Samurai Assassin

The winter of 1860. In Edo a group of ronin are planning to assassinate one of the most powerful men in the shogunate; they will lie in wait outside the palace gate in the snow. Among them is a man called Niiro, never accepted because he does not belong to the samurai class and does not know who his father was. Something he learns about the target changes everything. Kihachi Okamoto directs. Toshiro Mifune plays Niiro. The narrative comes from a real event. The assassination at Sakuradamon in 1860 is taken as a turning point in Japanese history and as the beginning of the unravelling of the shogunate. What interests the film is class rather than politics. Everything Niiro does is aimed at being counted a samurai and he never manages it; skill with a sword is worth nothing because the matter is birth. Okamoto's telling is cold. The fights are short and uncomplicated; snow, waiting and darkness are the real material. The image is black and white and widescreen, and the snow sequence at the end is among the most cited images in the genre. Mifune was known at the time for the Kurosawa films and plays an entirely different hero here: coarse, angry and unsure of his own place. Who it is for: viewers who like Japanese period film and samurai narratives about historical politics. Who it is not for: there are many characters, it is hard to follow without the historical background, and the action is limited.