Eureka Blu-ray Film Reviews

Samurai Wolf 1 & 2 (1966–67) • Blu-ray [Eureka! Masters of Cinema] —western influences come full circle in Japanese action duology

A duo of chanbara masterpieces from one of the genre’s greatest directors, Hideo Gosha.

Think of an influential Japanese director… odds are, I can guess which one. Anyone not put off by black-and-white movies from 1960s Japan will have no difficulty in enjoying this double bill of what director Hideo Gosha referred to as ‘Mount Fuji Westerns’. A breath of fresh air for the rapidly tiring chanbara, he was drawing from several earlier examples, but there’s more to the genre of samurai cinema than Akira Kurosawa’s classics. With his innovative Samurai Wolf duology, Gosha mixes in many traits from Italian Westerns, completing a sort of feedback loop between the cinema of Hollywood, Asia, and Europe.

The Western is the oldest genre, enjoying its Hollywood heyday with films like High Noon (1952) and Shane (1953) — both known to have impressed Akira Kurosawa, inspiring him to rework similar tropes in Seven Samurai…