Betrayal / Daisatsujin Orochi (1966)

If nothing else, Betrayal is a sign that lightning can strike anywhere in the movies. By 1966, Raizo Ichikawa was essentially living in the studios at Daiei, with 25 movies released in 1965-7, including multiple installments in his Shinobi no mono, Waka oyabun, and Sleepy Eyes series and several Nakano Spy and Aru koroshiya movies that might have developed into similar long-running series had he not fallen ill unexpectedly in 1968.  Tokuzo Tanaka was almost as busy, directing many of those same series films plus several Zatoichi. The same could be said for screenwriter Seiji Hoshikawa, who was cranking out scripts as quickly as they could be put in front of the camera, and Chikashi Makiura, who was possibly the least busy, photographing many of the same series but at the rate of only four a year. Given those conditions, no one could have expected them to produce one of the real gems of the chanbara genre, all but unknown outside Japan.

Betrayal begins with one of the most common and least explicable scenes in Japanese swordplay movies. A stranger rushes into a dojo and demands a “lesson,” but he is refused because the dojo is offically closed. This so outrages him that, as he rides away, he passes two men from the local clan and makes a comment about the clan’s cowardice, whereupon they attack him and kill him.  The rival clan, much richer, demands revenge, but it turns out that one of the killers was the son of the clan’s daimyo. The lord  convinces Ichikawa, for the good of the clan, to run away and hide for a year, so everyone thinks he is the killer, promising to set things right during that time. Unfortunately, the daimyo has a heart attack and no one knows about the deal, except the real killer, so soon both clans and the police are all after Ichikawa.

From this point we follow his social decline as well as his realization that the Samurai Code of Honor actually had no meaning. His purse is stolen when rescuing a drowning child so he is forced to learn how the working people are mistreated because he has to go to work himself. After a battle with his old sensei on a cliff side, he is nursed back to health by a woman who commits suicide after she is raped by two samurai chasing him, sending him into an alcoholic decline until he becomes a bodyguard for a yakuza boss who sells him to the police. The move from honorable innocence to cynical collapse gives Ichikawa a chance at one of his best and most varied performances.

Fortunately for chanbara fans (and unfortunately for non-fans), this culminates in a magnificent (or ludicrous) one-against-a-hundred finale.

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There was always in the chanbara a “can you top this?” challenge to finding a way to stage the great battle, and in 1966, Betrayal and the more famous Sword of Doom went about as far as it is possible to go with any hope of believability, even for die-hard fans, their body counts rivaling The Wild Bunch without any machine guns.  But where Sword of Doom left Tatsuya Nakadai frozen in mid slash within his cramped room, Betrayal carries the fight to its conclusion in the street.

The remarkable aspect of this over-the-top scene is that it is never repetitious. Ever new ways are found to attack Ichikawa, all of which are plausible (none of the silly shooting the dynamite that just happens to be lying around that mars westerns like Rio Bravo, for example, or the magical discovery of a Gatling gun). You may not believe that one man could fend off so many different attacks, but you can believe that he could deal with each different one. The other unusual feature is that Ichikawa is exhausted by the fight. Somehow the usual chanbara hero seems to always be physically ready for his attacker, but even partway through the fight Ichikawa can barely keep on his feet. This provides an unusual veneer of reality to all the exaggerated fighting, matched perhaps only by the duel in Scars of Honor and the similar finale of Orochi.

At one point, his sword is broken and he has to peel his hand off the handle finger by finger, so tightly has he been holding it. This particular bit, the exhaustion, and the vast army of men sent to capture him hark back to one of the genuine classics of chanbara, the silent Orochi, but despite its Japanese title, the movie is more an homage than a remake of that classic. Ichikawa’s personality and the reasons for his expulsion from the clan are completely different.

Even within the non-swordplay scenes, there is an unusual care and subtlety. For example, when, after years, Ichikawa finds his true love now in a brothel, their meeting is handled in silence, without a word and without music, just with their eyes speaking.

All of this is photographed with an eye for composition that might often make you think Kobayashi had directed it. Almost every scene is gorgeous, in a way that none of Tanaka’s or his photographer’s color films suggest he was ever capable of producing, as professional as those might be.

Rather like Eiichi Kudo when making 13 Assassins or The Great Killing, Tanaka’s reversion to black and white here seems to have channeled both the spirit and the eye of Japan’s most traditional film-makers and produced something extraordinary. As such, it can hold its head high within the great age of widescreen chanbara, almost all in black & white, that begins roughly with Hidden Fortress and continues through to Kiru, Okamoto’s semi-deranged homage to the genre as a whole and Kurosawa in particular.

For any chanbara fan, this is worth the extra effort to find a copy.