The Sword of Doom

The Sword of Doom (1966) is one of the darkest samurai films ever made, and it catches even genre regulars off guard. Ryunosuke is an extraordinary swordsman with no moral framework whatsoever. He kills without remorse. The film does not attempt to forgive him and does not go looking for a cause. It simply watches, and the watching becomes progressively unbearable. Tatsuya Nakadai plays almost the entire film without smiling. Toshiro Mifune appears in only a few scenes, but the fight in the snow is the sequence everyone remembers. The strangest thing about it is the ending. It was shot as the first part of a trilogy and the other two were never made. So it stops in the middle, unresolved and without exhaling. First time viewers are usually startled, and it is better to know beforehand. The final scene is a fit of madness of a kind cinema rarely attempts. It runs 122 minutes. Good for: samurai cinema, black and white Japanese classics, and studies of a character with nothing underneath. Less good for: the violence is frequent and arbitrary and there is a rape scene. Anyone wanting a hero or a resolution will not get either.