Samurai Spy
Released 1965, directed by Masahiro Shinoda
There’s an interesting contrast between something like Pulp Fiction, which wants to take certain elements of past genre films and complexify them, while still ensuring that the engine of the genre – the titular pulp – remains functioning, even roaring; and something like Samurai Spy, in which complexity is an alienating device, sugar in the gas tank, and the roar of the engine is swiftly cut short and we’re adrift. In the former complexity is a tool used to thrill, in the latter thrills are snipped out, patchwork style, and worked in with other elements to craft a densely textured surface. We see a hand pinned by a shuriken, a woman with her throat ripped out, many swordfights – but what is really meant to send our pulses racing are the tightly composed overhead shots, the carefully carved shadows, the delicately surreal sound design.
Shinoda had gotten in trouble for this before. His film Pale Flower, a yakuza feature, had its release delayed over complaints that it was “anarchistic” – essentially that it prized style over narrative; and his first big period film, Assassination, has a reputation similar to Chandler’s The Big Sleep, of being plotted past the point of audience comprehension. Samurai Spy doubles down on that tendency, to the extent that giving a summary would be not only unhelpful, but hubristic. It is possible however to give a vague outline. We are at the very end of the feudal era; the Tokugawa Shogunate is consolidating power, and in the process crushing its enemies, the allied Toyotomi and Sanada clans. Our protagonist is Sasuke Sarutobi (Koji Takahashi), formerly of the Sanada, but currently the author of a separate peace, war-weary and passive. But, in the way of these films, Sasuke with all of his wisdom and pacifism is nonetheless drawn into a series of violent spy vs. spy conflicts between Tokugawa and Toyotomi; centered around the recovery of supposed double-agent Tatewake Koriyama (no actor, because this is the kind of film where the driving plot element never actually appears onscreen). Mixed in with this are not one but two damsels in distress, the first of whom is killed and then seamlessly replaced by the other in an alarming bit of legerdemain (shades of Le Bonheur); as well as some side-plotting around the persecution of Christians in Japan. It’s all very confusing, and I found myself lapsing into totemic certainties in order to stay oriented – Sasuke is good but cynical, male characters are untrustworthy, female characters are in danger.
The genre being worked on here is chanbara – period-piece samurai movies – and Shinoda is serious regarding its exigencies: the historical context is carefully worked out, the sets are in order, the necessary extras have been obtained to flesh out the action scenes and given them a sense of consequence. He is also quite serious regarding the film’s earnest subtext – a plea for peace between the USA and USSR, whose nuclear standoff is meant to be mirrored by the Tokugawa/Toyotomi conflict. What makes Samurai Spy if not unique then at least very different is its marriage between these sincerities and an absolute commitment to style. The resulting synthesis is, turning back to Pulp Fiction, much more discordant, much more of a chore to watch (I say this more with admiration than condemnation, but perhaps with a slightly strained admiration). When Tarantino films gunfire, he wants it to be cool, but it has to also play its larger role within a given scene and sequence; whereas Shinoda will absolutely grind things to a halt in order to examine at length the cinematic possibilities of a single vertical ray of light playing across Sasuke’s face (This is a great film for faces. Takahashi’s features have a wide-spaced grandeur, while Kei Sato, who also starred in Kuroneko, is wonderfully louche and fractured as the - spoiler - bad guy, a cubist lounge singer). These tendencies extend to the soundtrack, where if an actor goes offscreen their voice might be plunged into reverb, as if they’d fallen down a well. The score, by long-time Shinoda collaborator Toru Takemitsu, was composed with no input from Shinoda – an intentional practice – and while it has a theatrical sparseness as its main mode (woodblocks, plucked strings), wry bits of spy-jazz are interspersed as if to remind us that there is, somewhere, meant to be a James Bond wink to all this.
Because he has so much not necessarily to say, but to accent his saying, Shindoda finds it difficult to advance his complicated plot. To get around this there are several long scenes where the characters gather in order to review various plot-related issues, like middle managers in the Narrative Department trying to hash out some tedious corporate snafu. These talky scenes, necessitated by the film’s stylistic obsessions, are in turn obsessively styled – the whole thing threatens to turn recursive. In the end, after a duel whose primary purpose is to answer the question what are the cinematic possibilities of fog?, it all cuts off with the abrupt, muted clap of a deus ex machina.
NOTES
Samurai Spy is filmed in ultra-deluxe black and white, every detail gem-etched. It makes you wonder how far the medium could have been pushed if it had remained culturally and commercially central (I know, probably not much further than the occasional prestige B&W release pushes it now). There is are scenes – a conversation shot from above through a lush forest canopy, a samurai vs. peasants mob battle – that just seem too linearly dense to ever work in color. So much of watching old movies is wondering at the profusion of lost technologies and aesthetic possibilities.
