Samurai Assassin (1965)

SAMURAI ASSASSIN, directed by Kihachi Okamoto; screenplay (Japanese with English subtitles) by Shinobu Hashimoto, original story "Samurai Nippon" by Jiromasa Gunji; photography by Hiroshi Murai; music by Masaru Sato; produced by Mifune Productions; released by Toho International. At the Bijou Cinema, Broadway and 45th Street. 122 minutes. (Not submitted at this time to the Motion Picture Association of America's Production Code and Rating Administration for rating as to audience suitability.)
Tsuruchiyo Shinno . . . . . Toshiro Mifune
Einosuke Kurihara . . . . . Keiju Kobayashi
Kenmotsu Hoshino . . . . . Yunosuke Ito
Naosuke Ii . . . . . Koshiro Matsumoto
Okiku and Kikuhime . . . . . Michiyo Aratama

Screen: 'Samurai Assassin,' Among Best of Its Kind:Mifune Is the Unwitting Murderer of Father Feature at Bijou Was Directed by Okamoto

February 17 to March 3, 1860, inside Edo castle. A group of assassins wait by Sakurada Gate to kill the lord of the House of Ii, a powerful man in the Tokugawa government, which has ruled Japan for 300 years. They suspect a traitor in their midst, and their suspicions fall on Niiro, an impoverished ronin who dreams of samurai status, and Kurihara, an aristocratic samurai who befriends Niiro. Niiro longs to identify his father, knowing he is a high-ranking official who will disclose himself only if Niiro achieves samurai status. With American ships in Japan's harbors, cynicism among the assassins, and change in the air, Niiro resolves to reach ends that may prove ephemeral

Among the countless samurai dramas to have played in the current Bijou Cinema Japanese film series, Kihachi Okamoto's "Samurai Assassin," which opened yesterday, must rank among the best. By no means great moviemaking, and overly given to that tiresomely artful manipulation of deep perspective that seems the fatal temptation of every second Japanese director, it is nevertheless a work of considerable craftsmanship with excellent performances and a rather pleasant regard for what may be done in a film that is understood as deriving from the art of fiction.

Like a good many samurai dramas, "Samurai Assassin" builds upon historical event, and, as in a good many samurai dramas, the actual event doesn't matter very much. Indeed, the film is at painSatos to rewrite history as it tells how in the early spring of 1860 the Tokugawa First Minister Ii was ambushed outside the palace gate by a group of samurai working for the Mito clan and was beheaded by one Tsuruchiyo Shinno (Toshiro Mifune), an aspirant eager to test himself, who did not know that he was in fact Ii's illegitimate son.

Shinno is of course fictional, but the film approaches him through the investigation of his personal history, which brushes tragedy as we learn that he intends to prove the nobility of his unknown parentage by killing his father, and then declines into bitter irony because there is finally no recognition, and he remains ignorant of what he has done to the end.

Although the climactic ambush is well and modestly handled (Mifune is never outnumbered by more than 6 to 1) and the revelation of tragic potential carries considerable structural interest, "Samurai Assassin" is much the best in its earlier parts, as the Mito men investigate their strange, unkempt new member and in bits and pieces report his story back to their leader. It is a cold, wet spring as the assassins huddle near the palace gate or sit in their rooms waiting for the time to strike, and the gloom seems concentrated in the intelligent, brooding, ugly face of their leader (Yunosuko Ito), who presides almost as a spiritual presence over the unfolding story and the moods of the film.

In the treatment of the exposition, and in the fine performance of Ito, the film develops a kind of reflective, low-keyed tension that does not so much pack its revelations together as allow them the time, and indeed the spaces, in which to spread out and so become the evocation of an atmosphere that is, as much as anything else, the meaning of "Samurai Assassin." For everything that is learned serves to deepen the mystery — until the pattern of discovery very nearly does conform to the intricacies of a life.