Acting
[Period covered: 1582-1594]. As the film opens, the warlod Nobunaga Oda rides to Iga Ayanokuni shrine. He is asked if he thinks he has destroyed all the ninja who opposed him and answers that he suspects that there may be more. A servant brings water and tests it first. The paige dies and we hear gunshots as two ninja flee the scene. His suspicions confirmed, Nobunaga oversees the execution of captured ninja and decides that, in the future, he needs a much crueler method of execution. The daimyo Hideyoshi comes to visit.
A story loosely based on the affair between Empress Kōken-Shōtoku and the monk Dōkyō, set during the Nara period (710–794 A.D.).
[Period covered: 1595-1600] We last saw ninja Ishikawa Goemon, as he was about to be boiled alive. But a good ninja is both hard to find, and even harder to kill. With the help of the enigmatic Hattori Hanzo, Goemon lives to skulk another day, and sets his sights on bringing down the warlord who tried to turn him into soup – Toyotomi Hideyoshi. And as always, in the background, the suble hand of Tokugawa Ieyasu is pulling strings as he plots to rule all of Japan!
Itinerant masseur and master swordsman, the blind Zatoichi, is near the village of his teacher, Hikonoichi, so he decides to visit. He learns of Hikonoichi's recent robbery and murder and the imprisonment of his virginal daughter, Osayo, in a brothel. Through friendship with Denroku, a local dice thrower and devoted father, Ichi uncovers an unholy alliance between the governor and the area strongman: among their scams is falsifying tax records to put farmers in debt, then forcing their daughters into prostitution at the boss's brothel. With help from Denroku's daughter, Otsuru, Ichi comforts Osayo until he can provoke showdowns with the villains and their henchmen.
As winds of change sweep Japan, an honest man joins the Shinsengumi out of admiration for its leader, and because he wants to live and die as a samurai. However, as his involvement grows, reality and idealism come into deadly conflict.
Returning to the village where a year before he had killed Hirate, a much-admired opponent, Zatoichi encounters another swordsman and former rival in love.
1962 Japanese movie. Remake of Mori's 1942 original movie
The first film in the 2 part series about Ryuzen, a renegade martial-arts priest who, in addition to breaking all the commandments against sex and gambling, opens his own gambling den in direct defiance of the local yakuza boss. Exciting action and a twisty plot this movie breaks new barriers in Japanese cinema. Katsu Shintaro is superb in one of his better non-Zato Ichi roles as he fights off the advances of a love-lorn woman and risks his life to defeat the powerful gambling boss who has a stranglehold on the town.
Shinjiro is a rambler, a single sword carrying lone wolf with only his fighting skills to protect him. He doesn’t know where his road leads, only that he must find his lost sister, and the ronin who stole her away. The ronin that Shinjiro has sworn to kill. On the road he’ll find his sister and test his blade against his bitter enemy. He also encounters a lost boy searching for his father, a boy he will swear to protect, and find his own lost love, a daughter of the yakuza who draws him into a frenzied and bloody battle between rival yakuza gangs for the control of a frightened town.
A 1961 film directed by Yoshiyuki Kuroda.
In the mountain regions of Hida, the dreams of a peasant named Kyonosuke, who longed to be a samurai, come true when he becomes one of three doubles, of shadows, of Lord Yasutaka. After months of intense and cruel training, he faces his destiny when the Lord and the other two shadows are killed in battle and he must take on the role of Lord Yasutaka....
Disguised as a beggar monk, Ryunosuke is harassed along the road by the rowdy members of a country dojo or fencing school malingering outside their fencing hall. The third film in the Satan's Sword trilogy.
A decapitation at the hands of the shogun's monstrous misbegotten son kicks off the action and draws nomadic Nemuri Kyoshiro (Raizô Ichikawa) into more sword-fighting adventures when he's blamed for the beheading. Meanwhile, the head-chopper's mother is busy knocking off the shogun's lawful heirs to secure the shogunate for her son.
Tired of everyday life, the 8th Shogun Yoshimune flees Edo Castle and asks Ooka Echizen to become his personal assistant. In a rice shop, Yoshimune meets a simple ronin Ohashi Kenshiro, and receives permission to stay at his house, but a mysterious corpse awaits him in the house... And then the second, third and fourth murders occur...
No description available.
1962 Japanese movie
1961 Japanese movie
