- 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.
sekenbanashi 