Black Gate

Lone Wolf and Cub 1: Sword of Vengeance (Japan, 1972)

Lone Wolf and Cub, the celebrated samurai manga series by writer Kazuo Koike and artist Goseki Kojima, began in 1970 and, wildly popular, eventually ran to many thousands of pages and was adapted to both film and television. However, it was virtually unknown in America and Europe until 1980 when the compilation Shogun Assassin was released, drawing on the first two motion pictures. But Shogun Assassin emphasized the series’ brutal violence and was regarded by most in the west as trash cinema, a reputation that was unchanged until 1987 when the Lone Wolf and Cub manga series was finally republished in the US and UK by First Comics. With covers and endorsements by then-fan-favorite Frank Miller, the comics were widely acclaimed, and the movies finally found release in the United States and Europe in their original forms.

This week we’re taking a look at the first three Lone Wolf movies from 1972-73. Despite their level of gore and carnage, which was considered extreme at the time, these are serious films, adapted from the manga by Kazuo Koike himself. Their success is all the more remarkable because star Tomisaburo Wakayama, middle-aged and heavy, looks so little like a samurai matinee idol. But Wakayama had been a dedicated martial artist before he became an actor, and his surprising athleticism adds depth and credibility to the role.

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El Cid (USA/Italy, 1961)

“Inspired by historical events”: the dreaded phrase that history wonks have come to learn usually means “bears little resemblance to historical events.” But hey, historical epics have to start somewhere, and it might as well be with a little history. To be fair, historical adventure film concepts often start from the best available accounts, but then scripts get rewritten and rewritten again, producers and directors have their own ideas about how the screenplay should get visualized, and before you know it you’ve got… well, El Cid (1961) for one, with a couple of other examples as well, including an admirable entry in The 300 Spartans (1962), which tries harder than most to get it right. I’ll be interested to hear what you think.

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Zatoichi’s Vengeance (Japan, 1966)

The Zatoichi films, a chambara series that features Shintaro Katsu as a blind yakuza swordsman, was very popular in Japan, running throughout the Sixties and totaling 19 films in quick succession, followed less rapidly by a final half-dozen “special” entries. Though the films in the series tend to follow a familiar formula, they are successful because the elements of that formula are a rich mixture of suspense, pathos, action, comedy, and wistful romance. Katsu’s Zatoichi is a blind masseur at the lowest level of Shogunate Japan’s social hierarchy, but he deeply resents the abuse he suffers from his social betters, and his preternaturally keen senses enable him to develop the skills of a sleight-of-hand gambler and, more importantly, a lightning-fast swordsman. A master of iaijutsu, or the slash on the draw, Ichi holds his blade in a reverse grip that is lethally effective when he gets inside the guard of those wielding longer katanas. He also has a lightning wit that enables him to suss out plots and conspiracies from a few overheard clues. Best of all, though he has a temper, Ichi is inherently good-hearted and always comes to the aid of the vulnerable suffering at the hands of their abusers.

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The Viking Queen (UK, 1967)

Though by 1967 the Hammer Films brand was thoroughly associated with Dracula and similar horrors, the studio stubbornly continued to turn out films in other genres, including historical swashbucklers. Our first film, The Viking Queen, definitely has that sensational Hammer touch, but A Challenge for Robin Hood could almost be a Disney film, which shows late-Sixties Hammer productions could still have a considerable tonal range.

Admittedly, our third movie, Alfred the Great, isn’t from Hammer Films, but hey, it’s British and from the same period, and it’s worth a look, so give me a break, okay?

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The Three Musketeers miniseries (UK, 1966)

At last! Because you demanded it. (I’m pretty sure that happened,) Finally, the subject everyone wants an article about, French Swashbuckler Tales Adapted for British Television! I know, right?

In the Sixties, one of the BBC’s stocks in trade was popular literature adapted into mini-series of six to sixteen half-hour episodes, usually shown on Sunday afternoons. In this context, Alexandre Dumas worked well for them: they’d had such success with The Count of Monte Cristo that they went back to the Dumas well twice more with his musketeers, and then picked up and dubbed a French serial called Le Chevalier Tempête set in the same period. En garde, old boy!

