• 三匹の侍 (Three Outlaw Samurai)

6/4/23 (Sun)

Gosha Hideo’s 1964 Three Outlaw Samurai, his first feature-length film, was a prequel to his hugely popular television series of the same name with the same three leads. The series had already been running a year at that point and continued for around 26 episodes annually through March 1969, gathering ratings as high as 42%. (They tried a sequel with new stars the following year, but that only lasted 13 episodes.) The Japanese title, Sanbiki no Samurai, is a play on words: the usual phrase sannin (three [people] – Shichinin no Samurai is the title for Kurosawa’s Seven ~), is replaced here by sanbiki, using the counter for animals, as in Sanbiki no Kobuta (the Three Little Pigs). It’s pretty much untranslatable – a herd of samurai, maybe? – but I guess they did the best they could.

Shiba happens upon a home in which three desperately poor peasants are holding the magistrate’s daughter as ransom in protest of heavy taxes. They threaten to take their petition to the regional lord, who is scheduled to visit soon. The magistrate is incensed, particularly intent on avoiding any exposure before the lord, and orders his soldiers to go settle matters.

Shiba watches disinterestedly at first but, realizing the peasants are way out of their league, takes their side and drives the attackers away. He even manages to attract one of the attackers, the wild Sakura, to their side. The magistrate then turns the tables and kidnaps one of the peasant’s daughters, threatening to kill her if they do not give in.

Shiba arranges an exchange of hostages and a promise on samurai’s honor not to pursue matters further, which seems at first to work. But he himself becomes a hostage and soon discovers that the magistrate has no intention of respecting the bargain. The treatment of Shiba, who has been left for dead, persuades Kikyo to switch sides. The three samurai must now fight the entire clan in defense of the peasants.

After complications, double-crosses and love affairs, the samurai triumph, only to discover that the peasants are too timid to take their petition to the visiting lord after all. The infuriated Shiba tries to kill the evil magistrate but is thwarted by the daughter, who had earlier begged the magistrate to spare Shiba’s life. Seeing all their efforts as meaningless, the three samurai wander off in a random direction with no clear future.

Shiba (Tamba Tetsuro) is a wandering Yojimbo-type samurai (made explicit in the opening image and final throwing of a hairpin to determine his next destination), Sakura (Nagato Isamu) is a farmer-turned-samurai who allies with Shiba in sympathy with the peasants, and Kikyo (Hira Mikijiro) is a disinterested samurai who prefers the comfort of the clan to going out on a limb. Shiba and especially Kikyo are not fully rounded as characters, maybe because they were already well known from the television series. Sakura is the only one who is truly developed, a wild man with a running mouth recalling Eli Wallach’s Tuco in The Good, the Bad & the Ugly two years later. His secret guilt at having unwittingly killed the woman’s husband was especially well portrayed.

Gosha, familiar with the material after his work on the television version, shows a very sure hand in an impressive film debut. The sword play can be cartoonish with the three samurai fighting against frankly impossible odds, but it is imaginative and thrillingly presented. The three leads are all perfectly cast, and the minor characters are sharply drawn and splendidly acted, with the love interests adding an extra dimension. The driving story is always coherent despite the many shifts and turns, some more believable than others (like the paper petition that washes down the river and appears intact in just the right place). The ending when the samurai find that their efforts have been in vain is brilliant. Gosha went on to greater heights, but as pure chambara, it doesn’t get much more entertaining than this. A big thumbs up.