The slice-artistry of the Japanese swordplay genre returns to the silver screen.

By Chuck Stephens

SHOHEI IMAMURA, whose blackly bawdy 1960s new wave classics someone long ago described as presenting a political anthropology of Japanese society from the waist down, once famously gazed into the mirror and reflected that while he was but a farmer, his contemporary Nagisa Oshima, whose own incendiary early films had slit the belly of Japanese cinema wide open and wrapped the entrails of postwar betrayal around both of the nation's political heads, was nothing less than a samurai. Not that any of that ought necessarily to come in handy during the onslaught of blade-running Bushido warriors and stomach-slashing slice-artistry to be unleashed in the course of the Balboa Theater's current miniseason of jidai-geki ("period piece") genre classics: a 16-film, A(kira Kurosawa) to Z(atoichi) survey of feudal folly and ferocious rebellion in freshly struck 35mm prints, tersely titled (with all the Zen simplicity of an Edo-era rebel's yell) "Samurai!"

Then again, so wide and wild are the ways of the samurai cinema that even in the hoariest examples of the genre, one always seems to stumble over something new worth savoring, so perhaps you really never know.

An example: Like many of you out there, I can scarcely remember the number of times I've seen The Seven Samurai over the decades, and in some ways its inevitable inclusion (along with four of Kurosawa's other chanbara chestnuts) in yet another swordplay retrospective fills me at least partially with a sense of unimpeded dread. Not that that should stop less jaded or altogether uninitiated viewers from attending – just the opposite. There's no denying that The Seven Samurai still sings with manly gusto, in large part due to the ferociously caged intensity of Toshiro Mifune's performance, which the actor boasted he'd accomplished by patiently studying footage of lions on the prowl. And of the satirical double whammy that is Yojimbo and Sanjuro, too much can never be said. Those pioneering pinnacles of the "spaghetti eastern" not only set new literary standards for subsequent decades of swordplay cinema throughout the Asian continent, but they also ratified the celebrity status and dramatic versatility of bug-eyed genre giant Tatsuya Nakadai, whose poodle-coiffed, pistol-packing kimono punk in Yojimbo stands in staggering relief against his shaven-headed super-severity in Sanjuro, as the magistrate who meets his fate in the most volcanic (nonsexual) money shot cinema has ever known.

But for all the times I'd seen those seven samurai, it wasn't until I saw them again this summer that I recognized for the very first time the familiar face of a supernumerary slash-master striding ever so briefly among them – and if you stay your blink reflex during the movie's 10:16 and 10:19 marks, you can spot him too. Sure enough, it's Tatsuya Nakadai, enjoying his 13-second debut among that Kurosawa-gumi as proud and pluckish in his barely glimpsed-ness as he might have been had he played every part in the picture, or somehow managed to convince Kurosawa that the whole thing ought to be retitled in his honor: The Eighth Samurai.

As time went on, Nakadai's persistent and central presence throughout the genre's transformations of the '60s and '70s – as the revolutionary political fervor that had long been playing out on the streets of Tokyo began to find its way into even the most tradition-bound entertainments shown on the silver screen – would prove so ineluctable as to overshadow even Mifune, prompting one critic of the era to recklessly posit Nakadai was a kind of insouciantly ronin Elvis to the increasingly stiff-necked Mifune's shogun-rigid John Wayne. In reality the classically trained Nakadai was no more a rock 'n' roll Method mumbler than an instinctual hillbilly hepcat, though he certainly could play one, and in director Kihachi Okamoto's astonishing 1968 supersatire, Kill!, he played one to the hilt.

Exuding a palpable sense of body odor and sporting a 15-o'clock shadow's worth of thorny facial growth, Nakadai swans into Kill! (which was based on the same source novel as Sanjuro) on a gust of world-weary Oscar Wilde sighs and miscreant sophistication and, while playing both ends of a small-town power struggle against the middle, proceeds to swallow the Mifune part whole. It's a far cry from the cosmically comic-book nihilism he'd exuded just two years earlier as the brooding assassin with the bamboo lampshade on his head in Okamoto's apocalyptic Sword of Doom, and a still further cry from the stentorian and cadaverous seppuku opponent he'd essayed in Masaki Kobayashi's austerely antifeudal masterpiece, Hara-kiri, made half a decade before.

But while Nakadai kept on changing, Mifune kept returning to shadow variations on his once so vibrant ruffian role from Yojimbo, until eventually Shintaro Katsu's comically inclined blind-masseur-slash-closet-samurai Zatoichi caught up with him, and, like Mothra and Godzilla, they were forced to face off in ludicrous battle before finally seeming to disappear together forever through the hole they'd worn in the Earth during all that running in place. Forever, that is, until Takeshi Kitano arrived to dye the blind masseur blond and return tap dancing to its rightful position as that most flexible of martial attributes allowed by what had once seemed the genre's ever-expanding grace.

But as most genre fans will recognize, that which never stops expanding must eventually go snap!

Say hello to Hideo Gosha, the last of samurai cinema's anti-irony holdouts, and a visionary whose all-encompassing approach to the genre in soft-core scroll-scribblings like 1978's Bandits vs. Samurai Squad typically involved trumping episodes of staggering ultraviolence with the still more nauseating tortures of epically enervated make-out scenes. Fond of tightly framed tongue-tangos between aging Ozu starlets and chipped-granite former he-men like Tetsuro Tamba (the George Kennedy of the Japanese silver screen), Gosha seemed convinced that the Floating World had mainly been kept aloft on piano-and-strings treacle that even Rachmaninoff wouldn't have endured. And so it was that the nobility of this once so revered of Japanese genres, where master swordsmen and master cineastes had formerly slashed their way to immortality, did finally reach its grimly glittering crescendo – and slowly succumb to suffocation not by choking on the blood of righteous vengeance, nor by suffering the savage swish! of some Oshima-sharpened blade, but by fumbling like an Imamura farm boy, desperate to drop his trousers as he drowns in the drool of topless dreams.

'Samurai!' runs Dec. 2-22, Balboa Theater, 3630 Balboa, SF. $6-$8.50. (415) 221-8184, www.balboamovies.com.