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The Sword of Doom (1966) [The Criterion Collection #280] [Re-UP]

Posted By: Someonelse
Date: 27 Mar 2015 12:08:00
The Sword of Doom (1966) [The Criterion Collection #280] [Re-UP]

The Sword of Doom (1966)
DVD9 | VIDEO_TS | NTSC 16:9 | Cover+Booklet | 02:00:15 | 6,4 Gb
Audio: Japanese AC3 1.0 @ 192 Kbps | Subtitles: English
Genre: Action, Drama | The Criterion Collection #280

Director: Kihachi Okamoto
Stars: Tatsuya Nakadai, Michiyo Aratama, Yûzô Kayama

Tatsuya Nakadai and Toshiro Mifune star in the story of a wandering samurai who exists in a maelstrom of violence. A gifted swordsman plying his craft during the turbulent final days of shogunate rule in Japan, Ryunosuke (Nakadai) kills without remorse or mercy. It is a way of life that ultimately leads to madness. Kihachi Okamoto’s swordplay classic is the thrilling tale of a man who chooses to devote his life to evil.

IMDB | Criterion | DVDBeaver | Wikipedia

The story told by Kihachi Okamoto's Sword of Doom is well known in Japan; virtually not at all in the western hemisphere. Viewers of the film, then, will need to pay close attention, because numerous characters and plot threads weave in and out of the picture, and it can be tricky to keep them straight. It's such a rich tapestry that even if you follow it all, it takes two or three viewings to really absorb and appreciate it.

The Sword of Doom (1966) [The Criterion Collection #280] [Re-UP]

The film is exquisitely crafted. The cinematography is stark and moody. Okamoto loves to play with the depth within his frame, preferring the illusion of three dimensions to the reality of two. It is remarkable how frequently psychological undertones are achieved by the placement of characters or action in the near foreground or deep background.

The Sword of Doom (1966) [The Criterion Collection #280] [Re-UP]

It's a somber, ponderous film and will particularly seem that way to anyone expecting the high adventure in Akira Kurosawa's samurai epics. The story is about an evil samurai and the effect his aggressive swordfighting techniques eventually have on him. The cultural backdrop here specifies that a samurai, in his complete dedication, becomes one with his sword. An evil man wields an evil sword. Much is made of the ending, which appears to drop important plot threads. Indeed, the story continues: just a few years earlier, in fact, Kenji Misumi filmed it as a trilogy, but Sword of Doom only covers the first part of it. Critics of the film's ending do have a point. Nonetheless, if one understands the primary purpose of Okamoto's film, then one understands the appropriateness – and brilliance – of the ending.
At-A-Glance Film Reviews
The Sword of Doom (1966) [The Criterion Collection #280] [Re-UP]

Ending a film with a freeze-frame is a potent and powerfully self-conscious decision, one that invariably draws attention to the final image and literally begs it to, if not explain, then cast an interpretive light on the rest of the film. One might think of the freeze frame of Antoine Doinel running on the beach at the end of Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959), capturing his gaze into the camera that conveys directly to the audience the sense of longing that fuelled his rebelliousness through the film (and its subsequent sequels). In a different vein, there’s the famous freeze-frame ending of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), whose gory deaths are withheld behind the image of them bursting out of their hiding place with guns blazing, thus forever fixing them within a frame of romanticized heroism.

The Sword of Doom (1966) [The Criterion Collection #280] [Re-UP]

Kihachi Okamoto’s superb samurai drama The Sword of Doom (Dai-bosatsu tôge) also ends on a freeze frame, an evocative, troubling final image of the film’s heinous anti-hero Ryunosuke Tsukue (Tatsuya Nakadai) in mid-slash, his face a twisted mask of agony and ecstasy. On the one hand, the final image is explainable in purely narrative terms: Sword of Doom, which was based on a serialized novel that ran in Japanese newspaper for some three decades starting in 1913, was intended to be the first of a series of films. Thus, the freeze frame signifies little more than a halt in a progressive narrative. On the other hand, a sequel was never made, thus the final image becomes literally the final image, and its power resides in the way it captures forever the antiheroic protagonist in the frenzy of violence that had defined his life.

The Sword of Doom (1966) [The Criterion Collection #280] [Re-UP]

Ryunosuke is a complex, enigmatic character, one you known on an intellectual level you should despise, yet fascinates you anyway. A resoundingly amoral killer, Ryunosuke slashes his way through life with nothing – not political ideology, not religion, not personal gain, not vengeance – to explain his murderous ways. He’s wrath without explanation, which makes him all the more fearsome and all the more fascinating.

The Sword of Doom (1966) [The Criterion Collection #280] [Re-UP]

The story in Sword of Doom stretches out in rough, episodic fashion over three years. Along the way, Ryunosuke kills an opponent (Ichiro Nakaya) after promising the man’s wife (Michiyo Aratama) that he would throw the fight in exchange for sex (which, as depicted here, is much closer to rape). Left without a husband, the woman becomes his companion and mother to his child, even though he continually degrades and abuses her. Tracked by his victim’s vengeful brother, Ryunosuke never seems concerned that he is ever in mortal danger, which gives him a demonic, eternal quality. When a noble samurai instructor (Toshiro Mifune) plots how to defeat him, there is the sense that Ryunosuke is, in his own terrible way, everlasting.

The Sword of Doom (1966) [The Criterion Collection #280] [Re-UP]

The Sword of Doom is bookended with Ryunosuke’s most fearsome violence: In the film’s opening sequence, he kills an elderly pilgrim at a mountaintop shrine for no apparent reason, and in the apocalyptic finale, he is hacking and slashing his way through an endless army of opponents, some of whom are flesh and blood and some of whom are ghostly apparitions of his earlier victims. In this sense, the film seems to be making a moral point about the circularity of violence, how Ryunosuke’s lethal sins come back to haunt him in the end, but his message succeeds only if you ignore the intended extension of the narrative into sequels. Ending as it does, it literally traps Ryunosuke in his own hell, but those who know the history of the film understand that it is a hell from which he invariably escapes, as evil always does.
James Kendrick, QNetwork
The Sword of Doom (1966) [The Criterion Collection #280] [Re-UP]
The Sword of Doom (1966) [The Criterion Collection #280] [Re-UP]

Special Features:
- New, restored high-definition digital transfer
- An essay by critic Geoffrey O’Brien
- New and improved English subtitle translation

Many Thanks to primolandia.

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