Red Lion

February 1868. As Tokugawa rule collapses, Gonzo returns to the village he was born in with the Sekihotai, a unit attached to the Imperial army. He has put on a red wig and looks like an officer. The news he brings is that taxes are to be cut. But the villagers take him for a man come to rescue them, and Gonzo cannot even read his own proclamations. Kihachi Okamoto's film uses Toshiro Mifune not as a master swordsman but as an ordinary peasant who thinks he has become something. The Sekihotai was a real unit. The telling sets comedy and pain side by side: the gap between the promise carried and what the new order actually delivers is the film's central subject. Shima Iwashita is also in the cast.