A Bloody Spear at Mount Fuji

 Has there ever been a better name for a movie:  A Bloody Spear at Mount Fuji?  Notwithstanding its title, Tomu Uchida's 1955 samurai picture isn't too fearsome.  In fact, there is no action until a final spectacular showdown a few minutes before the movie ends.  The movie is like one of John Ford's more leisurely Westerns, really a film about a community of travelers walking to Edo under the snow-capped pyramid of Mount Fuji.  In fact, the film has no real plot and consists of a series of episodes that aren't really connected in any significant way.  The viewer scrambles to assemble relationships between the people on-screen that don't exist in the story.  More of a mild comedy than a standard jidaigeki picture, the film rambles along in an unassuming manner until the big fight at the end, a climax that is really assembled out of nothing at all and that is only remotely motivated by the narrative.  The film is humble in its means as well -- shot on location in black and white the picture uses Academy aspect ratio, unusual for a Japanese samurai movie in the fifties when very wide-screen aspects were typically used.  For some reason, Fuji presides over the action as a distant, stylized god -- images of the mountain are stylized and rather abstract, pictures similarly to what we see in a Hokusai woodcut.  This is despite the fact that the picture, like any good Western, is very alert to its landscapes -- in one scene, we see a formidable escarpment of snowy peaks in the background, an image that looks like a vista from Lone Pine from the Owens Valley in early Spring.  

There's no plot, just interactions between travelers.  The characters appear at intervals doggedly marching along a trail -- there's a samurai, Lord Kawara and his two retainers, Genpachi, his spear-carrier (the weapon is about 12 feet long and reputedly an artifact from a legendary battle) and Gente, his porter.  (Gente is played by an instantly recognizable character actor, Daiseki Kato, a comical side-kick a bit like Walter Brennan or Harry Carey in American Westerns -- he won the Japanese equivalent of an Oscar for his role here.)  A beautiful young girl riding side-saddle on a horse is also traveling on the road, accompanied by her elderly father -- this isn't a happy trip for them:  father is selling her into prostitution to settle some debts.  There's a devious pilgrim, glimpsed counting coins -- he's the dangerous bandit, Rokuemon, who has just robbed some travelers along the road but is now in disguise.  A young mother carrying a samizen with her little girl, Otin, is also hiking along the road.  Along the way, the group will be joined by a blind masseur, a bit like Zatoichi, but without the sword.  And there's a father, who sold his daughter years ago, looking for the girl's owner to ransom her.  Three comical peddlars, one of them with a long red nose (the Japanese find big noses extremely funny), take up the rear of the column.  After some quick inserts, establishing each character, the film assembles them all at a ferry so we can see them interact.  A little orphan boy who can't afford the fee for the ferry swims across the river and tags along with the spear-carrier Genpachi.  The little boy says that he wants to become a samurai or, at least, a samurai's spear-carrier.

