The story in fact could have come from dozens of Westerns just as well as anything Japanese. Soon after the film opens we meet "Dora-heita," a somewhat dismissive nickname (more or less means "alley cat") for a samurai who has just entered town as a new magistrate. To the dismay of the other magistrates ruling the fief, Dora-heita has permission from their ruling Lord to clean up a near-by town that boasts an impressive array of vice and depravity. Oddly enough, it's apparently ignored by the magistrates who claim nothing can be done about it. Only problem for the clean-up goal is that Dora-heita himself is a drunken, gambling womanizer who perpetually ignores magistrate rules in favor of perpetual carousing. He also soon has a figure from his past in hot pursuit for more twists. Most viewers can't help but be reminded of Kurosawa's Yojimbo at the least, especially as the story grows more complicated.
Dora-heita's vision of samurai films decidedly leans more towards subtlety than slapstick. Even the few swordfights are brief and almost after-thoughts though that's appropriate to Dora-heita's lax manner. A recurring gag is the local scribes who chronicle every day's events but consistently report only that Dora-heita has not appeared in his office. Not a knee-slapping joke certainly but it does play on the confusion generated by Dora-heita, as well as underlining a broader theme of how many important events never make the history books. Much of the humor is character-driven, at its best when showing Dora-heita's possibly inebriated battle of wits with those who would cheat him and at its worst with stereotypical women shrews whose sole purpose seems to be to nag.
While the film covers familiar territory and runs at least half an hour longer than it should, it benefits greatly from Ichikawa's painterly eye. His framings tend to be balanced though not symmetrical and he seemingly can't help paying as much attention to light pouring through a house's dust or the village's morning mist as he does to the people in the film. It's an oddly sedate approach to a story about hidden power politics and human weaknesses but if nothing else at least keeps the film from feeling tossed off. Perhaps the style is another reason for no slapstick: Ichikawa is far too restrained for the violence of unleashed comedy and his few attempts aren't entirely convincing.
AnimEigo's DVD is as clear as you'd expect from such a recent film and is letterboxed at 1.85. One nice touch is the use of different color subtitles for different speakers and occasional explanatory notes that appear at the top of the screen. Without such notes most of us wouldn't know, for example, why one samurai asks another about his feet; it's not a fetish but a traditional Japanese belief that ghosts don't have feet. This subtitle technique has been around for a few years but never used as much as it could be. The disc also includes a small selection of trailers for similar films.
For more information about Dora-Heita, visit AnimEigo. To order Dora-Heita, go to TCM Shopping.
by Lang Thompson
