Movies: Sword of the Beast

By Serdar Yegulalp on 2005-11-12 04:19:31 No comments

Sword of the Beast plunges us immediately into its story with so little forewarning that for a long time we’re not sure if the character we’re seeing is worthy of our sympathy or our derision—just what’s needed in a movie loaded with moral ambiguities. When we first encounter Gennosuke (Mikijiro Hira, of Zipang and the undeservedly obscure Face of Another), he’s hiding out in the tall reeds from men who have presumably come to kill him. A woman, possibly a prostitute, offers herself to him, and he obliges. Almost too late does he discover she was paid by the very same men to distract him, and after one of the film’s many vigorous and expertly choreographed swordfights he’s on the run once more.

Is he a criminal? He certainly has the air of one—the disdain for authority, the loner outlook, the unkempt appearance (the latter shown most hilariously in the movie’s opening shots of his unclean bare feet). It comes as more than a bit of surprise to discover that Gennosuke is in fact a samurai, fleeing men of his own clan for having murdered one of his own superiors. The dead man’s daughter and her fiancé are among the many giving chase, along with a master swordsman and his own collection of retainers. One of Beast’s ongoing conceits, as we will see, is that Gennosuke may well be the most moral of the bunch—or at least have the clearest picture of what right and wrong are at this point.

Beast interleaves Gennosuke’s adventures with flashbacks to the events that led up to his flight. He and several other men of his rank were dissatisfied with the way things were being run and petitioned for reforms. To clear the way for things to change, they murdered the one superior of theirs who objected most strongly. What complicates things all the more is that Gennosuke believed he was acting on the tacit approval of his immediate superior. Worse, there are hints that his superior was aware of Gennosuke’s zeal, and used it to achieve his own ends—to get rid of both a man he didn’t want and a hothead retainer who would only spell trouble in the long run.

Gennosuke’s cynicism of samurai power has forced him to find other ways to survive. He bumps into a layabout who’s heard about a possible cheap source of income: There’s gold in the waters flowing around a nearby mountain. The only downside to panning it and pocketing the results is that poaching is punishable by death—and there’s already a gang of other criminals who’ve staked out the territory for themselves. Further upriver is a samurai, Jurota (Go Kato, also seen in Samurai Rebellion) and his wife, freely poaching the gold to keep their struggling clan from being abolished. Jurota has also heard about Gennosuke, and would gladly kill him to claim the reward on his head—it’s that much more money for his clan, after all.

The movie uses its plotting to freely mirror the motives of each character in another: Jurota and his woman are in their own way just as cynical about samurai life as Gennosuke, but express it differently. There’s also the buffoonish fellow Gennosuke pairs with to pan the gold: at first Gen has nothing but contempt for the other man’s ambitions, if only because he knows what ambitions lead to now. Better to live without them than to impose them in other people and suffer the consequences. These contrasts are pushed to the surface all the more when Gennosuke saves Jurota’s wife from being raped and murdered by the bandits, and the two men form an uneasy alliance against the clansmen who have come to the mountain to kill them all.

I’ve written before that Japan’s samurai cinema was made mainly for its own audiences. A whole galaxy of filmmakers operating in that space have gone largely unnoticed in the West because of this, many of them not only technically solid but artistically accomplished in their ways as well. Hideo Gosha, director of Beast, is a name that many samurai-movie enthusiasts should know—he directed something like twenty good-to-excellent such movies during his career. Among them were a number of small masterpieces such as Goyokin, a beautifully-filmed and dramatically powerful samurai-revenge tale that deserves a wider audience. My first exposure to him was through the lurid and fascinating Hunter in the Dark, and in each movie he introduces multiple parties whose motives ultimately mirror and comment on each other when they clash.

Gosha handles both the drama and the fights excellently in Beast. There’s a later scene where Gennosuke at first considers seducing Jurota’s wife, then thinks better of it when he finds out the reasons why they’re on the mountain. Gosha films it for the most part a single, unbroken take, letting you drink in the way the emotions shift and twist between the two of them. In an early scene where Gen is ambushed in a roadside inn, the setup and payoff are perfect, and he loads the fight with compelling technical details: “Use short swords,” Gen’s would-be killer admonishes his men. “The ceilings are low in that building.” Both the high- and low-brow parts of the movie work, and what’s more, they work in concert.

Like most of the other A-picture samurai films of the 1960s, Beast is as much a commentary on the samurai mindset as a depiction of it. Gennosuke has good reason to be contemptuous of his kind: he was one of them, saw its worst aspects, and fled from it. What he cannot do, as we later find out, is warn others who are already in it and a part of it how little they are going to get back from it. Late in the film a woman is raped; Gennosuke looks on as she stoically dresses herself and fixes her hair. A samurai’s wife needs to maintain her dignity no matter what. What’s even more interesting is that Gen looks jealous—that, unlike him, she still believes she has dignity to maintain.