‘The Sword of Doom’ or — Tough Decisions?

I immediately regretted choosing Kihachi Okamoto’s ‘The Sword of Doom’ (1966) as my movie night choice last night as soon as I put it on. The stifling, humid heat had worn myself and my friends down: one of them was sleepy whilst I had been irritable and antsy all day and wanted something visually and sonically energetic to snap us out of our funk. Unusually for me I was swithering over what to put on. I just didn’t know what. I didn’t want to risk ordering the steak when I wanted the fish.

“Just put on a movie, Colin! Just choose something!”

So I decided on ‘The Sword of Doom’. I’d heard it was great and besides, it’s a samurai film so should be exciting, right? My heart sank when I quickly realised it was going to be a rather lengthy melodrama; this was not going to be the violent delirium of ‘Lone Wolf and Cub’ or ‘Lady Snowblood’, films more in line with what I felt we needed and that I wanted. It also looked as though it was going to take the whole samurai business, and itself, very seriously. It didn’t look fun. The pacing was deliberate and the narrative required concentration and for the opening twenty minutes I was seriously considering breaking one of my movie-night rules by turning the film off and putting on something else. A heretical act!

But, like a good samurai, you can only learn and grow if you follow rules and boy, am I glad we didn’t go all ronin on this movie’s ass as ‘The Sword of Doom’ is (almost) a masterpiece. Sure, it’s a deliberately paced drama but it’s also an extraordinarily well made and visually stunning film.

‘The Sword of Doom’ concerns amoral (or maybe just downright immoral) samurai Ryunosuke Tsukue. He is a master swordsman and, seemingly, unbeatable. He is asked to throw a non-lethal fencing contest between himself and a less skilful opponent. He not only doesn’t throw the contest but ends up killing his opponent AND fucks the guy’s wife, so we start getting the sneaking suspicion that Tsukue might be a bit of a bad apple.

Tsukue flees his village and soon murders and assassinations, marital strife and vengeful brothers start coming into the picture and it becomes apparent that Tsukue is unable to heed the main lesson of being a disciplined swordsman — “The sword is the soul. Study the soul to know the sword. Evil soul, evil sword”.

‘The Sword of Doom’ takes fighting seriously. This means the violence is not B-movie escapist fun but carefully controlled encounters where psychology matters as much as the weapon. This precision extends to Okamoto’s directing as this is, easily, the most mature samurai movies I’ve seen with every movement, every edit as carefully balanced as a swordsman’s stance and foot position. This deliberation draws you in and when the violence occurs in Leone-esque bursts it is startling and as exacting as a katana’s blade. This film can take the fighting seriously because it has the intelligence, and style, to pull it off.

This maturity is also evident in the cinematography and art design resulting in a strikingly beautiful black and white sensation. The fight in the snow rivals anything else in epic cinema in terms of aesthetic wonder whilst, throughout the movie, slivers of light are constantly slicing the darkness. The finest example of this is when a samurai is practising his sword technique in a darkened room, using the shafts of sunlight piercing through the slats as targets for his blade’s gleaming point. It’s gorgeous.

The film lives up to its proclaimed style of fighting, mainly keeping its distance only to unleash its full power in a burst of violence at the end. Story points only hinted at finally become horrifyingly explicit and apparent and we realise, once we realise exactly what he has done, that the only road Tsukue can take is the one to hell. And hell is a good way to describe the ending with a climatic sequence I can only describe as the end of De Palma’s ‘Scarface’ crossed with a one-man ‘The Wild Bunch’. In the middle of the film Tsukue’s wife tells him to kill everyone in the world and, at the end, you think he might actually manage to do so. The psychological and physical violent explosion of this climax is a genuinely remarkable cinematic orgasm and a staggering, and truly disturbing, way to end a movie.

‘The Sword of Doom’ is serious-minded, dark and not setting out simply to entertain. It is a powerful, ravishing film and achieved something that is a sign of a great movie — to snap me out of a mood and pull me in under its spell.

I might have started off wanting the fish and I most certainly ended up with the steak, but it was one of the best steaks I’ve had.