Measuring Out Heaven's Punishment Leaves You With Hell to Pay
Gosha had the right idea...

I finally got around to watching the DVD copy of Hideo Gosha's Hitokiri (aka Tenchu ["Heaven's Punishment"]) that I've had sitting on my shelf for about a month.

Back in my "anything and everything on celluloid" days in college, I watched this a few other of Gosha's movies. To me, besides being beautifully shot, Gosha was the balance between the higher art of the Kurosawa samurai film and the bloody more exploitave actioners like the Lone Wolf or Razor movies. The Gosha movies always featured a substantial plot, but had just enough blood spray slice-n-dice spread out through it.

I believe it was Gosha's Hunter in the Dark (1979) that featured my favorite severed limb scene ever. When the hero of the story attacks a house full of guys, the first victim to rush up to him ends up with his sword stuck in the ceiling with his hand still holding onto the sword's hilt and about half his arm hanging off it. The hilarious part is that throughout the rest of the fight, the arm can still be scene hanging off the sword which is hanging from the ceiling.

So let's get on with it:

Hitokiri (aka. Tenchu) (1969, d. Hideo Gosha)

The Story: In the midst of political turmoil amongst the Japanese clans during the power struggle between the emperor and the Shogunate, small town ronin Izo Okada joins the political machinations of fellow townsmen Hampeita Takechi. A ruthless Takechi manipulates simplistic Izo into a puppet killing machine who realizes only to late that what he thought was newfound wealth and glory was only a path to damnation.

The Review: First lets discuss the actors.

Tatsuya Nakadai, who plays Hampeita Takechi, was a samurai movie staple for nearly 30 years. He whooped @$$ for Kurosawa. He whooped @$$ for Gosha. He even whooped @$$ as the bad guy in a spaghetti western, Today We Kill, Tomorrow We Die! (1968). The man has a face carved out of smooth but hard stone. He has intense hypnotic eyes. His screen presence can emanate power. In short, a great actor for action films. Now, he doesn't whoop any @$$ with a sword in this movie, but his maneuvering is chockful of evil. Not being just a stupid action star, you believe that a man of this stature could command such acts.

Next, our hero Izo Okada is played by none other than the legendary Shintaro Katsu, the original Zatoichi. In fact, he was 18 or 19 Zatoichi movies in before he did this one. This role was the exact opposite from the seemingly simple but impossibly cunning blind swordsman. Knowing it's Katsu would make it seem hard to put his most famous role aside for th viewer, but I never thought of it. The man could play the down-n-dirty rogue as well. Though essentially a nasty and in many ways stupid character, Katsu still manages to find the spots to make you care abou the guy and his ill fate.

Last, rival swordsman Shimbei Tanaka's icy style of whoop @$$ comes thanks to one of Japan's greatest authors, Yukio Mishima. Yukio's part is a sort of standard character, the master swordsman who cares about nothing save mastering the sword, and yet Mishima's intensity gives Tanaka some shine. What ultimately makes his role chilling, is his character's suicide after being framed for a murder, as Mishima himself publicly commited suicide a year later.

Most likely this movie has way too much story for what most moviegoers want out of a samurai flick, that hack-n-slash. This is in addition to the fact that much of that story is anything but happy. Even I get a little heavy lidded at certain points, but nonetheless its a well told story with some difference. We know early on that Izo is on the wrong track blindly murdering people for Takechi. Each time he performs the act, he yells "Tenchu! (Heaven's Punishment!)" at his victims. It doesn't take much imagination to figure out that eventually Izo's going to be dealt some divine punishment all his own.

Izo is a good man at heart, but who allowed new found riches and power steer off course. What I love about this movie (without giving away the ending) is that he doesn't get to come away clean and destroy those who corrupted him. Why not? Because it's just as much his fault that he allowed himself to become corrupted. Also, this movie does something rare in that it takes these problems beyond just the protagonist and antagonist. Society knows Izo's wrongs as well, and many of them turn against him as well. This is in additon to the number of enemies Izo already had by placing himself in the midst of a political war.

Definitely of note is Hitokiri's powerful cinematography. Shots are carfully framed often using the set and its decoration as frames within the frame. The subdued use of color as well as the deep blacks of the shadows add to the artistry. Even little conceits unjarringly pass through the screen beautifully. After one brutal nighttime assassination, the victim is left in the paved stream. Though it's dark, a deep crimson flows with a faint glow from the victim down the stream. Amazing. Also, there is frequent use of the character's face as landscape (though never to the same extent as Leone), which only works because of the striking distinctness of each of the actor's features.

In the end, it won't be as satisfying to those who desire really black and white/good guy and bad guy type movies, nor those who prefer a steady stream of corpses in their samurai movies. Nonetheless, I enjoy it, and I would be happy if action movies today were only half as intelligent or had half as much substance.

Interestingly, I also took in Sabu's Unlucky Monkey which featured an even more pronounced sense of spiritual cinematic justice. Maybe tomorrow, I'll talk about it along with the other movie I watched, Takashi Miike's The Guys From Paradise, a movie which despite all of Miike's cinematic nihilism does have a more standard morality tale conclusion.

But then again, I did go to the San Diego Comic-con.

Decisions. Decisions.

Cheers.