Often resembling the pilot of a TV show more than a stand-alone movie, Sword of the Beast is a gritty, cynical samurai film that, like the films of Masaki Kobayashi (with which it was grouped by the Criterion Collection) mounts an attack on Japanese feudal authority, and, by extension, Japanese authority in general. In the film's fast-paced, exploitative opening, the samurai protagonist is on the run from his former clan, who, in a typically shameless male fantasy, send a woman to seduce and distract him (all during the opening credits). As we later learn, the hero's involvement with a group of reform-minded samurai led him to assassinate his conservative clan head, all as part of a plot by the clan's ambitious second-in-command. Only some of this elaborate set-up is actually resolved, since the story comes to revolve around a mountain which other characters have been illegally mining for gold. Despite the very cinematic widescreen style and intensity that director Hideo Gosha brings to the film, the plot's restricted scope and open-ended conclusion give Sword of the Beast more of the feeling of a TV pilot than of a full-fledged samurai epic. The fight scenes are good without having being particularly memorable, but Gosha does bring a nice messy quality to them, so that the participants seem more like fallible human beings than the superhuman warriors who often populate films of this sort. Perhaps the story's biggest weakness is that the story's conflicts : both of the parallel plots involve samurai who are betrayed by superiors in their clans, but in neither case does the betrayal seem to be very deeply felt. It is perhaps in this respect, more so than in the plotting, that the film's TV-like qualities are truly limiting, denying the film the same kind of mythic resonance of the best work of Kurosawa and Kobayashi.
Review of Sword of the Beast
