Samurai Wolf (1966) - Movie Review
Hideo Gosha might be one of Japan's most underrated filmmakers. Once discussed as part of the chanbara trifecta—alongside Akira Kurosawa and Masaki Kobayashi—his name now looks out of place next to two of the most famous and well regarded directors in history. Though he has had two Criterion releases (one never received a Blu-Ray release and has been out of print for over a decade now), most of his films are impossible to find in the West and his work remains largely obscure—one of my personal favourite films, Gosha's Fireflies in the North (1984), has only 193 logs on Letterboxd, and no official release outside of Japan.
Something about Gosha's sensibilities just never appealed to Westerners the way Kurosawa's euro-inspired epics or Kobayashi's Marxist fables did. He never caught the attention of the Cahiers tastemakers the way his contemporaries managed to.
Watching Samurai Wolf (1966), I have to wonder if Gosha's films may have simply been too Japanese to catch on with mainstream European audiences in the mid-1960s. Pulpy, cathartic, almost proto-exploitation thrills combine with complex characters and and a philosophical framework that's something like what Nishitani coined as 'the self-overcoming of nihilism' or 'transcendance through negation', to create an atmosphere that's at once both cathartic and profoundly desolate.
Starting off the way any Spaghetti Western might, Samurai Wolf follows its drifter protagonist—the titular Samurai Wolf—as he wanders aimlessly around Japan. Eventually he happens upon a corrupt little outpost in the middle of the mountains, and though he only intends to stay overnight, that plan changes when he discovers that the town is under the thumb of an abusive gang of ne'er-do-wells. It is, of course, his duty as a wandering swordsman to free the little people of their oppressors, even if it puts him in the deadly crosshairs of Japan's ruling elite.
It's a standard genre film setup, but Samurai Wolf isn't standard genre fair. While it features all the gold shipments, outlaw gangs, and boss-fights you'd expect from a a 60s samurai movie, the proceedings are filtered through that strange melodramatic realism that's emblematic of the best of Japanese film and literature. It's aesthetically lethargic, but a barely restrained subsurface intensity makes everyone feel edgy and dangerous and a little bit unhinged—a style of perpetual tension that the Japanese modernists like Yukio Mishima and Junichiro Tanizaki exploited to full effect.
Samurai Wolf is cold and cruel. The hero doesn't get the girl—in fact, he doesn't even want the girl—and men, good and bad, die bloody, pointless deaths. At the end of it all our protagonist is left standing amidst a wasteland of his own creation, the only other survivor surrounded by the ruins of what was once her life. In the end, all they did was survive, and a lot of people died in the process.
It's not really a surprise that Hideo Gosha's films were a huge influence on Takashi Miike and Takashi Kitano—Samurai Wolf, in particular, feels, in many ways, like a precursor to Kitano's Outrage and Miike's Dead or Alive.
It really is a shame that Gosha's work has been all but ignored in the West—even if his disciples have become household names (in households that discuss Japanese film). His films are beautiful and complex, and still feel radical, even today. As is also the case with Masahiro Shinoda—another extremely influential director whose best work remains obscure—the West's understanding of Japanese film is weaker for Hideo Gosha's obscurity.
At their best, Hideo Gosha's samurai films absolutely stand shoulder to shoulder with Akira Kurosawa's efforts in the genre—and, for my money, stand head and shoulders above Masaki Kobayashi's.
