Directed by Akira Kurosawa. A crafty ronin comes to a town divided by two criminal gangs and. But evidence suggests they were stylistically crude – more or less straightforward recordings of onstage action. The revolution in chanbara came in the late 1. Chuji’s Travel Diary (1. It was from these that the modern samurai film was born. After the Second World War, the Allied occupation restricted films promoting feudal values, putting the kibosh on this most Japanese of action genres. When the occupiers departed in 1. As popular as the western in America, films based on legendary figures such as Musashi Miyamoto or the outlaw Chuji Kunisada, or historical tales such as . The most important samurai movie is Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 feature, Seven Samurai, which not only impacted the way the genre was viewed, but elevated its status.But distributors in the west had their blind spots, and little of the vast, popular output of, for example, the Toei studio has ever been seen overseas. To this day, classics like Bloody Spear at Mount Fuji (1. Let’s hope we’ll see some of these missing milestones being released for home viewing in the future. For now, the new Blu- ray release of Seven Samurai, and these nine other readily available genre gems, present the perfecting jumping off point. Seven Samurai (1.
Related Content: Akira Kurosawa’s List of His 100 Favorite Movies. Watch Kurosawa’s Rashomon Free Online, the Film That Introduced Japanese Cinema to the West. Director Akira Kurosawa. Poster for Seven Samurai (1. Akira Kurosawa’s monumental tale of heroism and humanism, set in the late 1. Warring States Period, is the director’s most famous work. It was joint recipient (alongside Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu Monogatari) of the Silver Lion Award at the 1. Venice Film Festival, and ranked 1. Sight & Sound poll of critics to determine the Greatest Films of All Time. The film depicts seven ronin (masterless samurai) as they band together to protect a beleaguered farming community from repeated attacks by marauding bandits. The epic three- and- a- half- hour runtime, on- location shooting, and use of multiple camera set- ups for its action scenes made this release from the Toho studio the most expensive Japanese production of its day. Most impressive is the use of physical geography and natural weather conditions to enhance the drama and the attention to each of its characters’ narrative arcs, resulting in a rich and involving work that has cast an incredibly long shadow across the world. Officially remade as the Hollywood western The Magnificent Seven in 1. The Dirty Dozen (1. Bollywood film Sholay (1. The Samurai trilogy (1. Director Hiroshi Inagaki. Samurai I: Musashi Miyamoto (1. Samurai I: Musashi Miyamoto (1. Samurai II: Duel at Ichijoji Temple (1. Samurai III: Duel at Ganryu Island (1. With Toei, the largest producer of period action dramas, remaining aloof to the vogue among Japanese studios of submitting works to international festivals throughout the 1. Toho’s entries in the field that provided foreign viewers with the most open window onto the country’s mythic past. The life of master swordsman Musashi Miyamoto (1. Zen ink brush, have been immortalised on film numerous occasions, including a 1. Mizoguchi for Shochiku. However it was Toho’s first colour production, and the first instalment of Inagaki’s remakes of his earlier trilogy for Nikkatsu studios (1. Eiji Yoshikawa, which won the Honorary Foreign Language Film Award at the 1. Oscars. Along with the works of Kurosawa, the films helped forge the international status of the studio’s contracted star, Toshiro Mifune, as the most iconic of screen samurais. Strangely overlooked today, the series charts Miyamoto’s rise from the formative years of his rural upbringing to his first taste of glory at battle, then through his further training, before Duel at Ganryu Island sees him renouncing his search for fame to concentrate on his quest for inner truth, culminating in a remarkable duel by sunset. Throne of Blood (1. Director Akira Kurosawa. Throne of Blood (1. Kurosawa’s oeuvre is so well- represented among western releases, so critically regarded and so impressive, it is difficult to know which to single out for individual attention lest this list turn exclusively into a celebration of this most famous of Japanese filmmakers. One could argue equally forcefully for Hidden Fortress (1. George Lucas, featuring two peasants enlisted into the service of a notorious general and the princess of a defeated clan (and represented Kurosawa’s first feature in widescreen Toho. Scope); the western- inspired Yojimbo (1. Kagemusha (1. 98. Century Fox. However, this eerie restaging of Macbeth in 1. Japan is worth singling out as a counterpoint to these more action- driven pieces. With its expressive use of light and shadows and stylised use of Noh’s theatrical conventions to convey the psychological torment of its protagonist, it is regarded as one of the most successful cinematic renditions of the Bard ever made. Kurosawa would later return to Shakespeare with his 1. King Lear, Ran. Harakiri (1. Director Masaki Kobayashi. Harakiri (1. 96. 