The third cinematic chapter in manga and scriptwriter Kazuo Koike’s bloody LONE WOLF AND CUB series is a genuine tour de force of chambara filmmaking, more thoughtful and deliberate in its presentation and superior to its two masterful predecessors.

Having previously established the dark past, elaborate weaponry and supreme fighting prowess of former Shogunate executioner Itto Ogami (Tomisaburo Wakayama), who now lives as a wandering assassin-for-hire with his young son (Akihiro Tomikawa), returning director Kenji Misumi layers the near-mythic characters in shades of deeper complexity than seen before. This only makes an already magnificent film series even better.

The beauty of this film is in how Itto’s character continues to be developed beyond merely a cool killing machine. It’s something that viewers of only SHOGUN ASSASSIN, the Americanized reworking of SWORD OF VENGEANCE and BABY CART AT THE RIVER STYX would have missed.

While continuing to be pursued by members of the Yagyu Shadow Clan, Itto encounters a disgraced, masterless samurai named Kanbei Magomura (Go Kato). This character presents an opportunity for Itto’s warrior philosophy to surface.

Itto previously forsake being an honorable samurai once betrayed and chose to live the life of a demon with hell always one step, or rather one sword stroke away. In sizing up Kanbei, Itto sees a mirror image of himself and chooses to spare the man by calling a draw to their duel. The two kindred warriors inevitably meet again for a rematch after Itto is hired to kill a ruthlessly ambitious official and Kanbei is hired to defend this target.

Viewers looking for a simple action flick filled with swordplay violence may be disappointed. By standard genre conventions, BABY CART TO HADES does contain liberal amounts of blood sprays, limb cleaving and general death-dealing by sword and naginata stroke. However, this action, along with unconventional gunplay and explosives use is kept in reserve until the film builds up to an epic showdown with Itto and Daigoro facing an entire army.

A measure of focus and patience is required to absorb and appreciate the reflective moments that silently reveal the relationship between the film’s protagonists and their purposeful characters, in addition to the mildly complex plot development.

The film greatly benefits from the asides, the almost incidental episodes that fill out the unsympathetic and flawed world that Itto and Daigoro inhabit. Innocent women are preyed upon by sexual predators. Men of weak character in positions high and low, who are blindly ignorant of the true samurai warrior spirit, wantonly use their station for worldly gain at the expense of others. A mentally-disturbed lord ordered to commit seppukku disrupts the ceremony, causing his loyal attendant to lose an arm while subduing the man in order to complete the execution. A female outcast (Yuko Hamada) finds strength and a form of honor in leading a band of “boohachimono,” merchants who run their own adult entertainment houses. Another woman who finds herself sold into prostitution is so determined to resist her fate that she bites off the tongue of her abusive handler and seeks the protection of Itto.

In all of this there is a strange bond that forms between Itto and Kanbei, two warriors seemingly from another time and place. Rather than finish with Itto’s heroic slaughter of an army of soldiers, the film ends with an explanation of Kanbei’s background and reason for pressing Itto for answers that can only come by facing death squarely in the face.

Another successful aspect of the film is how it builds on the image of Itto as a near-otherworldly angel of death, without resorting to any actual supernatural elements. This helps to explain his ability to best overwhelming odds. He long ago cast aside the role of a wrongfully disgraced samurai seeking revenge for his wife’s death and now prowls the countryside dealing death to those who not only deserve it but seemingly come looking for it by their own foolish actions. In the film’s final reel, a woman attracted to Itto’s strength of character and fighting prowess is warned not to follow him because he doesn’t appear human. By his own admission, Itto has traversed the crossroads of hell and in doing so has emerged as a lethal demigod to carry on his campaign of slaughter against the wicked.

As impressive as the film’s climax is with its over-the-top spectacle, in looking at Itto’s solitary stand against so many attackers I cannot help but find fault in the rather generic fighting that almost inevitably occurs when he’s required to strike down so many with his naginata. It’s a fault that commonly exists in the chambara genre but is rarely so obvious. The swordsmen have essentially one mode of attack and that is to charge Itto with their swords raised over their heads at all times. This leaves their torso exposed to a low sweeping counterattack that Itto effortlessly exploits nearly every time. The implication is that Itto’s opponents are misjudging the distance from their standing position to where they intend to strike at him. Either that or Itto is closing the gap faster than they can react to bring their swords down to strike or deflect the counterstroke. If this happened once or twice it would be fine but time and again Itto’s attackers charge well within striking distance and never lower their swords at all. It’s not a major fault though. There is enough variety in Itto’s unorthodox fighting methods to keep the battle interesting. He blasts gunners and archers with his own cannon hidden in the baby cart, hurls retractable naginata blades at horsemen and even wields pistols for the first time. What is interesting to note is that Itto always matches his choice of weaponry to his opponents. If it seems like his sword is rarely used in this episode it is because his sword is reserved for dueling, usually against worthy foes. Such is not the case for one opponent who wields his own pistols. Itto uses his son Daigoro to lure him into a trap. You almost feel sorry for how the gunman is duped, except that he’s not playing by the rules of Bushido and doesn’t deserve fair play in this particular setting.

I do have to add that the final staging for a flashback featuring Go Kato in a brief battle sequence was superb. The LONE WOLF AND CUB films have a tendency to greatly exaggerate their use of blood emissions but in this short sequence I have never seen a more visually satisfying and plausible use of flying blood effects in a samurai film. It makes Takeshi Kitano’s flying CGI blood in his ZATOICHI remake look about as convincing as Shaw Brothers’ infamous bright red “paint.”

With style and substance, BABY CART TO HADES elevates the image of Japan’s fighting anti-hero to new heights. It also defines mature genre entertainment. It unabashedly depicts some of the cruelest social injustices and gives viewers reason to cheer when the perpetrators are dispatched mercilessly. It also celebrates Japan’s nobler samurai spirit in a time when the warrior spirit was being crushed by corruption and encroaching modernity. By this third entry, the Lone Wolf and Cub have become film icons, fully realized, cumulative representations of the chambara genre and its evolution towards stylized, yet still cynical, near superheroics. It took Western writers and filmmakers years to catch up with Kazuo Koike’s dark vision. Only in the 21 century, with films like THE DARK KNIGHT do we begin to see Hollywood’s genre filmmaking begin to match the high standards that Kenji Misumi and producer Shintaro Katsu set with this film. Even so, no one on either side of the Pacific has yet emerged to challenge the phenomenal presence of the stocky and grim-faced Tomisaburo Wakayama, whose potent stares and stature were backed up by unrivaled fighting ferocity and physicality.

REVIEW: Lone Wolf and Cub 3: Baby Cart to Hades (1972), 10.0 out of 10 based on 2 ratings

by

Related Topics:
 •   •   •   •   •   •   •   •   •