The Sword and the Past
A review of Kill! (Kihachi Okamoto, 1968)
With a grimy penchant for rye wit and a revisionist streak Kill! wears its spaghetti western influences on its sleeve. Narratively complex and entertaining it is riveting as well as enjoyable.
The revisionist turn on westerns that spawned after WWII and into the cold war was largely a response to the macho and mythologized ideology and history that pervaded America and the west. It would seem then that following WWII the natural genre to revise in Japan was the samurai film. Kill! is revisionist formally as well as narratively by integrating the spaghetti western and revisionist tropes into the samurai film.
The plot is wonderfully pulpy and multidimensional. When two wandering ronin, Genta and Hanjiro, walk into a town with mercenary intentions they get broiled up in a coup and a spider web of lies and betrayal that increasingly makes the myth of samurai life all too real. The movies strongest point is how this plot develops along numerous directions. Characters are introduced and new details revealed that increasingly connect the various plotlines to one another while thematically unifying them around a singular idea, samurai life is violent, bloody, and not all like we dream.
The film is grimy. Sweat pours from people’s faces and dust and dirt are pervasive. The chaos of the social world is reflected in chaotic weather and wild winds in the environment. The fight choreography is surprisingly smooth while also visceral. Limbs fly and staggering men fall to the ground with stab wounds and bullet wholes; it’s not a pretty sight, nor a peaceful world, but it is quite enjoyable to watch.
The samurai, once a heroic and mythic figure, is returned to the earth and humanity in Kill!. In the heyday of the samurai genre epic displays of duty and honor were presented as the epitome of life with stoic filmmaking. Hara-kiri and self-sacrifice were the cornerstones of their ideology. That is not the case in Kill!. The film is efficiently polemical through its focus on class division. As the film progresses the holiness of the samurai and the baseness of the peasant simultaneously begin to disappear. It is revealed that love, money, power, and regret effect people no matter what their position in life. The samurai are also frequently the butt of jokes or presented with a damning frankness. Duels, a mainstay in the genre (and in westerns), are deferred for conversation and resignation. The fighters begin to realize their code of honour and duty simply leads to only death. It’s a funny film with snap quick edits, a lot of double takes, and whacky characters. There is a playful quality to the film that rids it of the dust and uptightness of the past and presents something new. For all their machao and mythic grander samurai remain susceptible to the same human failings as everyone else, jealousy, greed, stupidity.
The revision is not only formal and structural, but also essential to the narrative. It’s billed as a black-comedy action film, but I’d say it is more a melancholic-comedy action film. As the film progresses it is frequently marked by characters that reminisce on the past. Often tragic and haunting they lead the characters to wish to revise their wrongdoings. In many ways they act out the revision the film is doing to samurai genre itself. Seeking to fix the wrongs of samurai culture they confront it and ultimately rewrite their own dreams and views of the world. Genta is the clearest example of this. Endlessly charming and likeable as a prankster and hero of the film he is also haunted by his past and the film frequently alters tone as it delves into his melancholic internal struggle with revising his wrongdoings and stopping others from committing similar acts.
Playful, entertaining, and an action packed ride that is both complex and solidly revisionist Kill! cuts through swaths of history and myth to ask what being a samurai is all about.
