directed by Senkichi Taniguchi
Japan
96 minutes
4 stars out of 5
----
Every time I rewatch this, I'm surprised by how much I like it. I had a generally poor opinion of it the first go-around, possibly because I watched it in a stretched-out aspect ratio and terrible image quality and I had read a lot of many negative reviews. But now I genuinely love this movie. It's a blast. I don't understand why there seems to be a consensus of mediocrity among reviewers.
Toshirō Mifune plays Sukezaemon (or Sukeza) Luzon, a random guy who escapes being burnt at the stake for piracy and decides to become a pirate for real to spite his accusers. Our introduction to Mifune's character and the sequence that sets him on the path he'll follow for the rest of the film is very brief, almost comedically so; within the span of maybe ten minutes Luzon has gotten himself a big cartoony treasure chest full of jewels, engaged in naval warfare against a rival pirate (Makoto Satō, delivering the evilest evil cackles of his career), seemingly been punished by the gods for his hubris with a terrible storm, and washed up in a random unspecified country where everybody is surprised that he is Japanese but also, at the same time, all speak Japanese themselves. Mifune is of course eminently watchable and I'm tempted to say that he carries the whole film, but this works so well as an ensemble piece that that wouldn't really be fair to everybody else in it.
Luzon quickly finds that all is not well in the kingdom. The king is slowly being poisoned while a shifty chancellor attempts to seize power for himself and marry the princess. The chancellor's interim government demands tribute in the form of local young women who are taken to the castle and forced into slavery, and there are other generally oppressive measures leading the people in the kingdom towards mounting a revolt. But it'll take more than just a peasant uprising - it'll take some dude who isn't from around here and almost drowned a couple of days ago to gather enough strength to storm the castle and fight the Black Pirate and the chancellor's supporters.
The really fun thing about this movie is how many distinct characters make up the cast, and how every single one of them brings something new to the plot. It is a story about justice vs. injustice when you get right down to it, but there's such a broad range of actors involved in how the story unfolds. Some of them are somewhat opportunistic and switch sides according to their own whims (Jun Tazaki, for example, who looks absolutely lethal dual-wielding sai). Some are not very bright but side with Luzon for the craic. Two of my favorite characters really have no investment in the faction-vs-faction fight at all and have their own rivalry going on in the background, secondary to what Luzon is doing; these are Granny the witch (played by Hideyo Amamoto technically in drag but not really committed to it) and the hermit who got kicked out of heaven for being too horny (Ichirō Arashima). The panoply of personalities all contribute to why this movie moves at such a fast clip and avoids ever slipping into a lull at any point.
Whenever I try to think of which movie I'd recommend first between Sinbad and its "sister film" Adventure in Kigan Castle, I always have a hard time. Kigan Castle is objectively the better film, its production is far more elaborate and it has better pacing, but Sinbad is, in my opinion, way more fun. Although the scope is not as grand as Kigan Castle, which was shot partially on location in Iran, Sinbad still has some remarkable practical effects and the same feeling of "doesn't matter if the technology isn't there yet, we're gonna do it anyway" that all Showa tokusatsu is imbued with. I could probably rewatch this a bunch more times without getting tired of it, and if my tokusatsu film screening series doesn't crash and burn this year, it might make it into the roster at some point.
No comments:
Post a Comment