Samurai Wolf

Hideo Gosha's Kiba Okaminosuke (1966) is the kind of sword film that runs under eighty minutes and stays with you for hours. Isao Natsuyagi plays Kiba, a drifting samurai who walks into a village after a courier is attacked and finds himself inside a scheme aimed at a blind woman. A second swordsman, played by Ryohei Uchida and carrying no conscience at all, is set against him. Gosha was working fast and cheap for Toei in these years, and the constraint sharpened the film rather than hurting it. The fights do not unfold as long choreography; they end in seconds, usually decided by a single stroke. The camera works low, over dust, grass and bare earth. Kiba himself is not one of the period's spotless heroes: hungry, unkempt, grinning, interested in money and in women. A sequel followed the next year, so the story does not present itself as closed. The film's strength is not plot complexity but pace and Natsuyagi's performance. The black-and-white widescreen frame is used less for landscape than for holding two men facing each other in one shot. Who it's for: viewers who like post-Kurosawa chanbara and want the genre short and hard. Who it's not for: viewers looking for character depth and psychological motive; the motives here fit in a sentence and the film makes no attempt to hide that.