The film takes place across two days and night.  The travelers reach a village where some kind of festival is underway and stay at an inn.  Genpachi gives money to Jiro, the orphan boy, who squanders it on persimmons that give him a serious case of diarrhea the next day.  (The Japanese like toilet humor, particularly farts and diarrhea.)  The lady with the samizen and her little daughter perform on the street, presumably for pennies.  Lord Kawara is a bad alcoholic who can't handle his booze.  When he gets drunk, he becomes a menacing caricature of a samurai.  He drinks sake to excess with his porter, Gente, who also has a taste for the stuff, and, then, draws his sword threatening to cut off the nose of the peddler with the big, red proboscis.  (Genpachi, concerned about his master's welfare, punishes Gente by tricking him into drinking from a sewer -- again, the kind of humor common in Japanese films.) Jiro knows that the pilgrim is the bandit but no one believes him.  The next day, the characters are stalled on the road by arrogant noblemen conducting a tea ceremony on the right of way.  Their pretenses are subverted by the little boy who defecates nearby and causes them to sniff at the air disdainfully, even, accusing one another of the bad smell.  In the next town, everyone stays in a kind of dormitory.  We have seen a lenticular cloud (painted) around the painted summit of Fuji and, most of the rest of the film is dominated by the good old Japanese downpour, the sort of rain that is common in films of this kind (for instance, Kurosawa's Seven Samurai and Rashomon), a pelting vertical rain that fills the lanes with ankle-deep puddles.  Kawara discovers that the girl on horseback is going to be sold into prostitution and, in a vain effort at rescue, he tries to pawn his family's artifact -- the lance-like spear.  But the spear turns out to be a fake antique of no value.  When Genpachi brings the weapon back to the inn, he inadvertently points it at the brigand, who has been revealed and is now threatening everyone.  The brigand is captured and the local magistrate gives an award to Kawara, even though he had nothing to do with capturing the outlaw, an injustice that upsets the samurai.  The reward is meaningless, an ornate box containing a scroll.  The man who has painstakingly worked in a mine to ransom his daughter discovers that the girl is dead.  After a disturbing outburst of grief too intense in the context of this low-key film, he takes his money to the rich man who is bearing away the girl in a palanquin.  He purchases the girl's freedom and, then, as they say in Icelandic sagas, he is "out of the picture."  Another nobleman appears in town with a corps of belligerent samurai.  The next day, the orphan boy and the little girl with samizen lady play on the beach.  Lord Kawara has become thirsty again and he bullies Gente, his porter, into drinking with him at the local tavern.  Five samurai appear and mock Kawara for drinking with the servant.  Then, they cut-down Gente who protests.  Kawara fights with five samurai, but he's really not the indomitable swordsman we have been lead to believe he is.  The enemy corner him between two huge vats of sake and easily kill him.  Genpachi, who has been watching the children playing on the beach, runs back to the courtyard of the inn and fights the five samurai, ultimately stabbing all of them to death with the titular "bloody spear."  In the last scene, Genpachi carrying his spear and the boxed ashes of Gente and Kawara marches alone down the road. As in Shane, the little boy pursues him.  "Never become a samurai," Genpachi warns the child.  The boy runs after the departing spear-carrier to the crest of a hill where he cries loudly.  Samizen-lady and her daughter, as well as the three comical peddlers, watch.  

In the fifties, all serious samurai movies were intent on criticizing the institution and this film is no exception.  The final battle scene is shot largely from overhead, depicting the combat from a high angle so we can see clearly what is happening.  The fight is disorderly, anything but choreographed (although, of course, the sequence has been carefully designed to look like it is haphazard) -- Genpachi flails around with his huge lance and, more or less, accidentally kills his opponents who seem realistically fearful and inexperienced with their swords.  It 's not heroic in any way, a brutal fight in which the men slash around ankle-deep in sake leaking out of a big vat that has been pierced by the lance.  Genpachi is not charged with killing the samurai, who are in a caste superior to him, because "you have to be pretty stupid to let yourself be killed by a servant" -- at least so says the local magistrate.  The movie is mostly shot in the "invisible" style of an American B-western:  we see what we are supposed to see and the editing is unobtrusive.  Exceptions are the neatly planned scene in which Genpachi accidentally threatens the ferocious brigand, strutting around with a huge Yakuza-style tattoo of the wind god on his back and the climactic battle.  The viewer tries to link the various subplots in ways that don't work out.  For instance, I was convinced that the little girl with samizen-lady would turn out to be the long-lost daughter of the miner who has come to ransom her with his hard-won earnings.  But this isn't the case.  In an American Western, for instance My Daughter Clementine, the bad guys slaughtered at the end of the film would have been introduced in some capacity earlier in the movie and their belligerence motivated -- here the five samurai who get killed by Genpachi just show up out of nowhere; they seem to be a plot device contrived to support the film's title.  Despite its failing, I enjoyed this little movie on the basis of the interesting characters that we meet along the way.