Miyamoto Musashi (1973)'s comments

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monty

In 1973, Shochiku Studios released Tai Kato's updated two-part version of Miyamoto Musashi, this time with Hideki Takahashi in the title role. Hideki was best known as a yakuza-eiga or gangster film star. Jiro Tamiya plays Musashi's nemesis Kojiro in a subdued manner. The director has a sardonic approach which, like Kohata in the 1954 version, refuses to romanticize Musashi. Tai Kato was not able to go so far as to have Musashi realistically vulgar in appearance; Hideki Takahashi is too handsome an actor for that. Still, Musashi's spirit decidedly unrefined. He's not someone who goes from wild & naive to Zen purity. He is one hell of a mean bastard from start to finish. Titled Sword of Fury I & Sword of Fury II in the subtitled release, the dual film allows us to hear Musashi's thought processes as he faces opponents & develops his fighting style. The story itself is the familiar one, & it's really only the "attitude" toward Musashi that is strikingly different, apparently influenced by the popular "new" yakuza-eiga attitude which had been shifting from the chivalrous gambler seen in Japanese gangster films of the 1960s to the merely violent gangsters of the 1970s. In Part I we see the young would-be swordsman setting out to achieve greatness in war, achieving nothing because fighting on the losing side, & then beginning his long period of wandering & training, with the goal always in mind of his duel with Kojiro. Part II builds toward that great duel on Ganryu Island, with considerable focus on Musashi's planning & forethought as to how to gain an advantage.
Rather than the Zen questor of Inagaki & Uchida's versions, we come to realize by watching Kato's film that this Musashi is a calculating, cold- blood trickster, scientific in his approach. This is close to the truth of Musashi's historical self, for he was an opportunist first & sentimentalist last.

9 years 8 months ago

monty

10 years ago