Tenchu / Hitokiri (1969)

Hitokiri is a magnificent historical epic set in the 1860s and anchored by a character study featuring Shintaro Katsu in one of his finest, most complex roles, Tatsuya Nakadai as his devious master, and plenty of swordfights, blood, visual imagination, and even a strange kind of love story. However, this can be a very confusing period, especially to non-Japanese viewers, so you may wish to look at the very brief summary in the long footnote below.

Katsu plays Izo Okada, a lonely and poor samurai in the small and poor Tosa clan. Unable even to sell his armor, which falls apart when touched, he falls under the spell of Hanpeita (Tatsuya Nakadai), who sends Okada to observe three men sent to assassinate a samurai called Yoshida. This does not go well, in the sense that it is much more realistic than the usual chanbara fight in the moonlight, and it takes a long time for Yoshida to finally die. Okada is inspired by the slogan they use – tenchu, meaning heaven’s punishment – and by his belief that he could be a far better killer, which turns out to be true.

Soon afterward, we shift to Kyoto, where Hanpeita and his men have gone, and the narrator provides a long list of Okada’s murders. Okada, however, does not seem to have changed much. He is still the crude, vulgar, and dirty fellow he was at the beginning (which is not the way the history/legend describe him). Had we not seen the armor, we might think he was a peasant trying to become a samurai. He is not all that bright and is in such awe of Hanpeita that he is content to do anything he is told without question and to live on the pittance he receives after each kill. Even the prostitute he regularly visits berates him for his stupidity, since they only pay him enough to afford her rather than a real geisha like the the other samurai hire. He keeps crossing paths with Ryoma Sakamoto (Yujiro Ishihara), who warns Okada that a master will often turn on the most faithful dog when a mistake is made, but his trust in Hanpeita is complete. After he rushes to aid in an assassination that he was not ordered to participate in, Hanpeita refuses to pay him. Unable to find work with other clans, he returns in even more abject submission. One morning, he is rousted from his stupor in the whore’s room by the “Ronin Patrol” and obstinately refuses to give his name, so they arrest him. Fearing a political trap, Hanpeita refuses to identify him to get his release, so he serves 18 months in jail for vagrancy, after which he is sent home. His only friend from the old days appears with some poisoned sake; the friend dies drinking the sake to prove it is safe, but Okada survives, only to be questioned by a commission about the Yoshida murder years earlier. He promises to reveal the true killers, if money is sent to pay off the prostitute’s debts, and then spontaneously confesses to all his other murders, leading to his own execution.

Hideo Gosha made so many fine movies that we can hesitate to call this his masterpiece, but the film’s anchor in not just a set of historical incidents but also the complex and unusual character of Okada gives it a greater emotional depth than many of Gosha’s other superb genre films. In addition, it demonstrates a marvelous control of the camera. Like Goyokin made the same year with a different photographer, it is a color film full of shadows, as beautifully framed and controlled as in the finest black and white films of the era.

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There are excellent performances by Nakadai which by this date we almost take for granted and by Mitsuko Baisho as the prostitute, but it is Katsu who must hold the movie together.

Mitsuko Baisho

He combines the physicality and crudity that had emerged as early as Killer Whale with the more open emotional intensity of Devil’s Temple, while still making clear his desperate need for someone he can trust and his earth-shattering collapse when that trust is finally betrayed. Though distributed by Daiei, the movie was produced by Katsu’s own company, indicating that he seriously wanted to play the role, perhaps even over the studio’s objection. By 1969, Katsu’s relationship with Daiei was ending. He set up his own production company in 1967, which produced Tenchu, his last movie distributed by Daiei; his Daiei Hoodlum Soldier and Bad Reputation series both came to an end and all later Zatoichis were distributed by Toho. Though we have no clear evidence explaining this break-up, it is clear from his own productions that he was trying to expand his series personae, first with the art-house detective movie Man Without a Map and then Tenchu, while all his later Zatoichis were much darker and more nihilistic in tone.

Gosha has long been a cult figure for action movie fans, but Hitokiri and Goyokin, made back to back, are among the finest movies made in Japan, whatever their genre.

* During the years after the foreigners appeared in Tokyo Bay, Japanese politics threw up an enormous number of revolutionary plots. By 1861-62, the most visible of these was the sonno-joi (revere the emperor, expel the barbarians) that sought to overthrow the Shogunate and restore the Emperor to authority. That movement in itself took many forms, but initially was masterminded by Hanpeita Takechi of the relatively small and poor Tosa clan. He worked primarily through a set of four assassins, the hitokiri, including Izo Okada, the subject of this movie, who murdered at least seven men (though the list in the movie is longer) and Shinbei Tanaka. The threat of these assassins led to the Shogun’s organization of the group that eventually became the Shinsengumi to act as his own protection when he visited Kyoto to consult with the Emperor personally and marry the Emperor’s sister, and the Shinsengumi became the most powerful force in Kyoto, until the combination of their own infighting, over-reach, and opposition from the Satsuma and Chosu clans led to their destruction. In 1864, another poor northern clan tried to organize a rebellion along the same lines as the sonno-joi, which eventually became the tengu-to and was again destroyed by its own infighting. Shortly afterward, the various plots erupted into open warfare, during which the Shogun was defeated. Thus, if you are trying to deal with history through sixties movies, Hitokiri mostly lies between Samurai Assassin and Ansatsu, with the various Shinsengumi movies following, then Tengo-tu and continuing into the Boshin War touched on in Red Lion that defeated the Shogun completely. Movies being movies, their accuracy in detail is not necessarily trustworthy, but in general shape, they provide a good insight into the 1860s, at least as seen through the eyes of the 1960s.