The primary interest of Duel at Yagyu Valley is that it is a real chanbara film released in 1945, and few if any others of these made during the war years have survived. For the most part, it doesn’t appear to have been made with any particular propaganda purpose in mind.
How mainstream it might have been is open to argument, since we have so little information, but as it follows a structure that would be common to so much of later chanbara, we can probably assume it is fairly typical of chanbara during the war years.
Hozoin has been roaming the land trying to perfect his technique so that he can go back to Yagyu and challenge the great master there. In the meantime, he gets caught up in someone else’s problems which have to be resolved in a great fight. In this case, a young man and his sister are seeking their brother who as it happens was murdered on the road by the Kijin school who were stopping men to challenge to “test their skill.” Kijin tells the boy Hozoin did it, the boy learns that Hozoin the monk is a good man, and eventually the Kijin are killed in a typical fight when they ambush Hozoin. Then Hozoin can go off to his duel.
The oddity, given the way so many duels in later chanbara turn out, is that the final duel is in fact a duel, with no one killed and no new revenges taken. It’s also not particularly exciting to those raised on the more flamboyant chanbara of the 60s and 70s — there is no discernible activity visible to the untrained eye, rather like Olympic fencing but with spear against sword.
It also shows us Denjiro Okichi, who can be seen in the silent Jirokichi the Rat, in a role that is all but silent still, with a taciturnity that would make Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name seem an orator.
And we see some interesting scenery, especially the beautiful scenes of the fights in the woods with light filtering through the trees
and a lot of scenes by rivers and rocks that seem to be inserted purely to show us some beautiful rivers and rocks.
Directed by Eisuke Takizawa, the movie makes no special claim to our attention today except for its rarity. It is interesting enough to watch, but probably not worth any special effort to seek it out.
