Sword of the Beast

Hideo Gosha's Sword of the Beast
is a harsh, cynical samurai movie that questions the assumptions of the
often glamorized samurai code. Gennosuke (Mikijiro Hira) is an outcast
samurai betrayed by his superiors, tricked into killing a political
leader and then forced to go on the run. The film suggests that the
much-vaunted samurai code is actually a tool of political control and
oppression, a method of establishing a rigid hierarchy in which the poor
are kept in their place, occasionally offered an opportunity to advance
by superiors who seldom follow through on these promises. It's obvious
that the film's dark satire of the feudal system is a parallel to 60s
Japan, another transitional place and time. Gennosuke is seeking to
reform the bushido code, to introduce new ideas that would allow for
more social mobility and greater fluidity in the samurai ranks, reducing
the extent to which the highest samurai positions were a matter of
inheritance and wealth. Gosha clearly intended for the film's situation
to apply more or less directly to his own era, to social inequities and
the political exploitation of the lower classes, who in this film are
used and manipulated and then discarded when their purpose has been
served.

This is a very dark vision, a very negative perspective
on the samurai code — there's little trace here of the honor and
chivalry that so often characterize the relationships between samurai
warriors in popular movie representations. Gennosuke is on the run from
his old friend Daizaburo (Kantarô Suga) and Daizaburo's fiancée Misa
(Toshie Kimura) because Gennosuke had killed Misa's father; they've
vowed vengeance as a result. Again and again, the pursuers catch up to
Gennosuke and he avoids them; he scandalizes and shocks Daizaburo by
running away rather than standing up to them and fighting. The whole
situation is so unbalanced that there's very little honor in it, anyway:
the pursuers are accompanied by a samurai master and a squad of
soldiers, and they engage in dirty tricks while trying to capture the
fleeing ronin. During the opening credits, Gennosuke is seduced by a
woman who turns out to have been hired by Misa's party to distract the
ronin and lead him into a trap. Later, they bribe innkeepers and sneak
up on their target, ambushing him when they believe he's sleeping or not
on alert. There's no honor in this, no sense of the usual one-on-one
samurai duel between two equals. Instead, the pursuers even hire
criminal thugs to help them, and the samurai master justifies it by
saying that, in matters of revenge, the samurai code deems these
ordinarily immoral actions permissible.

The film's basic thrust
is this consideration of what it means to be moral within such an
immoral system. Gennosuke is considered an outcast, a ronin who
committed an unforgivable act, and he is called a beast. In fact,
though, he is the only character in the film who truly acts with decency
towards the people he meets, particularly the young samurai Jurata (Go
Kato) and his wife Taka (Shima Iwashita). They're looking for gold in
the mountains, working on behalf of their impoverished clan, stealing
gold from government land in secret; they too have sacrificed themselves
for the sake of their superiors, and it's obvious that their reward, if
there even is one, won't be worth the work they put in on behalf of
their leaders. Gennosuke initially plans to steal the couple's gold,
deciding to give in, to become the beast that everyone says he is, but
he's too decent at heart to really go through with this scheme.


Gosha explores this moral conflict in
heavy-handed dialogue scenes that spell out the film's themes in big
block letters whenever possible. If there's one thing Sword of the
Beast isn't, it's subtle. It's actually fairly crude and broad, and
its treatment of its female characters is questionable, to say the
least. The women in this film are often seductresses and betrayers, like
the woman in the opening scene who uses her body to lure Gennosuke into
a trap, or Osen (Yôko Mihara), an assassin who seduces men by
suggestively baring her shoulders or stripping to bathe, then tries to
kill the unsuspecting men. Misa is different, a strong-willed woman on a
mission of vengeance, but Gosha subjects her to a vile and violent rape
that eliminates her composure and self-sufficiency. The film contains
numerous such scenes of violence against women, and in virtually every
case, Gosha's cinematography seems to leer over the women as they're
violated and assaulted, exploiting the way their clothes rip and their
bodies are bared by the violence. It's apparent that Gosha intends for
these scenes to portay the dismal treatment of women, but he can't
resist ogling their bared flesh — and displaying them for audiences —
even as they're being attacked and raped.

This rather
contemptible disregard for women makes the film often difficult to
watch, even if in other ways it's an interesting take on the samurai
genre. Certainly, Gosha's feel for swordplay is admirable. He films the
action sequences in a brisk, on-the-run style that captures the frenetic
pace and confusion of these battles. The camera frequently tracks the
fighters as they run, occasionally stopping for an exchange of sword
thrusts. The battles almost all take place on the move, with very few
static showdowns; the fighters are running and circling one another,
chasing each other, doing battle while in motion, barely stopping once
one opponent has been dispatched before moving on to the next. Gosha's
camera frequently shoots the fighters in close quarters, where their
sword thrusts are rapid blurs slicing through the air, or else obscured
from within a field of high grass, the fighters just barely visible
through the foliage. This approach gives the impression of real, messy
battles playing out rather than carefully choreographed movie duels. The
sword fights are thrilling and viscerally intense in a way that cleaner
choreography wouldn't be able to accomplish.

The movie's
dialogue also has a certain blunt economy that's refreshing, in the way
that the pulpy dialogue of American film noir is refreshing. After
dispatching a number of would-be gold poachers, Jurota flatly tells his
wife, "Cheer up. I'll go take care of the bodies." The dialogue is often
like this, sharp and almost funny in its offhand brutality, and there
are stretches where the film can be appreciated as pulp trash, complete
with over-the-top femme fatales and bracing scenes of violence. That's
part of the problem, maybe, this conflict between different modes. On
the one hand, Sword of the Beast is a serious-minded social
satire, an examination of class oppression and the rigid hierarchies
that prevent people from advancing in life. On the other hand, however,
it's a gaudy exploitation picture, tantalizing audiences with hints of
female flesh and bursts of violence. The conflict between these two
tendencies isn't resolved here, resulting in a film that seems to be
constantly fighting in two different directions at once.