It is not at all unusual in Japanese movies, particularly jidai-geki or chanbara, to be dropped into the action without what Euro/American films would consider to be exposition. Nor is it all that rare to have characters introduced by some trait or function that later turns out to have almost nothing to do with the story. This is certainly a fine example of those story-telling methods.
We begin with five apparently unrelated characters and/or plots, introduced in a brisk series of five scenes separated by sharp wipes but connected by an ominous underlying drum beat provided by Ichiro Saito: 1) a strange man (Kazuo Hasegawa), apparently a traveling monk of some sort though his head is unshaven, who is suddenly accosted by a beautiful young woman (Fujiko Yamamoto) who wants to kill him in revenge for her father’s death; 2) a female pickpocket (Chikage Yawashima) with some spectacular acrobatic skills; 3) a young swordsman (Raizo Ichikawa) who leaves his father’s dojo to find greater challenges elsewhere; 4) a mysterious old man held prisoner in a mountain cave; and 5) a plot to overthrow the Shogunate, headed by a quite literally mad daimyo who is kept locked in a cell where he dances and plays his drum, but put together by a follower.
These overlap in convoluted ways, many of which end up with the women in particular suddenly both changing their minds and losing their skills. Yawashima turns out to be the daughter of the old man who has been sent to the province to report on the plot, so why she needed to be a ninja and a pickpocket is unclear. Hasegawa is also trying to find the old man to get his report for the Shogun. Ichikawa in particular seems to have no real function in what we would see as the real plot of the movie — he just keeps popping up now and again to challenge Hasegawa to a match, which Hasegawa always refuses, or to rescue Yamamoto in a moment of distress, though he has never seen her before.
How much of this abruptness may be a result of cramming in as much of the original novel as possible in a short time I couldn’t say (no English translation exists), but it is not at all unusual in popular entertainment films that I have come across. At least until the comic book movies came along, Americans have expected things to happen in something of a cause and effect sequence, but that does not seem to have ever been essential to Japanese movie makers. Certainly many Japanese movies do follow cause and effect narrative lines, though the causes may be culturally difficult for non-Japanese to understand, and many make careful exposition, but many others simply do not bother. “Things happen because they happen” seems a rather casual approach to story-telling, but the same attitude can be found in some of the most serious and socially perceptive works of the finest directors as well.* And also, as far as I can tell, after the necessary deaths the remaining principal characters go their own way with no romantic pairings such as would happen in almost any American film of a similar nature.
As so often happens with Japanese titles, this one gives no clue to the outsider. There is no Naruto character who has a secret. The Naruto straits separate the island of Awa, where the events occur, from the main island of Japan, so it signifies the secret kept by the Naruto straits, which were notoriously dangerous for boats at the time of the story and which figure in the ending though they are not actually seen.
There are of course opportunities for Hasegawa and Ichikawa to demonstrate their sword prowess — Ichikawa even has a special move in which he does a flip before slicing. And there are some nice editing tricks to make Yawashima seem a lot more agile than any woman in a kimono could be.
The movie is directed by Kinugasa, who was certainly no hack, and the visual composition of individual shots is arguably better than in Gate of Hell, where his immediate concern was to get as much out of the color as possible. Here, the color is equally intense but without the tight palette control of that earlier film. The music is used in an American manner, by which I mean that it often provides a sense of tension that is not actually present in the visible action, while much of it is purely percussive.
All in all, a fine example of the entertainment movie of the fifties, with stars acting like stars, striking sets and color design, and lots of incident. But don’t expect it to make sense until somewhere near the end, when everything at last becomes clear (if not necessarily logical).
* For only a sample, see Mr. Thank-you, Glow of the Firefly, An Inn at Osaka, or Policeman’s Diary.
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