Kill!

Saw Kill!, another samurai movie. This is the first in a while that wasn't about bureaucrats being assassinated. No, this one was a dark comedy. It opens with a starving ronin arriving in ruined town. He's told by some remaining villagers that an old lady runs an eatery down the road so he runs over eagerly, only to find she's hung herself. Amazing. The comic mischief is not really great, stunted as it is by distance from my familiar culture (and by my general grumpiness when it comes to comedy) but the film hold together fairly well as a knotty heist-ish movie.

The main plot involves a group of samurai hiding out in a mountain safe-house (they had recently assassinated a bureaucrat. Seriously.) and being sieged by another group. The clan leaders and city officials scheme and double-cross the groups, setting them against each other and trying to keep the peace. Against all of this and muddying the waters are a farmer ronin who wants to become a samurai and an ex-samurai turned beggar. There's a lot of plates spinning.

Comedies often keep many plates spinning to prevent any one comic storyline from becoming stale and samurai movies seem to tend towards very intricate plots. This film contains a double-whammy of plotlines and it's to the film's credit that wasn't harder to follow them all. But it was fairly hard to follow them all, alas, and I think I didn't get everything that happened.

Not one of my favorites - I got kind of lost in all of the plots and silliness. That silliness by the way is often dark - people getting hilariously killed at just the right moment. It's exaggerated enough that it was more funny than tragic however. The rest of the film is the usual sort of mafia film - lots of double-crosses and sudden twists.

Like the other samurai movies however, there's a deep distrust of petty tyrants. Authority is respected at high enough levels, but the local magistrates and ombudsmen are not to be trusted. These films come from the 60s. I wonder if this had anything to do with relaxing social standards, or with the recent defeat in WW2? It's all a rich tapestry I suppose.