"Samurai Wolf" and "For a few dollars more"
The best of the genre's
I don't talk about films I like here much but I love these two films so much I have to write something about them as I'm on a 13 hour flight from Haneda to Frankfurt and have nothing else to do after watching both of these films for probably the 20th time each.
Having made a sort of Chanbara or Samurai film in my 2012 Heart String Marionette I studied Samurai films for a bit around that time. I watched 40-60 of them- I read a few books about them and several articles about them. I studied the things that influenced them and some of the things they influenced like "Spaghetti western" films.
If you didn't know, Sergio Leone- the Italian director that created the "spaghetti western" genre with his "A Fistful of Dollars" film in 1964 had to pay out all the royalties of the film to Akira Kurosawa because he copied Kurosawa's film "Yojimbo" so much a court ordered he give up everything earned from his film.
So Samurai films inspired spaghetti westerns- and two of my favorite films which I think are the best in their genre's are the samurai film "Samurai Wolf" and the spaghetti western "For a few dollars more"
You can watch them for free at these links-
For a few dollars more on Archive.org
Samurai Wolf directed by Hideo Gosha who directed many amazing samurai films is the perfect genre film- it has everything cool about samurai films without feeling cheap. It doesn't feel like it has a big budget as there's no crazy set pieces or even any big "stars" from that time but for me its the best one of all IF I have to pick just one as it does all the fundamentals perfectly.
The writing, the staging, the music, the editing, the acting, the sound design, the cinematography, the characters, the pacing- everything is perfect.
The star of the film is Natsuyagi Isao- from what I've seen this was his only starring role in a samurai film along with Samurai Wolf 2 which is also great. He's so good in Samurai Wolf it makes me sad that he never got to be the lead in any other Samurai films.
From the first scene you feel for and love his character- he's a broke deadbeat but if you feed him he'll fix your house- he pretends to be a mean wolf but if women offer themselves to him he gets shy and backs away- a really interesting complex character played perfectly by Naoshige.
He's a bad guy in Gosha's "Goyokin"(another masterpiece) and Gosha's "Hunter in the dark"(another great one)
He plays Kiba Okanimosuke, the Samurai Wolf as a good guy pretending to be bad- he's a reverse anti-hero and he's perfect for the part.
There is a mute "face" bad guy with a monkey(I just saw a Japanese Macaque at Lake Chusenji for the first time), there is a blind koto player woman with a troubled past, there's a funny old lady, epic showdowns with a fire at night while the blind koto player is playing!- I'm telling you this Samurai film has everything and does everything perfectly.
Gosha plays with silence and sparse sound effects in action sequences perfectly- there's several super sick in camera transitions using canted shots that play clever visual tricks- all the parts are cast perfectly- its just the perfect samurai genre film.
The soundtrack is unique and iconic- I can't say enough about it so I watch it over and over.
My favorite- and what I think is the best spaghetti western is "For a few dollars more" which is the second film in the "Man with no name" trilogy- for me the first film "Fistful of dollars" is pretty bland and it is a total copy of "Yojimbo"- the third film that most people know "The good, the bad and the ugly" has a cool name but its too long, self indulgent and boring especially when compared to "For a few dollars more".
I used the word "perfect" a lot when describing Samurai Wolf and I feel the same about "For a few dollars more"- everything is perfect-
The camerawork, the staging, the music, the acting, the editing- everything is perfect-
I should say with both of these films- you could watch them without sounds or subtitles and understand them- the visual storytelling is really strong as is the audio storytelling making them really powerful films.
"For a few dollars more" is a super manly film- its dirty, dusty, sweaty men doing badass manly things with %100 no homo- being a manly man I love it all-
There's so many moments in the film that as a filmmaker you are just like "OH SHIIIIIIT" like when you first see Clint Eastwood's character walk into a town- as he does instant THUNDER and rain- then we see him light up a cigarrette, pan up to his face- badass manly dude with a beard, scowl and cool hat-
Then he interrupts a card game just to answer "You didn't say what the bet was for?" with "YOUR LIFE" oh shiiiiiiiit-
When Mortimer is calmly loading his gun to kill the crazed outlaw at the start of the film with the baffled bartender looking on-
There's a young man/old man macho thing going on in this film with the two leads which is fun- the young guy is short range gunfighter and the "old" guy is long range military sharpshooter. That dynamic is played with in the story as well with the inside/outside stuff as they try to infiltrate and defeat the bad guys.
You know both films do interesting things with sound effects that allowed them to surpass the previous generation of their genre's-
So in let's say Kurosawa gen samurai films sword clashes sounded like sticks hitting each other which real sword clashes mostly sound like- so they were realistic but they didn't sound "cool"
In Samurai Wolf and other Gosha films sword clashes sound cool with loud metallic clashes that sound epic-
In pre-spaghetti westerns gunshots sounded like real gunshots which are more like firecracker pops- in For a Few dollars more gunshots sound like EXPLODING dyamite or canon's- they sound epic-
For a few dollars more has a charismatic tortured villain in Indio played excellently- the other bad guys are also very iconic and have their own quirks- Klaus Kinski plays a twisted hunchback murderer- there's a big guy with a scar over his eye and a poncho who kills people with knives-
My next favorite Leone spaghetti western is "Once upon a time in the west" by Leone but its pretty far back in second place as it drags on a bit and Charles Bronson is an AWFUL actor, he even ruins his close ups as he can't not bad act even in a silent close up haha- he's so terrible its unbelievable- the character that Bronson plays in that film should have been played by Eastwood but apparently Leone and Eastwood had a falling out and stopped working together at some point.
Clint Eastwood went on to make another favorite western of mine which is "High Plains Drifter" which is a must watch if you haven't seen it- he plays a ghost that shows up, rapes a woman, paints a town red, sets it on fire and kills a bunch of dudes- the soundtrack is sick and yeah its a good one.
Anyhow- I'm done writing now- check out those films if you want to see great ones- or keep watching "content" slop- whatever haha