The Tale of Zatoichi (Daiei, 1962)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The two movies I wanted to watch last night (Friday, January 12) on Turner Classic Movies both dealt with blind protagonists. They were the 1962 Japanese film The Tale of Zatoichi and the 1942 U.S. programmer Eyes in the Night. The Tale of Zatoichi was the first of 26 films featuring the title character, a blind swordsman and former masseur who walked through the Japanese countryside looking for wrongs to right. TCM host Ben Mankiewicz this time had a co-host, Chad Stahelski, who graduated from being Keanu Reeves’s stunt double to directing Reeves in the film John Wick: Chapter IV. Stahelski said he got the idea of having John Wick face off against a blind samurai in Chapter IV from the Zatoichi movies, which both he and Mankiewicz claimed was the longest-running series in Japanese movie history. Sorry, folks, but that’s just another case of first-itis: Toho Studios, the biggest rival to the Daiei company which made the Zatoichi films, made 33 movies featuring Godzilla (plus five more for which they licensed the character to U.S. companies), though perhaps they meant that the Zatoichi films were the longest-running Japanese movie series in which the central character they carried over from film to film was a human being. Zatoichi was played by Shintarô Katsu (1931-1997), a very interesting actor with a striking resemblance to Erich von Stroheim: the same close-cropped hair, ramrod-straight posture and overall imperious, no-nonsense attitude. Katsu continued to play Zatoichi in most of the subsequent films and also in a TV series that ran for 98 episodes from 1974 to 1979.

The plot, to the extent there is one, deals with Zatoichi getting caught up in the middle of a rivalry between two Japanese warlords, Shigezô of Sakugawa (Ryûzô Shimada) and Sukegorô of Iioka (Eijirô Yanagi). Both are bosses of rival yakuzas – Japanese criminal gangs – and the script by Minoru Inuzuka (based on a short story by Kan Shimozawa) makes it clear that Zatoichi is himself a yakuza rather than a samurai. The distinction seems to be that a samurai is bound by the Japanese code of honor known as bushido and a yakuza is not. The one actual samurai we see in this movie is Hirate (Shigeru Amachi), who if not drop-dead gorgeous is handsome and a hunk, especially compared to the middle-aged homeliness of most of the males in this film. Unfortunately, Zatoichi and Hirate end up on opposite sides of the faction war between Iioka and Sakugawa; Hirate also suffers from a rare wasting disease (we’re never told what it is, but since its hallmark is coughing up blood my guess is tuberculosis) that has fatally weakened him just before the big fight, which Zatoichi easily wins with his amazing dexterity with the sword he keeps hidden in his cane. In the first few minutes I was wondering if there’d be any women in the film, so relentlessly male is the character list. It turns out there are two, but only one is significant: Tane (Masayo Banri), who was formerly the mistress of the local governor, Seisuke (Manabu Morita), until he got tired of her and passed her on to Shigezô, who married her. But midway through the movie Seisuke shows up determined to get her back, and almost rapes her before Tane fights him off. Zatoichi and Tane carry on a non-serious flirtation which reaches its height when she invites him to feel her face, and on the basis of his sense of touch he proclaims her very beautiful.

The Tale of Zatoichi was directed by Kenji Misumi and photographed in wide-screen black-and-white by Chikashi Makiura, who gets some really stunning images reminding one of Japanese woodcuts. The physical “look” of The Tale of Zatoichi is its major appeal; like a lot of Akira Kurosawa’s black-and-white films, it evokes the world of Japanese art so powerfully we don’t miss color. Next to that is the quite powerful emotion between Zatoichi and Hirate, which includes Zatoichi giving Hirate a massage (well, Zatoichi used to work as a masseur, remember, even though he admits that he never had any actual training and just learned by watching others do it and copying them) and ends with a really quirky death scene in which Zatoichi and Hirate confront each other on a very narrow footbridge and Hirate, mortally wounded by one of Zatoichi’s zippy sword moves (here and several other times in the film we see Zatoichi move his sword so quickly we’re not sure what he’s doing until Misumi’s camera pulls back and we see the dead and bloodied aftermath), tells both Zatoichi and us that he considers it an honor to have died by Zatoichi’s hand. Though the imdb.com credits list Shôhei Miyauchi as “martial arts director,” there are precious few martial-arts scenes in the film and surprisingly little action of any kind – just a few shots of Shintarô Katsu (or his stunt double) manipulating his sword so totally fast I’d like to be able to slow down the scenes at these points just to see what he is doing. Eventually Zatoichi abandons Shigezô and Tane with a few well-chosen words about how, even though Shigezô has technically “won” the war, he’s left behind so many dead bodies in his wake that Zatoichi doesn’t think the “victory” is anything to celebrate.

It’s hard to see why this sporadically interesting but very strange movie sparked such a legendary and long-running series, but then nobody predicted that Dr. No (1962), a perfectly reasonable but not all that interesting action piece, would launch the James Bond franchise either. Incidentally, Mankiewicz and Stahelski followed up The Tale of Zatoichi with a discussion of Stahelski’s lobbying campaign to get the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to start giving Academy Awards to stunt people – which seems like a good idea in theory but hard to work out in practice. Not only are stunt doubles almost never credited – and either crediting them or giving them awards would blow the illusion that the stars are doing it all themselves – but their work is being phased out as CGI is replacing them. (Stahelski acknowledged that the reason a lot of producers and directors are relying on CGI rather than human stunt people these days is to show stunts that would be physically either impossible or too dangerous for humans.) That’s one reason I’m generally gratified to see a film with a long list of people being credited with stunt work; it’s nice that at least some directors are doing these shots with actual live human beings!