Samaritan Zatoichi (1968)

Not rated.  Some of the Zatoichi movies try going hard edged.  Some of them try being a little bit more gentle.  We're back in the gentle era of Zatoichi.  I don't mind that one bit.  Zatoichi movies work better when they aren't trying to be Lone Wolf and Cub. There is still an incredible amount of violence --but with little blood.  Also, there's some implications of rape and sex trafficking.  Still, not rated.

DIRECTOR: Kenji Misumi

I have to write this quickly because I want to go back to work with no backlog of films to write about.  The funny part is that we're trying to get ahead of the Oscar season by watching some of the shortlisted films ahead of time, so I'm going to be really swamped.  The slightest bummer about the most blessed life in the world is that I got some video games that I would love to give some attention.  But if I'm to write about every movie I watch, then something has got to give.

Guess what?  No notes.  Samaritan Zatoichi is the perfect Zatoichi movie and I'm back on the Zatoichi train.  I know.   It took me a billion years to get back to that point.  But Samaritan Zatoichi did right what Prisoners did wrong.  (I'm acting like Prisoners is a terrible movie when it was fine.  Read what I wrote before.  I harp on the following point pretty hard.) Zatoichi films tend to work on a formula that makes a plot so complex that it almost becomes stupid.  I've always contended that I might be the stupid one in the equation.  But the story tended to always be the same.  If anything, in an attempt to churn out as many Zatoichi movies imaginable, they stopped trying to change anything about these films, even down to the weak plots.  But Samaritan Zatoichi works because it stops trying to offer plots that don't really matter.  If you don't know where I'm coming from, I'm going to try to unpack an idea that only comes from watching a lot of crappy Zatoichi movies.

Zatoichi movies tend to have the eponymous Zatoichi stumble upon a complex dynamic of a local lord or a boss trying to make a bunch of money off of messing with a village or town.  The movie plays up Zatoichi's blindness by trying to cheat him.  Eventually, everyone in town discovers that this is the mythical Zatoichi, the unstoppable swordsman.  Then people try manipulating him.  Sometimes there's a big bad.  There tends to be a small difference in the way that the bad guys confront Zatoichi.  Some of them give Zatoichi the chance to fall in love with someone who sees beyond his blindness.  And so on and so forth.  Some of the movies offer variation.  These tend to be the movies that I lose my mind about.  But Samaritan Zatoichi does something way smarter than what the other movies do.

It gets rid of the plot.

Old me would have lost his mind about this.  I thought everything was about the plot.  If you didn't have a good plot, what did you have?  Do you know what old me discovered?  If you don't have plot, it works if you have excellent characterization or themes.  Samaritan Zatoichi has both of those things.  What little plot there is builds on some of the issues that the Zatoichi franchise struggles with.  The basic plot is that Zatoichi is the cause of death of the female protagonist's brother.  He was a bit of a slimeball, but didn't deserve death.  When the other assassins try to tak advantage of the woman, Zatoichi alienates himself from the other assassins and bonds with the woman.  This is some great stuff because she is torn between being protected by Zatoichi and acknowledging that her brother would be alive if it wasn't for him.   That's the movie.  She hates him and loves him and that's a great movie.  Sure, a lot of movies do that.  But I really like that it is Zatoichi.

Samaritan Zatoichi does something that I wish the franchise I did more often.  Zatoichi is obviously a hero.  Doctor Who tried touching on this theme as well, but I like when the morality of a hero is questioned.  A few movies ago (You could put a gun to my head and I wouldn't be able to tell you the title of the movie) the word "yakuza" was dropped.  I was thinking about how weird the very notion of a wandering swordsman was.  Now, the early films really played up the fact that Zatoichi's primary form of income was a masseur.  But the later movies really play up the fact that he's an assassin for hire.  As an assassin, he's forced to align his morality with the person who is paying his bills.  But if he's not being paid for something, he has to fall back on what he finds morally right.  Yeah, the brother was a bit of a sleezeball, but he was also backed into a corner.  Because Zatoichi signed up for a hit job, he didn't know the ins-and-outs.  He doesn't understand that this boy took a loan that had so many strings attached that there would be no way out from under the crime boss's thumb.  There's this guilt (that unfortunately is assuaged when he's given verbal forgiveness) that rides through a lot of the movie.  He feels bad that he killing this boy, but not enough to change his ways.

Can I tell you how much I like the fact that this is character motivated?  I'm not lying to myself when it comes to the fact that this will have almost no impact on the franchise moving forward.  (I mean, I'm on the home stretch.  Only with a franchise like Zatoichi that seven movies makes it the home stretch, but I'm there anyway.) But I like that Zatoichi makes this story personal.  They've done this a couple times in the franchise, but it always kind of felt artificial.  The fact that Osode has a hard time with Zatoichi makes the story all that more interesting.  I also kind of dig that the guy who is supposed to be the big bad guy of the movie is actually a pretty rad dude.  The governor is supposed to be this corrupt guy, but he's constantly mentioning that Osode is not a big deal and that his underling really needed to let this whole thing gone.  It comes down to the underling being someone who has to deal with a point of pride.  He doesn't like that Osode got away, especially with the help of a blind man.  That's way more interesting than a complicated plot that the other movies try doing.

I'm a little torn about the muscle of this movie.  In terms of what it offers, it's super cool.  Yasaburo (I hope I have the right guy) is the first bad guy in this very long franchise that is actually better than Zatoichi.  There have been threats to Zatoichi.  They tend to be gimmicky bad guys that play on his blindness.  But Yasaburo is the first guy who is genuinely better than Zatoichi.  I can't believe that I got this far in the franchise before running into a problem that a lot of movies introduce early on.  And the guy loses!  I don't know if that's really a spoiler.  But he loses because he's playing with Zatoichi.  If the message of the entire series is that people undervalue the handicapped, Yasaburo is the mascot for that entire idea.  It's really kind of cool.  But in terms of anything else with Yasaburo, he's way too cryptic to actually be considered a character.  That dude shows up everywhere, to an almost supernatural level.  At one point, Osode is running through the woods away from kidnappers, runs into a cabin in the middle of nowhere, and there's Yasaburo. He doesn't care about money, which is interesting.  But who is he?  Why is he so good?  It's almost like they set up a big bad for the entire franchise and then killed him.  That's fine, I guess. It's just not in line with the rest of the movie.  Still, I'll acknowledge that the movie needs him for the movie to end.  It's all pretty good.

I can't believe that it took this long to find the perfect Zatoichi movie.  There were a few other times that I lost my mind about these films.  But this one is solid as heck.  I can't deny that I'm the most excited for the next one.  But because I'm so excited, I'll probably be disappointed.