2)The first jidaigeki by Kwaidan (1. Masaki Kobayashi, about a young ronin during the early Tokugawa period (c. As its title suggests, the relatively slow drama comes punctuated by moments of extreme goriness, mercifully rendered in monochrome. Formally, the film is quite stunning, making impressive use of the peculiarities of Japanese architecture, selective lighting effects and judicious placement of its characters across the scope frame to create a striking collection of grid- like compositions conveying the oppressiveness of this highly- structured society. Toru Takemitsu’s percussive, atonal soundtrack similarly adds to the haunting air of detachment. Samurai Assassin (1. Director Kihachi Okamoto. Samurai Assassin (1. In Samurai Assassin, set in 1. Tokugawa Shogunate, Toshiro Mifune plays a roguish ronin unaware of the identity of his nobleman father, and who’s driven with ambitions of securing samurai status at a time when this warrior class is on the cusp of being abolished. He becomes involved in a plot to assassinate Ii Naosuke, a powerful official in the shogunate’s military government whose calls for opening up the country to foreign trade anger nationalists. The scene is set for the final implosion, and one which will see the age of the samurai over once and for all. This strikingly- shot dramatisation of an incredibly complex defining point in history (one tackled in a number of films, including Masahiro Shinoda’s first period drama, Assassination, in 1. The historical background, delivered in a combination of terse voiceover narration and whispered intrigues, is dense in detail. The climactic battle, however, framed in spectacular monochrome scope during a snowstorm at Edo Castle, provides more than adequate reward for patience. Directed by one of the stalwarts of the jidaigeki during the 1. Kihachi Okamoto, whose signature works include The Sword of Doom (1. Kill! Add to the mix a British director known for his work on three early Bond films, and love interest in the shapely form of Swiss- born actress Ursula Andress, and one is left with a unique transnational curio, one with little in the way of authenticity to any culture, but an enjoyable romp nonetheless. Lady Snowblood (1. Director Toshiya Fujita. Lady Snowblood (1. Meiko Kaji’s most representative screen role, as the kimono- clad avenging angel immortalised in the cinematic diptych adapted from Kazuo Koike’s pioneering manga series of the 1. Lucy Liu’s character of O- Ren Ishii in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill (2. This first of the two films (Lady Snowblood 2: Love Song of Vengeance was released the same year) is by far the best, as our titular heroine slices and dices her way through Meiji- era Japan in mute displays of bloody carnage as she seeks revenge against those who raped her mother and left her to rot in jail. Despite the early modern- era setting, the film contains many of the same tropes of earlier samurai films (albeit with a lot more bloodletting), most notably another Koike adaptation that preceded it, the seven- film Lone Wolf and Cub (1. Shogun Assassin (1. Director Robert Houston. Shogun Assassin (1. Kazuo Koike’s classic manga series Lone Wolf and Cub features a disgraced former executioner of the Shogun, Itto Ogami, who is wrongly accused of treason and forced to live as an outlaw with his infant son Daigoro following the murder of his wife. He was memorably introduced to the west with this US release, edited together from the first two film adaptations, Baby Cart to Hades and Baby Cart at the River Styx, both directed by Kenji Misumi and released in 1. Fondly remembered by a generation weaned on VHS (its graphic violence saw the film consigned to the video nasties list in the 1. American version is effectively an . Shogun Assassin certainly preserves the hyper- realistic arterial spurts and bone- crushing violence of the originals, but loses out on the moments of Zen- like stillness. The originals are undeniable classics and well worth checking out, but Shogun Assassin nonetheless remains a hugely- entertaining guilty pleasure in its own right. Twilight Samurai (2. Director Yoji Yamada. The Twilight Samurai (2. The man responsible for bringing the loveable travelling salesman Tora- san to the screen in the long- running It’s Tough Being a Man (1. As an antidote to Hollywood’s post- 9/1. Japanese feudal history in Edward Zwick’s The Last Samurai (2. Yamada’s affable take on the samurai as low- ranking everyman, Twilight Samurai stems from a similar political standpoint as the director’s earlier comedy dramas. Its hero is a petty bureaucrat forced to react against the personal and wider historical circumstances he finds himself beset by in the twilight years of the feudal era preceding the Meiji Restoration of 1. The first of Yamada’s . As in his takes on yakuza gangster films in the late- 1. Takashi Miike’s revisionism veers more towards the stylistic rather than the socio- political end of things, in this remake of Eichi Kudo’s 1. Kudo’s work, produced at Toei and thus little- known in the west, were made during a decline in popularity in jidaigeki and marked with the era’s concern for a greater degree of gritty realism. His signature samurai action films, based on original stories, vibrantly captured the spirit of the times, with titles like The Great Killing (1.
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