• 斬る (Kill!)

6/7/23 (Wed)

Okamoto Kihachi made this film in the same year (1968) as his batty The Human Bullet, and it bears much the same sensibility. The Japanese title Kiru means to slash to death, so the similarly sounding English Kill! must have been too tempting to resist. The added exclamation mark is in line with the spirit of this chambara comedy, not a crowded field. The film comes from the same source material as Sanjuro but takes it in an entirely new direction. While it’s nowhere near the level of that classic, it makes for an interesting comparison.

Genta (Nakadai Tatsuya), a disillusioned samurai who has become a wanderer, meets Hanjiro (Takahashi Etsushi), a farmer who wants to become a samurai. They were inspired in opposite ways by witnessing attempted peasant rebellions and the ugly outcome. They arrive in a dilapidated town tired and hungry, only to come upon a rebellion in the works. Seven samurai have killed their leader at the behest of an official, who, as usual for these films, promptly betrays them afterwards and wants them killed. Hanjiro joins one group in hopes of advancement, only to be ordered to murder Genta, while Genta can’t resist taking the side of the vastly outnumbered samurai in their shelter in the mountains. The tense sequence when the deceived samurai are bombarded at the same time by one group with guns and another with an apparently inexhaustible supply of arrows (shades of Throne of Blood) is particularly memorable. After numerous complications, Hanjiro discovers that the samurai life is not all he had hoped for.

That vastly simplified outline would fit a lot of movies of this type, but the tone is an interesting mixture of light and dark in what amounts to a parody of a chambara film. The opening with the unrealistically run-down town (I was waiting for the tumbleweeds), the suspicious eyes peering through slats, and the famished Genta and Hanjiro comically chasing a scrawny chicken made the tone clear from the start. Genta had a perpetually bemused look and jaded attitude toward the samurai game, even during his fight scenes. He calmly observes and comments caustically on the scene, but his words are clearly the voice of experience. Hanjiro veers close to slapstick on several occasions, not helped by some excessive mugging. There are visual gags throughout, my favorite being when the woman bedding a horny Hanjiro is seen bouncing horizontally up and down in the air in an energetic session. The chambara features flying limbs and fingers as well as some wild flaying by Hanjiro. Other characters are generally treated more seriously, the most important being the evil official; an anti-samurai swordsman who takes up the cause in a desperate bid for money to free his lover from a brothel; and the main samurai whose girlfriend frantically follows him to the mountains. The women are less prominent this time in what is very much a man’s world.

Nakadai morphs into a completely different character type than his usual fare and looks to be thoroughly enjoying himself. Takahashi seems more a comedian than actor, and his style can be undisciplined. But it more or less works in the context of the director’s approach. The film is in the spirit of the cynical 1960s take on the samurai code, and Okamoto clearly knows the genre well as he upends its conventions. Sato Masaru’s music makes a strong contribution; it could be superimposed as is on a Sergio Leone Western. While I’m not sure I followed the plot at all times, it didn’t really matter. A very different and enjoyable take on chambara films.