A "feel-good" movie about a blind 19th-century masseur who happens to also be a lightning-swift swordsman with dead-on instincts and a soft spot for common people? Back in his '60s-through-'70s day, the bearish, buffoonish, and sometimes monstrous Zatoichi had the touch – his pudgy digits planted firmly on the pulse of the Japanese public when they weren't wrapped around his cane sword or plunged into his nostrils – and his adventures were chronicled in 26 feature films and more than 100 TV episodes. Slicing and dicing his way through a world of gamblers, gangsters, and geishas, the Blind Swordsman, as played by the late Shintaro Katsu, single-handedly resurrected the post-Kurosawa chambara (sword fight) cinematic genre, one that revolved around samurai and masterless warriors, or ronin, roving through a lawless land.

Unlike Takeshi Kitano's remake, The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi, there's little arterial spray, self-conscious cool, or winky cleverness in Zatoichi and the Chess Expert, Zatoichi's Vengeance, and Zatoichi's Cane Sword (Home Vision Entertainment; $19.95 each), entries 12, 13, and 15 on the film side of the Blind Swordsman series. These midpoint journeyman stories draw you in with their old-school attention to the sometimes gnarled narrative, their handsome earth-toned look, some stunningly stylized art direction, earnest themes of kindness toward the vulnerable and handicapped, and the sheer magnetism of their star, Katsu. Much more chatty than Kitano's swordsman, fast with his fingers when it comes to throwing dice or giving a geisha a good rubdown, and eager to mix it up with townspeople – particularly when women and children are in peril – Katsu's Zatoichi is a modishly sideburned, gambling, drunken master. He's an extraordinary everyman with hypersensitive senses and an ability to see into people's hearts, making his way through a Tokugawa-era feudal gangland where ordinary folks are regularly roughed up and shaken down by ever-warring thugs. All you need is the perseverance to hang on through the still, inactive parts of these stories. Consider it a character-building exercise – if you were served nothing but bloodshed, you'd be consuming Zatoichi: The Videogame instead.

If anything, these three films point out the possibilities within the flexible perimeters of the Zatoichi character, the whodunit and justice-prevails plots, the general tone of humanism (in noggin-boggling contrast to the general tone of nihilism that characterizes most Japanese cinema today), and the expectation of some kick-ass action. Little wonder that at one point, in 1964, Zatoichi movies were trundled out bimonthly, as Japanese audiences waited, like Dickens's readers, for the next fix of their Teflon-coated, blood-letting Little Nell.

Of the three, Zatoichi and the Chess Expert is the least complex, despite the fact that it was directed by noted chambara filmmaker Kenji Misumi, who helmed the first film in the series (The Tale of Zatoichi) and hit the lyrical heights of the swordplay genre with the beautiful, blood-washed Lone Wolf with Cub: Baby Cart at the River Styx (albeit if you equate Ashes of Time-like lyricism with, say, a scene in which female ninjas trim a man's body of limbs). In contrast, Chess Expert seems downright sedate; but you do get tidy cat-and-mouse scenes between Katsu and his chess-playing opponent and a relatively torrid love scene between the blind swordsman and a mysterious widow with bite.

The ladies love a blind man! That notion persists in the elegantly streamlined and elemental Vengeance, as Mayumi Ogawa (who falls for a serial killer in Shohei Imamura's Vengeance Is Mine) plays a hopeless prostitute with a soft spot for her killer-masseur. Here, vengeance is blind, and the twist is that Ogawa's ex-ronin lover must earn her freedom by slaying Zatoichi, who happens to be in town after stumbling over a dead man in a field and restoring the money he finds to the deceased's mother and young son. This time, Zatoichi's outsider status is clearly delineated by his counterpart, a blind biwa-playing priest who speaks in riddles and chastises the masseur for corrupting the boy by allowing him to believe that violence answers life's problems. "Children are attracted to the strong," the holy man quips. Climaxing with one of the series' most striking battle scenes (lensed by Yojimbo's Kazuo Miyagawa), Vengeance finds Zatoichi lurching through an army of gangsters, holding his sword like a dagger, and looking like a killing machine or silent-movie monster in eternal defense mode. Could this installment be the most ambivalent, and antiviolent, of the trio?

In Zatoichi's Cane Sword, the blind swordsman attempts to renounce his bloody ways when an ex-swordmaker, played with grit by Ozu and Kurosawa regular Eijiro Tono, tells him that his sword will snap after one more kill. Zatoichi tries to get by as a masseur, but like any mafioso, he finds himself sucked back in again as gang turf wars bust through the paper walls of his hideout. A final tangle with a corrupt inspector artfully builds to a genuinely surprising conclusion, culminating with a battle scene in which Zatoichi literally fights his way out of a barrel. "Pops," he tells the swordmaker, "it looks as if I can't go straight after all." Neither can you, most likely, after you see a few of these: the movies will whet your appetite for more Zatoichi and the hordes of mute, womanly, child-caring, and otherwise underdog sword fighters who spun off in his wake.

Kimberly Chun