Kill! (1968, Kihachi Okamoto) (Patreon)

66/100

Less galvanizing than The Sword of Doom, if memory serves (been 15 years), but perhaps that's mostly because here Nakadai's paired with Etsushi Takahashi, who's totally solid but just, y'know, not Toshiro Mifune. To be fair, that's proper casting, since Takahashi's aspiring samurai has been conceived as a major doofus, in deliberately stark contrast to Nakadai's jaded, wily former samurai; much of Kill!'s comedy early on involves the former ineptly trying to murder the latter and failing even to ruffle the guy's feathers a little. It's like watching a bull charge Bugs Bunny and smack its head into the anvil hidden behind his red cape. Unlike Samurai Spy, a fellow Criterion title that drove me bonkers the previous week, this film takes care to keep its clan-based intrigue relatively simple: Boss betrays seven henchmen—this could have been titled The Seven Samurai, if not for duh—and tries to have them killed before they can reveal his treachery to some higher authority in Edo. And even if the plot had proved tougher to follow, I'd likely have rolled with it, as Okamoto frames each shot and orchestrates each sequence so robustly that it's all but impossible to lose interest. Small but gratifying formal touches abound, e.g. reframing a close-up with a slight lateral move that seems entirely justified for its own sake, dramatically speaking, but turns out to be setting up a rack-focus to the door behind Nakadai, which suddenly slides open. Ending's a bit of a damp squib (by which I mean mostly the way in which order gets restored, though I've also seen better epilogues), and the swordplay's so expertly chaotic that you wish there were more of it, but this is clearly a filmmaker worth investigating further. (I'll get to Zatoichi Meets Yojimbo eventually.) Ancillary fun fact: Having long mistakenly assumed that the yakuza date back only to the previous century—would never have thought of them as coexisting with samurai—I read the Wikipedia entry and discovered that yakuza, the word, represents an especially lousy hand in a particular Japanese card game, 8 (ya)* 9 (ku) 3 (sa). It's as if American gangsters were called the sevendeuceoff. 

* Though it seems as if the current Japanese word for eight is something like hachi. Maybe it was different hundreds of years ago.