Thursday, April 10, 2003

Last night I revisited a

Last night I revisited a film I hadn’t seen for years - Hiroshi Inagaki’s Musashi, part one of the 1954 Samurai Trilogy.  It’s gorgeously filmed with great characters and an inexorable build.  Toshiro Mifune is riveting as the renegade peasant who makes a name for himself, first as an outlaw, then as a diligent student of the way of samurai.  At one point he takes on twenty men with only a wooden sword in his hand - and since this is part 1 of 3, you know he makes it out okay.  But he’s forced to retreat and hide in the countryside, which itself is treated so sensitively and lovingly that it effectively becomes another character in the film.  As the entire village is impressed into service to find him among the steep hillsides and deep ravines, the kindly buddhist monk and the jilted orphaned fiancee of his faithless best friend decide to sneak into the woods themselves to camp out and bring Musashi to a safe place.  The priest and young woman scurry along hoping to evade detection in that wonderful scampering way so prevalent in films set in 17th century Japan, he in his grey tunic, she in bright red ankle-length robes.  I was thinking at this juncture that she really needed something less conspicuous to wear, something that would blend into the verdant hillsides more smoothly - maybe with a mottled green pattern that would make it harder to see her.  Then I realized that, at that early date, the camo-no hadn’t yet been invented.