Eureka Entertainment: Cruel Tale of Bushido (1963) - Reviewed

Images courtesy of Eureka Entertainment

In recent months, boutique labels such as Arrow Video with their Samurai Revolution Trilogy and now Eureka Entertainment’s forthcoming limited release of Until We Meet Again director Tadashi Imai’s Cruel Tale of Bushido (also reviewed here by Michelle Kisner) have been shedding light on a kind of jidaigeki film that is at once grounded in the past but allegorically speaking about the present.  Taking formerly lofty escapist notions of the samurai epic period film and pushing for a far more socially realistic unforgiving aesthetic into focus, Imai’s films often focused on the plights of the poor whether it be women of the Meiji Era in An Inlet of Muddy Water and later Night Drum which was scripted by Onibaba director Kaneto Shindo. 
 
Mid-career between his jidaigeki films and his more modern day set dramas, Imai in 1963 unveiled debatably his masterwork with Cruel Tale of Bushido: a Toeiscope widescreen black-and-white centuries-spanning epic restored in 4K by Toei and presented by Eureka Entertainment in both the original Japanese mono track as well as the rarely used 3.0 channel sound format last used in Shin Godzilla.

 
In the present, an average salaryman names Susumu Iikura (Kinnosuke Nakamura in one of many roles) returns home to find his wife has attempted suicide.  Shocked and appalled, the grief-stricken jolt to Susumu’s senses sends him (and the film) reeling on a cross-century spanning odyssey over 350 years as he ruminates on previous family lineages with ancestors laying down their lives for the sake of the strict bushido moral code of the samurai.  Covering roughly seven generations of the family dynasty ranging from the Tokugawa period up through World War II into the 1960s, we see brutally violent and unforgiving history repeating itself with each disparate subsection spearheaded by a different iteration of Susumu’s ancestors. 
 
Co-starring Ko Nishimura from 11 Samurai, recurring Akira Kurosawa star Masayuki Mori and Yojimbo actor Eijirô Tôno, the ensemble piece presents several situations and iterations governed by the bushido code, including but not limited to grisly decapitations.  All the time, through the use of Kinnosuke Nakamura across multiple parts, we get a sense of Japanese history, the ruthlessness of the bushido code and a sense of things not changing much over time and tide. 

 
From The Insect Woman composer Toshiro Mayuzumi’s gloomy and frightening, sometimes experimental atonal score which frankly sounds at times like Krzysztof Penderecki to The Conspirator cinematographer Makoto Tsuboi’s luminous and radiant camerawork illuminating nighttime battles and daylight executions with distance and detachment.  One sequence which springs to mind and seems to embody the title, translated as Bushido, Samurai Saga or Bushido: The Cruel Code of the Samurai in some territories, is a bold execution sequence in which several samurai are beheaded together jointly before a group of horrified onlookers.  Seeing scenes such as these no doubt paved the way for some of the tortures glimpsed in Martin Scorsese’s Silence which is also as much about the medieval as it is about the modern day.  Sets and costume designs are appropriate to each period which editor Shintaro Miyamoto freely fleetingly cuts between so we’re never really certain of which period we are in. 
 
Given the amount of dramatic weight on the shoulders of Kinnosuke Nakamura who plays eight characters in total, it is remarkable how successfully Nakamura was able to convey the recurring encounters of the bushido code across many lineages.  Able to differentiate each part without them overlapping despite the film’s emphasis on history repeating itself, Nakamura’s performance is comparable (at the time) to the work of Peter Sellers and is equally brilliant and nuanced.

 
Entered into the 13^th Berlin International Film Festival where it went on to win the prestigious 1963 Golden Bear Award, the daring and uncompromising widescreen epic jidaigeki as modern day allegory quickly ascended the ranks among the greatest samurai films of all time.  Something of a stylized antidote to Seven Samurai despite featuring some of its key players and modern day sociopolitical allegory of things staying the same despite many eons of change, Cruel Tale of Bushido comes to Eureka Entertainment Blu-ray in a fairly stacked release featuring original essay writings by Hayley Scanlon who usually handles the subtitles for many Radiance Films releases, a new video essay by Jonathan Clements, video interview with Tony Rayns and a collectible slipcover. 

 
Probably most interestingly of all, however, is the inclusion of ‘optional’ Japanese DTS-HD 3.0 audio which will remind listeners of the Perspecta sound format.  Films and/or albums rereleased with multichannel audio are rarely limited to the three front loaded channels and whenever a mix of its kind is included, it offers a wholly unique kind of sonic experience.  In any case, Cruel Tale of Bushido represents a stark contrast to previously romanticized samurai epics and Eureka Entertainment’s comprehensive disc release is a stellar way to absorb one of 1963 Japan’s finest moments on the silver screen.

--Andrew Kotwicki