Samurai I / Musashi Miyamoto (1954)

There are several stories that Japanese audiences apparently can’t get enough of, and thus remakes seem to occur even more often in Japanese movies than in American ones. The most common is the story of the 47 Ronin, based on a historical event. This has appeared so often, sometimes even twice in a year from different studios, that there does not seem to be an accurate list anywhere of all its film versions. Another endlessly popular story is the Daibosatsu Pass saga, drawn not from history but from a popular serial, which in most movie adaptations is amazingly nihilistic for such a popular story.  In between these two extremes is the Musashi Miyamoto story, which chronicles the transformation of a man who can’t control his temper into the greatest swordsman of all time and a perfect exemplar of Samurai honor and Buddhist serenity.

Miyamoto was a real person, and according to his own writings at least, he was a wonder of wonders, both a philosopher and a great swordsman, the first to use both the long and the short sword simultaneously. But the known movie versions all are based on a popular serial of the 1930s by Eiji Yoshikawa rather than Myamoto’s own writings. Daisuke Ito made a pre-war trilogy and Uchida would later make a 5-part version in the early sixties to name only the most noted among the other versions. Other single features regularly appeared in theaters, on TV, and of course in anime and video games. But this version by Inagaki, winner of an Academy Award as best foreign film and one of Criterion’s earliest DVD releases, is the one most widely available to Americans.

As often seen in Inagaki’s jidai-geki, there is plenty of spectacle to go around, with massive battle scenes and cavalry charges, armies on the march, entire villages scouring the woods for outlaws, and parades through Kyoto.

Takezo and Matahachi dream of glory

But what sets this particular version apart from others is that it has Toshiro Mifune as Musashi. When you’re depicting one of the greatest Samurai figures, whether fact or legend, it never hurts to have charisma on your side, and Mifune provides that like no other star of his time.

This is actually not the first time Mifune played Musashi; he made a powerful silent appearance as the character in Inagaki’s Kojiro Sasaki, appearing for the duel on Ganryu Island that will eventually conclude this trilogy. But here in Part I, we see the making of Musashi, long before he becomes the master swordsman of his time.

His real name is Takezo, a young peasant who, like many others in Japanese films, can’t resist the call of the army passing through his village of Miyamoto. He and his friend Matahachi (Rentaro Mikuni) both join up, hoping that they can distinguish themselves in such a way as to gain Samurai status. Unfortunately, the army is marching to Sekigahara, and they have picked the wrong side. Struggling to escape, with Matahachi wounded, they come across an isolated cabin with a woman and her daughter where they are taken in.

Takezo resists temptation

The women themselves are outlaws of sorts — like the women in Onibaba, they make their living stripping the armor from dead samurai — and in his attempt to protect them, Takezo becomes a hunted man himself. But he is captured by an odd monk who first strings him up in a tree and then later locks him away in the attic of Kyoto castle for three years where he is forced to study the religious texts locked in with him.

The beginning of the monk’s lessons

Freed at last when his wild temper has been tamed, he is given his Samurai name, Musashi Miyamoto after his home village, and then embarks on a long journey across Japan to both perfect his sword technique and purify his soul.

We also have two interlocking love triangles. In the village is Otsu to whom Matahachi is promised but who carries a torch for Takezo. Similarly, when the men  meet the two women in their hidden cabin, Takezo rejects the advances of both, but Matahachi jealously tries to replace him with Akemi and eventually marries her (Mariko Okada in one of her earliest significant roles). This may seem familiar, as we have seen the formula in Inagaki’s Sengoku burai (1952) and will see it again in dozens, if not hundreds, of other chanbara in following years. Rather than following armies to find Takezo, however, Otsu waits patiently by a bridge outside the castle, where he will bid her what is apparently a final farewell that concludes the movie but where she will contnue to wait for years to come.

All of this is told by a master film maker. Only after writing a number of posts for this blog did I begin to understand how important Inagaki was to the development of the Japanese chanbara. In a sense, he is Japan’s John Ford (but without Monument Valley to give his movies a unique look).  In the post-war world, he made the chanbara respectable, just as Ford did for the American Western, making it more than just a move from fight to fight. In the process he also firmly established the framework and the yardstick against which every other chanbara would be measured, while making a form of great flexibility that could be a way to examine his nation’s soul as well as its history. Others later would turn the form to more cynical explorations, so to speak, just as the Westerns of the sixties and seventies began to be more cynical about the American West, and in general viewers of today find these more congenial to our world-view. But they all, to one degree or another, walk in Inagaki’s footsteps.

When I looked at this anew for the post, I realized that it also is one of the few detailed explanations of one of the most contradictory aspects of the Samurai film ethos: the association of purity of soul with killing efficiency through one’s sword skill, which would seem to be mutually contradictory impulses. Americans dealt with that contradiction in the Western by making sure the hero’s duel, however reluctant he may be to fight, is with a clearly identifiable villain. Thus, we don’t need to examine Shane’s soul because he is standing up for the defenseless against Jack Palance. In the chanbara, the Seven Samurai are the exception, not the rule; only perfection matters and the defenselessness of the poor or the weak are not the hero’s problem, and we often see duels to the death for no reason except to prove whose technique is better.

Here, we see Musashi’s development more clearly, because Takezo is not tamed by a sword master but by a monk, and his natural skills are honed by meditation and religious texts. And in his scene with Otsu on the bridge, he rejects all personal ties as he begins a pursuit of absolute perfection traveling across the country to be alone and to duel with as many others as possible.

Although it is a bit hard to accept Mifune as the naive young man at the beginning, once he gets in stride he is as good as you would expect, from convincing wild man to determined loner. Once again, I am impressed by the workload of Japanese stars of this era. Given the release dates, we might think that Mifune went directly from Seven Samurai to this movie, but he in fact appears to have made two others in between and another four or five before the trilogy was finished.  Rentaro Mikune adds another of those odd characters he would often play, handsome and likeable yet somehow weak and untrustworthy.

And we should note that this was also Inagaki’s first color film.

I’ll look at other portions of the trilogy in later posts, but this stands on its own quite well.