Zatoichi Meets Yojimbo (1970)

Not rated, but this one gets pretty gory.  There are some Zatoichi movies that are almost family friendly.   Then there are Zatoichi movies that really embrace the fact that a guy who swings a sword a lot should be surrounded by blood.  This is the latter kind of Zatoichi movie.  I'm also a little concerned that there's really brief nudity, but I can't be confident about that.  There's also some language!  So one of the more controversial Zatoichi movies!

DIRECTOR: Kihachi Okamoto

You know, considering that this is the best looking Zatoichi movie, I could not find one still that really reflected the cinematography of this movie.  It's a borderline crime how much time I wasted only to settle with the image that I had above.  Some of those other Zatoichi movies had immediate finds.  This one?  Both Google and Bing image searches.  When I hit Bing, you know that I'm desperate.  (Although I actually like their image searches better than Google's...)  This movie is the prettiest looking Zatoichi and I had to find an image where some of the eponymous protagonist's head is cut off.  Boo.

This is the movie that I was excited for.  Are you kidding me?  The hero of the Kurosawa film Yojimbo meets Zatoichi, the Blind Swordsman?  I watched 19 movies up to this point just to get ready for this film.  But I have to tell you, this movie was bound to disappoint.  In some ways, it did exactly what a crossover film should do.  In many other ways, it kind of craps the bed.  When I eventually log this into Letterboxd after writing this blog, I'm probably going to give it a three out of five.  I hate to simplify movies into "out of five" breakdowns, but I know that I'm going to stray into some pretty whiny writing.  I can see it now.  Three out of five is fine.  We're all in the fine camp here.  But with a movie that I've hyped up a lot, three out of five might be the worst review that it can get.  I was almost let down in the first moment.  I was watching the opening credits and I had the weird epiphany, "What if it's not Toshiro Mifune?"  I thought it might have been the character from Yojimbo, but they couldn't get a big name like Mifune to show up for the movie.  The credits kept going and I didn't see Mifune.  Then, poof!  There's his name.  You'd think that would be enough to get me excited.

Here's the problem.  It is Mifune.  They even say "Yojimbo" a whole bunch in the movie.  The problem is, the character's name isn't Yojimbo in Yojimbo.  "Yojimbo" means "Bodyguard."  And for a lot of the movie, the word "Yojimbo" does stand for bodyguard.  But the character in Yojimbo is named "Sanjuro."  The Yojimbo character in Zatoichi Meets Yojimbo is not named Sanjuro.  He's named something else.  The idea is that Daiei couldn't get the actual rights to the Yojimbo character, so they called the movie Zatoichi Meets Yojimbo because the character is played by the same dude in a similar vein to the character he played before.  Yeah, there's a lot of dancing around.  So the weird thing is that we're supposed to treat and think about Mifune's character as Sanjuro without any of the mythology of Sanjuro.  It's some tap dancing that I should be more okay with, but I think we're in the same camp when we say, "I guess I'm excited that Toshiro Mifune is playing a cool dude in a Zatoichi movie".  Still, it's not Sanjuro.

There is some degree of specialness to this movie.  I'm sure it's not an accident that they saved this crossover for Movie 20.  I prepped for this movie by watching Yojimbo, but I also should have watched the OG Zatoichi, the Blind Swordsman in preparation for this movie.  This is the movie where Zatoichi returns home.  The movie makes a pretty fine meal out of Zatoichi's return.  I'll have to be honest with you.  It's been a minute since I've seen the first movie.  It's been so long that when I finish this box set, I have to go back and watch the first few to say that I've written about every Zatoichi film.  While I don't remember the individual beats, Zatoichi Meets Yojimbo does a lot to catch me up on what happened in the previous films.  And the movie is longer too.  Like, this is almost a full two hours.  In terms of grandeur, the movie feels bigger than the other Zatoichi movies.  But the runtime does not help the pacing of the film whatsoever.  I'll get to that in a second.  But as I've mentioned, the cinematography is something of scale.  I don't know if they necessarily spent more money.  We have a lot of the same "Stay in one village" tropes that the Zatoichi movies have employed in the other films.  

