Along with his contemporaries Kurasawa and Kobayashi, Okamoto Kihachi (1923-2005) is a colossus of the samurai genre and indeed, of Japanese cinema. For a man who directed 39 films over a career spanning 43 years, surprisingly little is known about this versatile genius. Here is a concise but well-written tribute article that includes a list of his direction credits. For a complete filmography, go to
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0645477/A Tribute to Kihachi Okamoto
by Tom Mes
http://www.midnighteye.com/features/kihachi_okamoto.shtmlThe death of Kihachi Okamoto brings us yet another step closer to the disappearance of a truly matchless generation of Japanese filmmakers. He was part of a group of men who not only made some of the country's most vibrant and defiant genre films, but who were also united in having experienced the horrors of war and battle at an early age.
Okamoto was a 19-year-old university student when he was drafted into the army in 1943 and shipped to the front at the height of the Pacific War. "You could say it's a miracle I survived the war at all, since statistics show that the largest number of people killed were those born, like me, in 1924," he said in a 1977 interview with Peter B. High. As in the case of Masaki Kobayashi (born 1919), Kenji Misumi (1921), Seijun Suzuki (1923), Yasuzo Masumura (1924) and others, this battlefield experience would have an immeasurable impact on his later work as a filmmaker. It's certainly no coincidence that this is the generation that would take genre cinema into new directions in the 1960s, as it was their encounter with violence and destruction that led them to rethink the very foundations of genre film.
After the war Okamoto entered Toho studios in 1947, where he served as assistant director to Senkichi Taniguchi on the Akira Kurosawa-penned Snow Trail (Ginrei No Hate) before moving on to work with the likes of Masahiro Makino, Mikio Naruse and Ishiro Honda. His own chance to sit in the director's chair came in 1958 with the melodramas All About Marriage and Wakai Musumetachi [tr: Young girls]. He quickly began to specialise in action films and directed three entries in Toho's successful Underworld (Ankokugai) series, featuring his first of many collaborations with Toshiro Mifune. The films paired Mifune with a young Koji Tsuruta, who after two entries jumped ship to join Toei, where he starred in a competing series of Underworld movies before going on to become the undisputed star of Toei's ninkyo eiga yakuza films. A big fan of John Ford, Okamoto quickly began to model his action films on American westerns. Mixing this with his war experience, he delivered another bonafide hit with Desperado Outpost (1959), in which he transposed a cowboys-and-indians plot to the Manchurian frontlines of the 1940s. A sequel, Westward Desperado, followed less than a year later.
The Desperado films also featured a liberal amount of satire and comic asides, hinting at Okamoto's interests in comedies and musicals. However, after his Noh musical comedy Oh, Bomb sank, perhaps unsurprisingly, at the box office in 1964, he was forced to indulge in this particular love in roundabout ways. After starting work in the genre for which he is best known overseas, the chanbara, with 1963's Warring Clans, he began designing a very rhythmic approach to filming and editing action sequences. Carefully timed placement of sound effects and music combined with camera movement and movement within the frame to form a very rhythmic, almost musical whole.
Alongside his formal experimentations, Okamoto's Sam Fuller-esque exorcism of war traumas in his films would continue for much of his career. Not only in the large number of war films he directed (almost a third of his entire output), but also in his attitude to violence and human conflict in his other genre work. He was one of the main proponents of the wave of chanbara filmmakers that, in the wake of Akira Kurosawa, took a very critical attitude to bushido, the samurai lifestyle and Tokugawa society in general. Starting from the early 1960s with such films as Kurosawa's Yojimbo (1961), Kobayashi's Harakiri (Seppuku, 1962), Misumi's Destiny's Son (Kiru, 1962), Masahiro Shinoda's Assassination (Ansatsu, 1964) and the Sleepy Eyes of Death (Nemuri Kyoshiro) series, the emphasis of the genre was no longer on honour and heroism, but on the death and misery that inevitably follow those who live by the sword and the people with whom they inadvertently come into contact. Okamoto's notable contributions to this epoch include Samurai Assassin (1965), Sword of Doom (1966), Kill! (1968), Red Lion (1969) as well as his very peculiar entry in the Zatoichi series Zatoichi Meets Yojimbo (1970), which matched Shintaro Katsu's blind swordsman with Toshiro Mifune's emblematic ronin.
