Zatoichi at Large (1972)

Not rated, but this one is one of the more questionable ones in terms of content.  Sometimes, Zatoichi movies aim to be family friendly.  Then there are the movies that toe the R-rating. While there isn't any actual sexual acts, there is a lot of innuendo, including some rear nudity.  This one also gets pretty brutal when the bad guys torture Zatoichi a bit.  Still, I didn't feel the need to pause the movie when my four-year-old entered the room because most of the movie is pretty tame.

DIRECTOR:  Kazuo Mori

Do you know how much I want to be playing Star Wars: Outlaws right now?  Like, I've leveled my character up enough that the game is crazy fun.  I'm just tearing through content as it comes my way.  I've unlocked some trophies that I thought were impossible.  Instead, all my kids are being adorable and playing four player Mario Kart and that's pretty adorable. So instead of procrastinating on writing about the movie I just finished, I'm going to write about it now.  I have to confess: I watched the conclusion of this movie without glasses.  I don't kow where my glasses are.  I got a little flummoxed about what was going on in the final fight.  Still, I got enough to make sense of what was going on, including questioning...

...is Zatoichi immune to fire now?

I mean, those shots are super cool.  Slowly walking out of fire and facing down the big bad, not even bothering to put out the fire.  Still, there are some bad third degree burns.  Heck, I was stressed out for the stuntman who had to do this scene.  Still, like my Kay Vess in Outlaws, I'm the in the final throes of the Zatoichi franchise.  I have two more Zatoichi movies to watch after this before I have to restart because I haven't written about those initial films.  Still, I will have been able to say that I've seen the OG Zatoichi films.  It's this point in the franchise where he's just a tank.  He's always kind of been a tank.  But at this point, by Zatoichi at Large, his reputation is so well deserved because he's just gone through bad guy after bad guy that I never question if Zatoichi is going to win. Heck, he's so far leveled up that the filmmakers behind this one took their trope and just downplayed it.

I'm talking about that scene from Rebels where Old Man Ben Kenobi just took down Darth Maul without effort.  Sorry, I'm feel like my writing is a bit manic today, but let me explain. There's a great scene in Star Wars: Rebels (I swear that I'm not obsessed with Star Wars) towards the end of the run where Kenobi, without ceremony, defeats a seemingly overpowered Darth Maul in one swipe.  The Zatoichi franchise has played up the trope that "Zatoichi has finally met his match."  There's always a guy who admires Zatoichi's skill so much that he can't help but be tempted into fighting this blind swordsman who just wants to be left alone.  Traditionally, these movies put this fight on a pedestal.  There tends a bit of sturm und drang with these fights.  Both sides take hits and Zatoichi only barely pulls through. But with only a few movies left in the franchise, I adored that we weren't even made privy to the fight.  Zatoichi, with a few slashes of his blade, completely destroys the big bad without ceremony.  Because the story isn't about this guy.  This guy is a wonderful witness to the world of Zatoichi.  He's outside the world, so he's allowed to provide commentary on Zatoichi's skills.

But I'm actually pretty floored that I liked this movie.  This movie breaks a lot of my rules about Zatoichi movies.  I've been frustrated with the majority of this series.  Many of the movies, like other samurai / jidaigeki films, involves a mean local mob boss harassing the town.  It's up to Zatoichi to free these people.  And, I'll tell you, I tend not to like these movies, mainly because the films tend to add complicatons to these bad guys to differentiate them from other Zatoichi bad guys.  But ultimately, these stories are the same.  But maybe what makes Zatoichi somewhat more interesting is that it doesn't steep the character in a lot of backstory that, ultimately, doesn't matter.  Instead, we see the way that he treats the villagers and the supporting cast and that's all we need to know.  I don't need to know his relationships with neighboring bosses and the internal politics of gangland Japan.  Instead, his actions have 1:1 relationships with people that we are seeing.  That's way more interesting.  The crafting of this film lets us see his moral code and what he would do to defend himself.

And it's not like the movie doesn't tell us about him.  If anything, I was really skeptical about this movie because so much of the first act is about telling us about how bad Boss Tetsugoro is and I didn't think that he could live up to that.  But because the film gives us real world consequences for tolerating Tetsugoro, I got on board wanting to see Zatoichi bring this guy down.

But do you know what I'm slightly annoyed by?  Two movies, back-to-back, have noble characters instantly distrust Zatoichi despite his behavior with these people.  Sure, I'm kind of yelling at a kid who watched his mother die in childbirth.That seems to be a fair character to distrust a stranger who is carrying is little brother around.  But beyond that, we also had Denjuro believe his son, who clearly didn't know what he was looking at instead of trusting the man who was bending over backwards to help his family and returned his child.  There was no sign that Zatoichi had the 20 ryo, yet Denjuro was quick to believe that Zatoichi murdered his pregnant wife and stole that 20 ryo.  Sure, it would be easy to write off that a man grieving for a wife stolen from him.  But it seemed like he was pretty quick to turn on one of his only friend.

And then the constable's son?  That's a weird pick.  There's a poster on the ground and he comes to the conclusion that Zatoichi killed him?  Killers tend not to leave posters of themselves when they murder folks.  Still, we have that trope slightly beaten to death.

Yet, the movie works!  Like, our character is leveled up to the promise we were given at the beginning of this franchise (although, in all reality, he was always there and I'm just used to it) and the stories are simple and straightforward.  There are some cool sequences.  I wish I could find my glasses to really appreciate some of the nuance that went into the "Zatoichi on ice" sequence at the end of the film.  But when Zatoichi is in the burning building, he really does come across as this unstoppable demon of death.  It makes the takedown of the villain that much more sweet. Yeah, Zatoichi at Large works really well.  Even if the title only makes sense in the last few minutes of the movie.