The 47 Ronin

The 47 Ronin is a legendary samurai story based on a true incident from the era in Japan which saw the decline of the samurai system. A group of warriors become "leaderless samurai," known as ronin, when their lord is forced to commit ritual suicide for assaulting an official. After months of planning, they take revenge on the official who decreed their leader's fate and in turn they must themselves pay the ultimate price for taking vengeance. The story exemplified the honor code which persisted even into the twentieth century. The story has inspired countless plays, Kabuki, puppet plays, and at least a dozen films.

One of the most striking and unconventional film versions of the tale is the two-part, nearly four-hour epic made by director Kenji Mizoguchi, and released in 1941 and 1942. The government foisted the project on the director as a wartime morale booster, and as justification for the expansionist, nationalistic, and ultimately suicidal world war that Japan was embroiled in during the middle of the 20th century. It took two studios to make it, bankrupting one of them, and was not a hit. Unlike most samurai films, there is little action or bloodshed; instead The 47 Ronin is both a dazzling showcase for Mizoguchi's mastery of style, and a thoughtful meditation on life, death, loyalty and honor.

Technically, The 47 Ronin is a marvel, with long, swooping tracking shots and meticulously planned deep-focus staging. In a 1975 interview, production designer Hiroshi Mizutani recalled that The 47 Ronin was the first time that he and Mizoguchi used a blueprint for the set, and the director used it to carefully plot out his camera moves and angles. Mizutani also recalled that all the props were real antiques, not papier-mache. Thematically, Mizoguchi used the film to express his own doubts about the principles that it was supposed to extol -- the characters spend more time discussing and questioning the Japanese code of honor than actually carrying it out. As film historian David Thomson notes, "The use of the camera to convey emotional ideas or intelligent feelings is the definition of cinema derived from Mizoguchi's films." Still, government officials found that that the film satisfied their mandate, and gave The 47 Ronin a special award.

Mizoguchi died in 1956, after a prolific career that had begun in the silent era. Unfortunately, many of his films have been lost, and opportunities to see the surviving ones in the west are rare and worth seeking out. As recently as 2014, critic Richard Brody wrote in The New Yorker, "I consider Mizoguchi to be not just the greatest Japanese director but one of the handful of the greatest filmmakers ever."

Director: Kenji Mizoguchi
Producer: Shintaro Shirai
Screenplay: Kenichiro Hara, Yoshikata Yoda, based on the play by Seika Mayama
Cinematography: Kohei Sugiyama
Editor: Takako Kuji
Costume Design: Ryuzo Kawada, Yoshisaburo Okumura
Production Design: Hiroshi Mizutani
Music: Shiro Fukai
Principal Cast: Choguro Kawarasaki (Kuranosuke Oishi), Kanemon Nakamura (Sukeimon Tomimuri), Kunitaro Kawarazaki (Jurozaemon Isogai), Yoshisaburo Arashi (Lord Asano) Mitsuko Miura (Lady Asano)
223 minutes

by Margarita Landazuri