With the end of the studio era in the early 1970s, Okamoto returned to a more diverse output as a free agent. He had made his first of three films for ATG in 1968 with the self-financed war satire Human Bullet (another two followed: Battle Cry in 1975 and At this Late Date, the Charleston in 1981), but nevertheless his interest in genre cinema on the one hand and music and comedy on the other hand continued to characterise his output. Often in close partnership with his producer wife Minako, Okamoto ventured into territories as eclectic as a science-fiction satire (Blue Christmas, 1978), a crime comedy (Rainbow Kids, 1991), a samurai western (East Meets West, 1995) and the story of a quartet of black jazz musician lost in 19th-century Japan (Dixieland Daimyo, 1986). Okamoto's final film, 2001's Vengeance for Sale, saw him return to the chanbara genre, albeit with a generous comic slant. The film reunited him with Tatsuya Nakadai, star of his most internationally feted film Sword of Doom.
By the time he made Vengeance for Sale, however, the director was already in ill health. After the stroke that felled him during the shooting of East Meets West, Okamoto also suffered from lung problems. He had plans for another film, for which he had already written the script, but it was not to be. He died of esophagus cancer two days after his 81st birthday, on February 19, 2005. With Kihachi Okamoto gone, plus the recent passing of film noir specialist Yo*aro Nomura, the ever non-conformist Seijun Suzuki remains the last active filmmaker of Japan's battlefield generation.
Kihachi Okamoto filmography:All About Marriage (Kekkon No Subete, 1958)
Wakai Musumetachi (1958)
Boss of the Underworld (Ankokugai No Kaoyaku, 1959)
Aruhi Watashi Wa (1959)
Desperado Outpost (Dokuritsu Gurentai, 1959)
The Last Gunfight (Ankokugai No Taiketsu, 1960)
Daigaku No Sanzokutachi (1960)
Westward Desperado (Dokuritsu Gurentai Nishi-e, 1960)
Ankokugai No Dankon (1961)
Big Shots Die at Dawn (Kaoyaku Akatsuki Ni Shisu, 1961)
Jigoku No Kyoen (1961)
Operation X (Dobunezumi Sakusen, 1962)
Gekkyu Dorobo (1962)
Warring Clans (Sengoku Yaro, 1963)
The Elegant of Life of Mr. Everyman (Everyman-shi No Yuga-na Seikatsu, 1963)
Oh Bomb (Aa Bakudan, 1964)
Samurai Assassin (Samurai, 1965)
Fort Graveyard (Chi To Suna, 1965)
Sword of Doom (Daibosatsutoge, 1966)
The Age of Assassins (Satsujinkyo Jidai, 1967. a.k.a. Epoch of Murder Madness)
Japan's Longest Day (Nihon No Ichiban Nagai Hi, 1967. a.k.a. The Emperor and the General)
Kill! (Kiru, 1968)
Human Bullet (Nikudan, 1968)
Red Lion (Akage, 1969)
Zatoichi Meets Yojimbo (Zatoichi To Yojinbo, 1970)
The Battle of Okinawa (Gekido No Showashi: Okinawa Kessen, 1971)
Nippon Sanjushi: Osaraba Tokyo No Maki (1972)
Nippon Sanjushi: Hakata Shime Ippon Doko No Maki (1973)
Aoba Shigereru (1974)
Battle Cry (Tokkan, 1975)
Sugata Sanshiro (1977)
Blue Christmas (1978)
Dynamite Bang Bang (Dynamite Dondon, 1978)
The Last Game (Eireitachi No Oenka: Saigo No Sokeisen, 1979)
At This Late Date, the Charleston (Chikagoro Naze Ka Charleston, 1981)
Dixieland Daimyo (Jazz Daimyo, 1986)
Rainbow Kids (Daiyukai, 1991)
East Meets West (1995)
Vengeance for Sale (Sukedachiya Sukeroku, 2001)
The Guardian obituary (
http://www.guardian.co.uk/japan/story/0,,1440513,00.html) by Ronald Bergen is also worth a read:
Obituary
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Kihachi Okamoto
Japanese film director renowned for his studies of militarism
Ronald Bergan
Friday March 18, 2005
The Guardian
Probably the most popular film genre in Japan is jidai-geki , or period pictures usually set in the Togukawa era (circa 1616-1868). However, although jidai-geki is also the most celebrated genre to come out of Japan, one of its leading exponents, Kihachi Okamoto, who has died of cancer of the oesophagus, aged 82, was among the least known of postwar directors in the west.
