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Band of Assassins (1971)

Screen: Japanese Saga:Feudal Spirit Survives in 'Band of Assassins'

"Band of Assassins" picks up the story of Japan in 1863 and drops it in the spring of 1868, a few months before it was previously picked up by last week's "Red Lion." It is just possible that by following the fortunes of Tohshiro Mifune at the Bijou, program after program, one might progress by brief forward spurts through the whole saga of the Japanese nation—in reverse. Of course Mifune dies (the question in these movies is never "whether," but only "how"), but if he keeps on dying several years before each previous death he will achieve a kind of immortal mortality good at least until the dawn of recorded Eastern history.

The film's time span covers the last years of the Tokugawa shogunate, the last gasp of the feudal spirit, the last vain struggle to close Japan to modernization and foreign influence. Very little of this seems to get into the film overtly (at least, as well as I can make out by the subtitles), except that the final battle is fought by swords against cannon and rifles. But I think a good deal does get in covertly, and it furnishes the main interest in what is otherwise no better, no livelier, no more subtle and no less bloody a movie than any of the other samurai dramas we have for some time been seeing.

Mifune, a farmer turned samurai, joins and eventually leads a band loyal to the emperor and dedicated to eliminating, generally by mass murder, extremist elements of whose loyalties I am not altogether sure.

Mifune is strict, severe, solemn, and much given to staring down destiny—as evidenced in the portentous profiles that seem to be his favorite way of being photographed in close-up. I don't know what historical status his character has, but its mythic status, like the tremendously solid presence of Mifune himself, is clear enough. He means to transform history, to translate it into personality—and though his films are full of other able, powerful men, they are no more than their ability or power. Only Mifune lives fate inwardly.

But "Band of Assassins" knows its time as well as its timelessness, and Tadashi Sawahima, whose name is not familiar, seems to have directed in terms of traditional visual styles. Sometimes his work looks like Ichikawa, sometimes it looks like Ozu, but more often it looks like a tribute to the Japanese print and to the arrangements of space in Japanese architecture. I think this tribute is deliberate, and rather lovely. And although it is eventually submerged in the habitual pieties of the Mifune enterprise, it suggests for a while a spirit and a style that is deeper, more delicate and surely more durable than the heavy heroics for which it serves as a backdrop.

The Cast
BAND OF ASSASSINS, directed by Tadashi Sawashima; screenplay by Kenro Matsuura; director of photography, Kozvo Yamada; music by Masau Sato; produced by Mifune Productions for release by Toho International. At the Bijou Cinema, 45th Street near Broadway. Running time: 122 minutes. (Not submitted at this time to the Motion Picture Association of America's Production Code and Rating Administration for rating as to audience suitability.)
With Toshiro Mifune, also Isami Kondo, Keiju Kobayashi, Kinya Kitaoji and Rentaro Mikuni.