Hanzo the Razor: The Snare

In the Edo period the treasury has begun debasing the currency and most of the population has been driven into poverty. Hanzo Itami, a city officer, enforces the law without regard to rank, which puts him in constant conflict with his superiors. In this instalment he pursues a case involving abortions and the selling of girls at a convent, and the trail leads him straight to the treasury. The man in charge of it wants Hanzo gone. It is the second of the three films in the series, and it is not a picture that can be watched without argument today. Hanzo's method of interrogation is the central matter of the films, and that method is built on raping women; the narrative presents it as a display of power and delivers it in a comic register. The films belong to the period when Japanese genre cinema of the seventies recognised no limits, but they are not works to approach without knowing what is in them. Shintaro Katsu, the actor known from Zatoichi, plays the exact opposite kind of figure here.