# Chushingura (1962)

### reviewed by
David Arnold

    Chushingura (1962, Hiroshi Inagaki)

"Chushingura" is an epic tale, based on a historic event, set in the late feudal period of Japan: A young lord, Asano (Yuzo Kayama), follows his consience and a new law and refuses to pay tribute to an elder lord, Kira (Chûsha Ichikawa). Kira has achieved his position through graft -- he is, in reality, a cowardly, greedy womanizer. When Kira realizes that Asano won't enrich his coffers, he hatches a plan to humiliate him. Kira arranges for Asano to be host to some imperial envoys in the Shogun's palace in Edo. Asano is as inexperienced as he is incorruptable, and Kira witholds essential details of protocol, taunting Asano and implying that whatever tribute Asano had withheld would be a pittance compared to what it would now cost him to employ Kira's assistance. Finally, Asano is goaded beyond his limit, draws his sword and attempts to slay Kira in the palace.

Drawing one's weapon inside the Shogun's palace is a capital offense, and Asano is compelled to commit hara kiri. His family and their retainers (ronin) are forced to relinquish the Clan Asano castle and become outcasts. Led by Lord Oishi (Koshiro Matsumoto), the clan chamberlain, 60 of the clan secretly plot revenge against Kira. Along the way, a number of interesting side stories and digressions are set up, all of which come together at the film's climax.

The film is beautifully photographed in Tohoscope (a wide screen CinemaScope/Panavision clone), and unfolds meditatively, evoking early 18th century Japanese scenery and customs in lush detail. The ethic of the film is very, very Japanese with its emphasis on honor and Bushido, the code of the Samurai. Kira is more of a villian for being cowardly than for being greedy. Anyone with an interest in Japanese history and culture will eat this film up.

The score, written by Akira Ifukube, is on the whole a delightful and effective bit of east-meets-west cinema music, although the use of what sounds like a Hammond organ in full Leslie mode as punctuation brought flashbacks of 1950's televison soap operas.

The only shortcoming is at the very end, in the climatic battle between Oishi's followers and Kira's bodyguards. The fight scene suffers from the same lack of realism as so many Hollywood shootouts from the 40's and 50's -- the Good Guys cut up a larger force of Bad Guys without losing a single man, and the Bad Guys drop without shedding a drop of blood. I'm sure that, in reality, such a battle would have been nothing short of a bloodbath. Not that I'm complaining, really, since I don't get off on explicit scenes of bloodhshed. It's just that the violence in the early parts of the film were handled so carefully and so obliquely (the shot of Asano's suicide dissolves out before the fatal plunge of the daggar), I found the final fight scene jarringly unrealistic in the context of the rest of the film.

The version of "Chushingura" that I saw was from Image's DVD. It is just short of 4 hours long, and in two parts. I believe this is the way the film was originally shown in Japan. The DVD itself is somewhat lackluster and suffers from some authoring problems: The image is less crisp than of what DVD is capable, and a number of encoding artifacts appear in the image. Perhaps since this film comes so close to maxing out a single side of a DVD, some bandwith compromises were made to avoid having to cut a 2-sided disc. The English subtitles are burned into the video and could not be switched off; thankfully, they're outside of the image itself. Properly done, this DVD should have had selectable subtitles. I would have preferred it to have been dubbed as well. As deep as is my love for things Japanese, I'm afraid that my love for the Japanese language shall forever go unrequited.

Essay copyright (C) 1999 David M. Arnold. All rights reserved.

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