But if Samaritan Zatoichi did everything right by making the story a character film, Zatoichi Meets Yojimbo makes the mistakes of previous movies by leaning heavily into a plot that doesn't make a lick of sense.  Sometimes, I'm convinced that it is just me, not understanding the dynamics of jidaigeki era films.  But I decided to read up on the plot of Zatoichi Meets Yojimbo.  I wanted to be something special.  After all, I watched a lot of movies to get here.  And do you know what?  I don't think many people really understand the bulk of the plot.  I understood most of what other people had gotten about this movie and that was pretty minimal.  Some of those plot things brought about some great imagery.  For example, I knew that there was some hidden gold in the village.  I understand that gold was in dust form.  I know that the gold blew away in a storm, covering the fighters in gold dust and that all looked super rad.  But a lot of how the gold got there and why it was being treated the way it was eludes me.  Honestly, the dynamics of a lot of the criminals is odd.  I get that the guy hoarding all of the money has two sons.  The sons are trying to kill each other for the money.  But that's all I know.

Even beyond this point, I don't really get how Sassa (Yojimbo) and Zatoichi interact with each other.  They really play up that old chestnut of the two heroes refusing to get along, mainly because they're too alike.  But because we don't know much about Sassa --because he's not Sanjuro --Sassa really comes across as the villain of this piece.  His entire gag is that he's a bit of a bully when it comes to Zatoichi.  If you didn't know it was Toshiro Mifune (which I didn't for a minute!  He's older in this movie!), he would just be the villain of the movie.  He has some moral scruples, but I'm not quite sure what he stands for.  We get that he's in love with the woman that may or may not love Zatoichi.  But he's also a spy.  Zatoichi vocalizes his anger at men like Sassa, claiming he won't even pretend to be like him.  (Mind you, the last movie made a big hullaballoo over the fact that Zatoichi is a yakuza.)  Here's the deal.  If I had never seen Yojimbo (and it shouldn't matter because this isn't the same character!), I wouldn't know that Sassa was a heroic character.  Much of the movie, he complains about not being paid enough.  He doesn't really help the town except with his scheming with Zatoichi.  It's all about personality against a town's real problems.

I also don't think that there's enough mythology behind both Sanjuro or Sassa to really establish tropes for this character.  There are some beats of Zatoichi Meets Yojimbo that are just rehashes of Yojimbo.  If I squinted, I could see that Mifune's character slightly plays the two warring factions off of each other as he keeps getting paid peacemeal.  That's something that happened in Yojimbo, but in a much more deliberate way.e  Similarly, we had the evil gunslinger character walk into town and be all mysterious.  That's something that happened in Yojimbo.  It's just that we don't get any character growth.  It feels like the production team just wanted to remind you about how good of a movie Yojimbo was, even if it has nothing to do with this film.  But by having Sassa tease Zatoichi's blindness, it feels like his aloofness that came with the original Kurosawa film is more about the protagonist being a jerk who simply got a happy outcome rather than someone who is pretending to be a selfish samurai when he's actually a good man.

I mean, thank goodness that the movie looked pretty or I would be pretty annoyed by the film as a whole.  I can't deny that the second act was a blur for me.  The final act, when the two are just massacring the bad guys left and right was actually kind of fun.  I even liked that Zatoichi struggled to beat the bad guys in this one.  (I'm still absolutely confused by the inconsistency of Zatoichi's blindness.  He's either hyper aware, "seeing" what others can't or he gets confused by steps.)  Yeah, it's great to see Mifune again in a similar role.  But this movie lacked the meat of the knockout that was Samurai Zatoichi.  But it will all work out in the end because I'm getting close to the home stretch.