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Sword of the Beast (Japan, 1965)

As outlined in Part One, in the Fifties postwar Japan’s film industry gradually returned to making chambara movies that glorified the samurai warrior code of bushido, but in the counter-cultural Sixties some filmmakers took an opposite tack, blaming bushido for supporting a culture of rigid oppression and cruelty. Some remarkable films came out of this movement, pictures of high art that depict the samurai’s wonderfully skilled swordplay while skewering the society that relied on the sword as a tool of domination. Let’s look at three films that exemplify this movement from three brilliant directors: Hideo Gosha, Kihachi Okamoto, and Masaki Kobayashi.

Sword of the Beast (or Samurai Gold Seekers)

Rating: ****
Origin: Japan, 1965
Director: Hideo Gosha
Source: Criterion DVD

Co-writer and director Hideo Gosha’s follow-up to Three Outlaw Samurai takes an even less forgiving view of society than its predecessor: individuals may be good, bad, or both, but hierarchical authority cares only for power and does only ill.

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The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh (USA, 1963)

1963: Lerner and Loewe’s Broadway musical Camelot finally closed after almost 900 performances, Disney’s The Sword and the Stone was preparing for release at the end of the year, and President John F. Kennedy’s administration was being compared to King Arthur’s. This didn’t go unnoticed in Arthur’s Great Britain, and the British movie industry obliged with two Camelot movies, one of them quite ambitious, that have now been largely forgotten. Indeed, Olde England was still the favorite screen setting for historical adventure, as Walt Disney, looking for a follow-up to Zorro, was well aware. And so Disney’s last great swashbuckler, The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh, was shot on location on England’s south coast, one classic that hasn’t been forgotten.

Sword of Lancelot (or Lancelot and Guinevere)

Rating: ****
Origin: UK, 1963
Director: Cornel Wilde
Source: Alpha Video DVD

This is a worthy attempt to film the tragedy of the doomed love triangle of Arthur, Guinevere, and Lancelot, and if it falls short of greatness, it isn’t because writer, director, and star Cornel Wilde didn’t give it his all, it’s just that he wasn’t David Lean or Sergei Eisenstein.

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Morgan the Pirate (Italy/France, 1960)

We tend to think of pirate tales as mainly an English language thing, since the first early modern histories of pirates were in English, as were the genre-defining stories of Robert Louis Stevenson (Treasure Island, Kidnapped), Rafael Sabatini (The Sea Hawk, Captain Blood) and Howard Pyle. But pirate stories were extremely popular in Continental Europe as well, especially in Italy, where Emilio Salgari (1862-1911) wrote as many as 200 adventure novels, mostly about pirates or colonial adventurers who might as well have been called such. His most famous novel is The Black Corsair (1898), which has been filmed at least five times.

During the period of 1960 through 1965, the Italian film industry was famously focused on making peplum, or sword-and-sandal films, but they also dabbled in other historical adventure genres — and in the case of pirate movies, more than dabbled. At lot of these are quickies that might not be worth your time, but Italy loves a good keelhaulin’ cutthroat, and some of the Italian pirate films of the early Sixties were standouts.

Morgan, The Pirate

Rating: ****
Origin: Italy/France, 1960
Director: André DeToth/Primo Zeglio
Source: Turner Classic Movies

This is a fine Franco-Italian production, one of the best Continental pirate movies, starring Steve Reeves as Henry Morgan and Valérie Lagrange as Doña Inez, his daughter-of-the-Spanish-governor love interest. Its taut direction is primarily credited to the Hungarian-American director André DeToth, who (you can’t make this up) later in life lost one eye and wore a black eyepatch. But seriously, Morgan’s production values are good, it has topnotch cinematography by Tonino Delli Colli, excellent costumes and locations, and a rolling nautical score by Franco Mannino.

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