rich with vivid scenes you’ll never forget. The encounter in the haunted forest between Generals Washizu (Toshiro Mifune) and Miki (Akira Kubo) with the pale and malevolent witch who foretells their fates. The brooding intensity of the murder scene in which Washizu’s wife, Lady Asaji (Isuzu Yamada), hands him the spear with which he is to assassinate their guest, his reigning lord, and her tense wait for him to return, shaken, his hands clotted with blood. The siege of the great black castle on the barren slopes of Mt. Fuji where Washizu, now the reigning lord himself, pays the price for his betrayals in a hissing storm of hurtling arrows.

Most of all, you’ll remember the coldly poisonous voice of the relentless Lady Asaji, and Lord Washizu’s panicked glances from behind his fierce martial visage, the look of a trapped animal who sees no way to go except deeper into the trap. Yes, it’s very different from an uplifting action movie like The Seven Samurai in which heroic warriors fight desperately against the odds, but on its own terms, Throne of Blood is a very great film indeed.

Samurai Vendetta aka Hakuoki
Rating: **
Origin: Japan, 1959
Director: Kazuo Mori
Source: AnimEigo DVD

Some regard Kazuo Mori’s tale of a tragic love triangle as a masterpiece of samurai cinema, but I’m not among them. I find Mori’s direction pretentious and haphazard, compelling in one scene and then awkward in the next. The visual style switches from natural to impressionistic and overwrought without warning, which is jarring rather than emphatic. And there’s an over-reliance on narrative voiceovers to more the plot forward or tell us what the characters are feeling when a well-acted dialogue scene would do the job better. That said, with dialogue like, “Ours is a twisted world of warring titans,” maybe we’re better off with the voiceovers.

The film nonetheless has several points of interest. First of all, it’s a prequel of sorts to the Japanese national epic of Chushingura, or the Forty-Seven Ronin, telling the backstory of one of those famous martyrs to the samurai warrior code. Raizo Ichikawa does a fine job as the first male lead in the role of Tangé Tenzen, a dishonored fencing instructor forced to separate from his wife. Even more interesting is the second male lead, one of the forty-seven named Yasubei who’s played by a very young Shintaro Katsu, years before his international stardom as Zatoichi, the Blind Swordsman. Katsu has the best fencing moves in the picture, plus he gets to weep in the rain and be the only survivor of a scene of horrific slaughter—good training for the future Zatoichi.

Samurai III: Duel at Ganryu Island
Rating: ***** (Essential)
Origin: Japan, 1956
Director: Hiroshi Inagaki
Source: Criterion Collection Blu-Ray

This is the final film in Inagaki’s epic trilogy adapting Eiji Yoshikawa’s biographical novel of the early life of Musashi Miyamoto, the exemplar of Bushido. It leads up to the inevitable duel between Musashi (Toshiro Mifune) and his arch-rival Kojiro Sasaki (Koji Tsuruta), introduced in the previous movie. But more than that, the purpose of this film is to draw a contrast between the vainglorious Kojiro and the increasingly humble and thoughtful Musashi. It does this from the very beginning, the first scene showing Kojiro at a waterfall, a location of great natural beauty, ignored by the samurai who sees a passing swallow as nothing more than a challenge to his sword-skill, as he brings it down with a single lightning stroke. Musashi, on the other hand, when challenged by a boastful spear-wielding monk, declines to draw his own sword, and instead neutralizes his opponent by grabbing the end of his spear and using his own strength against him.

This sort of thing continues: Kojiro defeats his adversaries in flashy duels, burnishing his reputation, while Musashi avoids a brawl with a gang of thugs in a famous scene where he awes them with his skill by using chopsticks to grab flies on the wing. Though Kojiro has never lost a duel, neither has Musashi; realizing that only Musashi is a match for him, Kojiro challenges him, but Musashi temporizes, putting him off for a year “to train further.”

Musashi’s idea of further training is to return to the simple life of the soil. He becomes a farmer at a village where the peasants, repeatedly raided by bandits, are giving up in despair. But the complications of his old life pursue him into the countryside: Otsu (Kaoru Yachigusa), who’s loved him since he was a youth, shows up at the village, as does the bandits’ moll Akemi, who also pines for Musashi. Jealous of Otsu, she calls the bandits down on the village, and Musashi must fight to defend the peasants.

Finally the reckoning with Kojiro can be put off no longer. Inagaki’s depictions of the fights in this film are impeccable, but the final duel at dawn on the beach at Ganryu Island is a thing of beauty, a ballet of light, water, and weaponry, a few simple elements the director combines into a scene both elegant and unforgettable, exemplifying all that’s gone before. I think I’ll go watch it again.