Film Review: The Sword of Doom (1966)

There are many aspects of samurai films that I love but one of my favourites is what I call the Stop, Drop and Die move. This occurs when a master samurai slashes his sword at several assailants and they immediately freeze in a standing position, often with their swords still upraised. This is the Stop portion of the move. We know they've been hit, they know they've been hit, but for a few seconds nothing happens. Now comes the Drop. The assailants slowly topple over or crumple to the ground. There's a certain elegance to this maneuver. You can't just drop to the ground and bounce like some cheap gangster, you have to go down like a neatly felled piece of bamboo. It's very zen. Finally, the Die. Once on the ground the samurai's victim is allowed one limb twitch or a muted groan. No histrionics, please.

I don't know what the Stop, Drop and Die signifies in Japanese culture, but there are lots of examples of it in The Sword of Doom, one of the best of the classic samurai films. The plot...do I have to? Is it really necessary? Oh, well, I'll try. Ryunosuke is a psycho samurai with a perpetual, spooky, thousand yard stare. Why is he like this? We aren't told. He murders a pilgrim for no reason at the beginning of the film, then follows that up by killing a samurai from another clan at what is supposed to be a non-lethal tournament. He then becomes a ronin and falls in with a gang working to support the shogunate. Toshiro Mifune is also around as a fencing master who intimidates Ryunosuke.

The plot borders on the opaque but the action elements and cinematography more than make up for it. This is one of best-looking samurai films ever. The highlight is an attack on the Toshiro Mifune character at night during a snowstorm. Even if there wasn't swordplay involved this would be a ravishing scene to look at, made even better by the fact that the film is in black and white. Snow scenes are made for black and white. Almost as good is the sequence in which Ryunosuke is attacked on a foggy road by rival clansmen. The final sequence is a triumph of art direction and fight choreography. Ryunosuke is in a tavern/brothel with his gang when he suddenly comprehends how evil his life has been. He's suddenly haunted by the shadows of the innocent people he's killed and in a demonic rage he begins slashing the walls apart. At this moment the gang moves in to assassinate Ryunosuke and thus begins a seven minute sequence of non-stop swordplay and Stop, Drop and Die. The film ends on a freeze frame of Ryunosuke still slashing and hacking. I thought this ending was a bit odd until I read that The Sword of Doom was supposed to be the first film in a trilogy, which, unfortunately, never came to pass.

The snowball fight quickly got out of hand.

If you're a casual fan of samurai films the wonky plot might be an annoyance, but if you're a hardcore samurai fan then the classic pleasures of the samurai film are here in abundance. A recent samurai film that's almost as good is 13 Assassins, which I reviewed here. Like Doom, it features a bad guy who's pure evil to the tips of his fingers. The trailer below was put together by a fan, but it's pretty good if you can ignore the music.

Film Review: Red Sun (1971)

I have a high tolerance for Euro-schlock films of the 1970s, the kind that feature multinational casts in thriller/western/cop movies with a B-movie sensibility. These films weren't always cheaply made, and there was usually some A-list talent in the cast. Red Sun is a good example of this type of film. It's a western, shot, of course, in Spain, and features a United Nations of stars: Charles Bronson, Toshiro Mifune, Alain Delon and Ursula Andress. Let's see, that's respectively an American, a Japanese, a Frenchman and a Swiss sex symbol. Bronson is the only one in the movie with an accent matching the film's setting.  In 1971 all four of these actors were major stars.

The story has train robber Bronson double-crossed by Delon, who also steals a ceremonial sword in the care of Mifune. Bronson and Mifune, playing a samurai, team up to find Delon. Basically it's a lightly comic road movie with Bronson initially mocking Mifune's strange ways, but then realizing he's a "hell of a man." Along the way they fight some bandits, slaughter some Comanche, and enjoy some gratuitous nudity courtesy of Ursula Andress. The actors seem to enjoy themselves, and this film probably marks one of the last occasions on which Charles Bronson actually did some acting. Once he transitioned from Europe to the U.S.A. he became the Easter Island statue of actors.

The action scenes are fairly plentiful, albeit perfunctory, which is a bit surprising considering that Terence Young, director of three of the early Bond films, was in charge of things. The most dated part of the film is its treatment of Indians. By this stage in Hollywood Indians were the beneficiaries of revisionist history and were presented in a sympathetic light, or at least weren't treated as devils in buckskins. In Europe, however, Indians were still just colourful villains. In Red Sun the Comanche are whooping, incompetent cannon fodder for Bronson's gun and Mifune's sword. And they wear the worst native outfits I have ever seen in a western; they look like leftover Hallowe'en costumes from K-mart. So if you're hopelessly addicted to westerns or Euro-schlock or both, check it out.