Zatoichi in Desperation (1972)

Not rated, but far-and-away the most un-family friendly of all of them.  I mean, this movie is as vulgar as it gets.  I've mentioned in my other Zatoichi blogs that the questionable content varies based on whoever is directing.  It seems like Zatoichi star Shintaro Katsu when given the reins to direct, wanted to make the most hardcore Zatoichi movie ever.  It's incredibly bloody and over-the-top sexual compared to the other companion pieces.  But there's one scene that is one of the most offensive scenes I've seen in a movie, even though you technically don't see this rape.  It's absolutely horrifying.  

DIRECTOR:  Shintaro Katsu

It is almost 5:00 in the morning and I'm not allowed to go to bed.  So I decided that I should get my writing done now so I can sleep all day when I am allowed to sleep.  We'll see how this plays out because I just wrote a tank of a Superman blog and Zatoichi blogs are hard to write.  The good news is that I often give myself permission to cut these guys short because it seems that there are only so many words that I can write about Zatoichi.  

Okay, I mentioned in the parent advisory section that this is the most offensive Zatoichi movie.  It's 1972 and we're starting to enter the Taxi Driver era of filmmaking.  I know that Taxi Driver didn't come out until 1976, but the '70s often screamed "gritty filmmaking" and it seemed like Shintaro Katsu was so tired of making the same kind of Zatoichi movie over and over that he decided to make a movie that somehow felt like real cinema.  I mean, that's really harsh on the other movies.  I don't think that the Criterion Collection put a lot of hours into remastering about 30 movies just for the penultimate one to be the one that they consider worthy of the collection.  But I will admit and side with my fictionalized version of Shintaro Katsu that the other movies often were written and filmed with a formula in mind.  Often, this formula kind of felt like what Hollywood did in the hayday of Westerns.  Pools of extras and rookies on a soundstage often did the trick.  Well, Katsu wasn't having any of that when it came to this movie because this movie looks absolutely fantastic, even if it is wildly offensive occasionally for no good reason.

I have to admit something here that I was going to put up top if I wasn't writing this at the crack of dawn:  I watched this movie in the worst way possible.  I watched the first hour and then waited 10 days before finishing the second half.  To my defense, we did go on vacation and that would have been a weird flex asking my wife to wait for me to finish another Zatoichi movie.  But if I don't have some of the details right, I am incredibly apologetic, especially consdiering that I actually really liked this movie.

There was this great episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (I know!  I'm proud of me for making this base connection as well!) where we saw the world of Buffy through Xander's eyes.  This is not a blind joke.  I'm just using colloquialisms.  Anyway, the entire conceit was that there was this whole world that wouldn't find the happenings of Sunnydale all that normal.  While Buffy was having her epic fight to the death with the monster of the week, we'd see the struggles regular old people do in this world.  I think that Katsu knows that his character is borderline a god at this point.  Nothing can touch Zatoichi.  Even when he's hurt...he's not that hurt.  So in a movie where you have a borderline Mary Sue doing his thing, movie-in-and-movie-out, what can possibly be interesting...especailly considering that there are a billion Zatoichi movies.  While Katsu doesn't stray super far from the eponymous protagonist, he does almost go out of his way to show how terribly life is for people in this era.  Everyone he meets, even if they are only tangentially tied to Zatoichi, lead these absolutely awful lives.  Sometimes, I wonder why Katsu shows some of these characters.  After all, one of the sex workers in the brothel where a lot of this movie takes place, loses a little brother and then commits suicide.  (I should have included this moment in the parental advisory section of this blog.)  This is where the mentally disabled man (who is played without a moment of self-awareness or study.   It's a pretty bad performance) is raped. Katsu goes out of his way to show how Zatoichi's presence affects the every day man.  

I would say that this, oddly enough, is successful.  I don't like how he did it.  That mentally challenged caricature is rough.   I know.  Some boomer out there is probably talking about how the woke mind-virus has gotten me.  (Note:  I also loved Superman.  Come at me, my guy.) The odd thing is I think it works because Katsu somehow knows his way around the camera.  (I'm not going to bother to look up the cinematographer on this movie.  Let's pretend it's Katsu because this one definitely has a different vibe than its peers.)  But beyond the visuals, focusing on the smaller charactes actually fixes many of the problems that I claimed many of the other Zatoichi movies had.  

I always had a problem with nothing really mattering in these movies.  The times that I applauded a Zatoichi movie was when we were given a reason to care about people.  Often, this involved simplifying the plots so we could fall out of the trappings of the Zatoichi formula.  Well, Zatoichi in Desperation is really rough on plot.  What plot there is happens to be excellent.  I won't lie.  When the old lady falls to her death at the beginning of the movie, I was honestly shocked.  It is such a hard open for a movie.  While the image of the woman falling to her death plays out over the course of the movie, I wish that her death mattered a bit more. It seemed like Nishikigi didn't care a bit.  I don't mind a major character in a movie being aloof to death.  I just wish that it tied into the story more than it did.  Instead, we get a supporting character who often doesn't make a lot of sense.

I'm being harsh on the film.  Nishikigi was somehow both progressive and awful at the same time.  (Boomer, I told you to sit down.  You are going to throw out that hip.)  I don't think that Katsu was going for open-minded with this movie based on a lot of the sequences in the film.  But oddly enough, Nishikigi has this speech about how Zatoichi isn't really saving her because she is in need of saving.  Instead, he's more concerned about having accidentally wronged this woman.  Nishikigi goes further, arguing that while Zatoichi finds sex work as morally offensive, it is the life she chose.  But here's where I think Katsu falls.  We're supposed to be on Zatoichi's side.  And, if I'm being completely honest, as progressive as I try to be, the world that Nishikigi lives in is one based on exploitation.  Yes, she recognizes that Zatoichi is a good man who may have personal motives for helping her.  But that doesn't change the fact that he is a good man.  Where I'm frustrated is that I recognize that Nishigiki is meant to be a redemptive, dynamic character.  But I have a hard time reading her.  And, yeah, part of that comes from the fact that she doesn't care that her mother died trying to visit her.  Maybe that's a bridge too far.  She's coded as a villain for a good chunk of the film.  While she seems to have that moment of epiphany that she's not a good person, there's not a lot of time to rest on that emotional beat because we have the final fight sequence with the sword strapped to Ichi's wrist.

I so love/hate the end with a secret lean into love.  I commented on how the fact that, by this point, Zatoichi is borderline a god of fighting.  No one is going to beat Zatoichi, the Blind Swordsman.  These movies tend to find his Kryptonite and then it does nothing.  I watched this one and thought, "Well, there's no coming back from this."  See, in this one, Zatoichi allows his hands to be destroyed kind of crucifixion style.  (At 5:27 am, my brain don't work so good, you see?)  We're all thinking the same thing, right?  There's no hospital to fix that.  Zatoichi's hands are done for.  Well, we have one more movie left.  I'm incredibly skeptical about whether or not they can have a blind master swordsman without functioning hands.  Still, watching Zatoichi make a workaround, albeit silly, kind of was fun to watch.  It's just the point of believability, but my sense of "That's kind of rad" won out over my brain in this one.

I think I really like this one because it is so visually interesting.  I like the fact that Shintaro Katsu refused to make "just another Zatoichi movie.  The way that I'm justifying the stuff that I find offensive is that Katsu was shooting his shot in 1972.  He was aiming for edgy (which isn't the best target to aim for) and went too far.  For the one thing that really bothered me, there are a dozen or so innovations that made this movie truly worth watching.  It took the formula and looked at it from another perspective and I totally dug that.