As the credits play over Three Outlaw Samurai (1964), we see only feet marching through the lonely landscape as if on mission. No face and no identity, only a scruffy wandering samurai on the move. A commotion at a nearby hut draws his attention, and he interrupts a trio of peasants who have kidnapped the daughter of the local magistrate. His next move is not at all what one might expect given this situation.
Samurai cinema, or chanbara as it is known in Japan, is largely defined in the West by Akira Kurosawa. He celebrated the ideals of the samurai code in Seven Samurai (1954), which exported the genre around the world, and then turned the themes of honor and chivalry upside down with a cynical hero in a corrupt world with Yojimbo (1961). (Not coincidently, both were remade as successful westerns.) In those terms, Three Outlaw Samurai can be seen as a scrappy twist on Seven Samurai—in this case, a trio of mercenary warriors side with oppressed peasant farmers against a corrupt magistrate—with a post-Yojimbo sensibility, but the similarities end there, thanks to the distinctive sensibility of director Hideo Gosha, who made his feature directing debut with this tough, cynical, often surprising samurai thriller.
Gosha was born in Tokyo in 1929, the son of a street peddler and part-time bodyguard, and grew up among the struggling lower classes and small-time criminals of the Asakusa district. During World War II, as a young teenager, he trained a kamikaze pilot, a fate he escaped when the war ended before he was sent up, but he returned home to find some of his siblings had been killed in the war. According to his daughter, these experiences defined his philosophy and drove him to survive at all costs. He studied economics at university and worked as a reporter and producer for radio before he moved to TV in 1957 and began a career directing for Fuji Television. He made crime shows and social dramas and then tackled the chanbara, which was to Japan what westerns were to the U.S. His television show Three Outlaw Samurai became a sensation and Shochiku, one of the major film studios in Japan, signed Gosha to make his feature directing debut with a big screen version.
Gosha reunites the three stars of the show's debut season for the feature, a prequel that tells the story of how the title characters first met and stands on its own as an original samurai action thriller. Tetsurô Tanba takes the lead as Shiba, the wandering ronin of the opening scene. Wily, unpredictable, with an offbeat sense of humor, it's a character that recalls Toshiro Mifune's scruffy Sanjuro in Kurosawa's Yojimbo. Tanba's star was on the rise when he signed on to the series, thanks in part to a memorable role in Kobayashi’s Harakiri (1962). This film marked his final appearance in the role of Shiba; he left the series for a busy career on both the big and the small screen, including a major supporting role as the head of the Japanese Secret Service in the international blockbuster You Only Live Twice (1967) opposite Sean Connery as James Bond. He ultimately appeared in more than 300 movies and TV shows in a long career and continued to perform until his death in 2006 at the age of 84.
Isamu Nagato, on the other hand, was largely unknown when he appeared in the first season of the series, and he returned to play the easy-going but principled Sakura through the entire six-season run of the show. Completing the trio is Mikijirô Hira playing the cynical Kikyô, a skilled swordsman who has given up on the ideals of the samurai code, or so he thinks until he watches the man to whom he has sold his services break his word without blinking. In Gosha's world, loyalty is virtue but not when it conflicts with honor. Hira had been a stage actor when he made his TV debut in Three Outlaw Samurai. Like Nagato, he remained with the show for the entire six-season run, continuing his career in TV, film and theater, where he earned a reputation as Japan's greatest Shakespearean actor.
Filled with twists, betrayals and expertly choreographed action, Three Outlaw Samurai became a hit and launched Gosha on a career making samurai films and yakuza (crime) thrillers. In the 1980s, he shifted his focus to women protagonists living in in the same mercenary world as his samurai and yazuka characters, and he won the Japanese Academy Prize for best director for his 1983 drama The Geisha. Yet he never enjoyed the international attention that such contemporaries as Kurosawa, Kon Ichikawa or Masaki Kobayashi received and was often dismissed by Japanese critics despite the popularity of his films. Thanks to home video (including the Criterion Collection release of two films) and revival screenings, new audiences have had the opportunity to revisit and reassess his work in Japan and around the world.
Sources:
"Hideo Gosha: The Manly Way," Robin Gatto. Midnight Eye, 23 September 2013
"A Director's Cuts: The Samurai Savvy of Hideo Gosha," Stephen Hunter. Washington Post, September 25, 2005.
"Three Outlaw Samurai: The Disloyal Bunch," Bilge Ebiri. The Criterion Collection, 2012.
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