FULL REVIEW

Fulfilling the maxim that 'if a cinematic sub-genre is created, a book will soon follow', Roland Thorne has nonetheless come up with a handy little reader for beginner or intermiediate film students delving further into this niche. It's a comfortable read, covering the most important films, directors, and general context.

Empire Magazine

FULL REVIEW

From the early days of filmed kabuki plays in the 1920s to recent gems like The Hidden Blade and Takeshi Kitano’s Zatoichi, Japanese samurai films have won devotion from audiences, thanks to their combination of moral inquiry and visceral action. In the best samurai movies, like Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai or Kihachi Okamoto’s Samurai Assassin, the simple pleasures of mainstream adventure movies merge with irony and complex characterizations to create a mythology as rich and satisfying as that of the Hollywood Western. Yet for many American viewers, the cultural obstacles to fully appreciating samurai films are significant. Without a proper understanding of Japanese history and storytelling traditions, the pleasures of classics such as The 47 Ronin and Kagemusha can be elusive.

This is where Roland Thorne’s clear, efficient Samurai Films comes in; it is a highly readable crash course in samurai cinema that introduces the reader to the most important artists and works in the genre. The book begins with a bit of historical context in a chapter that explains the real-life origins of the samurai in Japanese culture. This introduction is extremely helpful for Western film fans who will come to movies like Samurai Banner and Kagemusha with a much greater sense of clarity after reading Thorne’s summary of samurai history and terminology — knowledge Kurosawa and other filmmakers take for granted but which has made some of their films difficult for Western viewers. Interestingly, Thorne points out the very classification of “samurai film” is an invention of Western film critics and is barely used in Japan.

The complicated Japanese method of categorizing films (which are grouped into period and non-period movies and then classified according to a large selection of sub-genres) makes it difficult to precisely define the samurai film, but Thorne does so by revealing a common theme. As he sees it, a samurai film is not necessarily a movie about swordplay; rather it is about what goes on behind the swordplay — specifically, samurai films deal with the question of what it means to be a warrior and focus on the warrior’s journey of discovery. After noting a couple of key conflicts and motifs (such as the use of nature and Japanese artistic traditions in samurai films), Thorne goes on to brief considerations of noteworthy directors (including Kurosawa and Hiroshi Inagaki) and stars (Toshiro Mifune, Tatsuya Nakadai and Shintaro Katsu). He then discusses the influence of the samurai genre on world cinema, from American Westerns to more recent works by George Lucas, Quentin Tarantino and Jim Jarmusch.

Thorne then reverses direction and starts from the beginning again, taking the reader through each decade of samurai cinema by reviewing a representative sample of films. The 1950s, for example, include essays on classics like Seven Samurai, Throne of Blood and Inagaki’s Samurai trilogy, and subsequent chapters cover the masterpieces of samurai genre from the 1960s to the present day. Each chapter also includes a brief foreword in which the author addresses the conditions of the Japanese film industry in each decade, pointing out how economic factors allowed certain directors to thrive and develop the genre’s conventions. For every film, Thorne provides detailed cast and crew listings along with synopses and analysis, and his choices are highly accessible, both aesthetically and practically. The films are not only enjoyable and easily understood (particularly with the help of the author’s commentary) entry points into the world of samurai cinema, but they also are readily available on DVD. While this approach causes Thorne to ignore some significant films (as he freely admits in his introduction), it adds to the book’s value for newcomers to the genre who will find it easier to comprehend Thorne’s insights by applying them to movies they can actually see.

It is to these newcomers Samurai Films will be most useful because the reviews of individual films are relatively superficial — there is nowhere near the rigorous thematic analysis or attention to visual language one finds in Stephen Prince’s writings on Kurosawa, for example, or on the Criterion DVD commentary tracks for many of the movies Thorne references. Yet the book might also be of value to more learned Japanese film scholars as a reference tool, given its efficient organization of key works and their credits according to decade. The volume’s format — a pleasingly compact 159-page paperback — necessarily makes it a starting point rather than the final world on samurai movies, but given the limited space, it covers a lot of ground and includes some vivid color stills. During his review of Yojimbo, Thorne notes the movie is the perfect place to start if one has never seen a samurai film. The same could be said of this book.

Jim Hemphill

American Society of Cinematographers