I Would Like to See It: Three Outlaw Samurai

Three samurai, retainers of a cowardly and treacherous magistrate (Hisashi Igawa), burst into the chamber where louche prettyboy swordsman Kikyo (Mikijirō Hira) lies smoking opium with his lover. In a flash the camera is on the move, whipping out through a narrow gap between sliding screens and then along a walkway as without us the action spills through the now-revealed structure. A sword slices through rice paper and bamboo. A body shakes a screen in its frame. Blood sprays the translucent barriers. Down the stairs in a tumbling rush, a corpse flopping down the steps, and into the courtyard where a fire still smolders in an unattended pit. Kikyo and his foe gain their bearings, stares locked, and in a heartbeat the other man breaks toward the audience. He’s dead before he escapes the frame, killed with the same efficient, frenetic artfulness with which Three Outlaw Samurai shoots all its action scenes.

Director Hideo Gosha’s elaborate, lived-in sets lend every scene an easy verisimilitude which compensates for the film’s uneven score and sometimes awkward dialogue. His dynamic camera work, full of rapid dolly shots and artful handoffs, brings even the least detailed space to life. When the brave and principled Shiba (Tetsuro Tamba) storms into the magistrate’s compound to interrogate and humiliate him, instead of following in his wake the camera speeds through entryways and down echoing halls from his perspective. During a close-quarters exchange of blows in a derelict mill Gosha opts to move his shot over and behind the bodies of the combatants, perilously close to flailing limbs and flashing swords, in order to obtain a more exciting angle. During the film’s final action sequence he captures the frantic pace of the fleeing swordsmen with easy confidence, the entire strung-out running battle filmed such that we dart in and out of the thick of the melee.

It’s Isamu Nagato as the good-hearted Sakura, though, who really glues the film together. Of the three titular samurai he’s the warmest and most charming, his onscreen presence at once wise and disarmingly silly. His ill-starred romance with the wife of a peasant rebel he kills before switching sides is deeply affecting, as is his instant conversion to the cause of the peasants once he realizes what’s at stake. The story tends toward the emotionally simplistic, but beneath its account of changed hearts and bonds of brotherhood is a richer illustration of the frustrating nature of fighting for change from within a cruel system. Freedom fighters lose heart, officials exploit their offices for their own ends, and even the most daring acts of martial heroism run up against the blunt fact of human connection. In the end, what’s left but to walk away into the blowing dust, victorious and disappointed.