The Men Who Tread on the Tiger's Tail

A warlord has fallen out with his brother and is fleeing. Yoshitsune must go north with six retainers. There is a checkpoint on the road and the guards are looking for exactly them. They make a plan: they will disguise themselves as travelling monks and pass the lord off as a porter. They reach the checkpoint. The commander Togashi is suspicious. Benkei, the chief retainer, is made to read out a document; the paper in his hand is blank and he invents the text from memory. Then the commander asks one last question. Akira Kurosawa directs. Denjirō Ōkōchi, Susumu Fujita and the comedian Kenichi Enomoto are in the cast. It is a Japanese production. The source is a well known kabuki play; the story has been staged in Japan for centuries. It was made in the last days of the war; the censors of the period found the account of feudal loyalty unsuitable and it was not released when finished. The occupation authorities after the war blocked it on the same grounds; it was shown only in 1952. It runs under an hour and almost all of it takes place at the checkpoint. Kurosawa added a new character; the porter played by the comedian Enomoto is not in the source and brings an outside eye to the narrative. The matter it treats is bluff; everything depends on the confidence in Benkei's voice. Its limit is scale; the budget is very small, the sets limited and there is little event. Who it is for: anyone curious about Kurosawa and the Japanese theatre tradition. Who it is not for: it is very short, confined to one place, and closed without knowledge of the references.