His unwarranted neglect may be due to the fact that out of the 39 feature films he directed after 1958, many of them were yakuza (gangster) and chambara (swordplay) movies, satires on war and comedies aimed specifically at local audiences, with no thought of the festival circuit or western distribution.
Yet The Sword Of Doom (1966), made during the heyday of the Toho Studios, gained a following, and is still highly regarded. Set in the 1860s, when the Shogunate were desperately trying to cling to power, the rousing, though complicated, film, follows the enigmatic samurai hero (Tatsuya Nakadai) as he kills a great number of people, with the justification that all of them have been guilty of a crime.
Like many of Okamoto's films, it contains breathtaking, widescreen black-and-white photography and a number of magisterial fight sequences. The dynamic Toshiro Mifune, who appears in a small role as a master swordsman, would make eight films for Okamoto.
Okamoto belonged to the generation of Japanese university graduates who were drafted in to the worst years of the war in the south Pacific. He was called up in 1943, and was almost alone among his colleagues to survive an American B-29 air raid on his military academy. He later joined a flying squadron to bomb US tanks. The experience helped shape his attitude to the nature of conflict and the Japanese war.
On being demobbed, Okamoto joined Toho, gradually becoming an assistant to such directors as Mikio Naruse (Floating Clouds) and Ishiro Honda (famous for his Godzilla films). It was more than 10 years before he became a fully-fledged director, in 1958. Among his earliest successes was Desperado Outpost (1959), a bitter tale of a sergeant who joins a tribe of bandits after his commando (led by Mifune) has been wiped out by Chinese forces.
That same year, Okamoto made the acerbic yakuza movie Boss Of The Underworld, in which a gangster has to kill his own brother to survive. This exploration of the conflict of loyalties continued in The Last Gunfight (1960), in which a detective (Mifune) becomes a friend of a gangster whom he might have to arrest for murder. In Samurai Assassin (1965), Mifune is an impoverished ronin (or outlaw) who dreams of samurai status. He proves himself in the bloody finale, which takes place during a snowstorm.
There followed three fascinating second world war films. In Fort Graveyard (1965), Mifune has to train a platoon of inept soldiers, knowing they will be going to their deaths. He plays a war minister in The Emperor And The General (1967), who, after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, proposes to fight on. But when Emperor Hirohito agrees to surrender to the allies, he is caught between his desires and loyalty to his emperor. The Human Bullet (1968) tells the story of a Japanese soldier on a kamikaze mission against a US ship. It is a savage satire about senior military commanders and the dehumanisation of soldiers.
The Red Lion (1969), a jidai-geki black comedy (in colour), has a dim-witted swordsman called Gonzo (Mifune in comic vein) returning to his home village to promote the imperial restoration wearing a garish, red wig-mane, like those worn by leaders of the imperial army. He then attempts to help the people oust a corrupt deputy. Okamoto cleverly counterbalances the comedy with social comment and violent action.
Zatoichi Meets Yojimbo (1970) had Mifune reprising his role of the latter in Akira Kurosawa's films, Yojimbo and Sanjuro. The best-of-enemies relationship between Zatoichi, the blind swordsman (Shintaro Katsu, who appeared in the same role in a 28-part series) and the loutish, drunken Yojimbo, is consistently amusing. The film, like most in the genre, ends with a brutal battle sequence.
Many of Okamoto's jidai-geki films seldom strayed from traditional plot structures. Nevertheless, as a lifelong fan of John Ford, he inserted elements of the western into both his samurai films and his war movies.
In his penultimate film, East Meets West (1995), he got the chance to make a real western in the US, using a mixture of Japanese and American actors. Set in 1860, at the time of the first Japanese mission to the United States, it follows a samurai trekking across the wild west in pursuit of a gang of robbers who have stolen gold from the mission.
Okamoto, who was referred to in Japan by the single name of Kihachi, was back on more familiar territory in his final film, Vengeance For Sale (2001), a delightful low-budget throwback to his samurai films of the 1960s.
Lastly, here is a photograph of the late master, also from the Guardian:
AuthorTopic: samurai cinema (Read 1660 times)
April 18, 2007, 04:34:30 AM
