Hanzo the Razor: Sword of Justice

Kenji Misumi's 1972 film is a police story set in the Edo period and contains Shintarō Katsu's best known role outside Zatoichi. Inspector Hanzo Itami openly refuses his superiors' corruption and works by his own methods. The most famous and most contested thing about it is that method: Hanzo uses rape as an interrogation technique to get information from women, and the film presents this as heroic and even as comic material. Those scenes run through the whole picture and are not defensible now. Against that, the film is treated as a document of where Japanese genre cinema went in the seventies, and Misumi's visual language and the fight sequences are technically strong. Who it's for: those examining seventies Japanese genre film historically. Who it's not for: almost anyone who would rather not approach a film in which sexual violence is endorsed and used as entertainment.