Chapter Two: Shogun Assassin
By Brett Beach
June 10, 2010
BoxOfficeProphets.com
When I was a child, Leonard Maltin’s TV Movies and Video Guide was my flashlight of mini-criticism shining into a world of thousands and thousands of films that I (wrongly) suspected I would never be able to gain access to. I reread those capsule reviews so many times that a good number of the sentences have become as dear to my heart and repeatable as anything captured in Bartlett’s Quotations. For the original Friday the 13th, a parenthetical aside on its success with the teen market snarkily asserted that this was “one more reason as to why SAT scores continue to decline.” The review for the sequel succinctly observed, “More nubile campers. More bloody executions. If you loved Part 1…”
Still another: Scorsese’s The King of Comedy comes highly recommended as a “pungent black comedy” where “ the denouement is a wow!” Since both of those vocab words popped up over and over in my Honors English classes, I have a special scholarly nostalgia for them, I must confess. But regardless of that, “the denouement is a wow!” may be the most elegantly composed and concise sentence in the entire book. It trips off the tongue. It’s upbeat, and lyrical, and it also sounds like the best band name ever for a solo electronic artist making music on his/her laptop. A Google search only shows three hits for it so here’s hoping this helps to carry it just a little bit further.
Sometimes, it wasn’t simply a catchy sentence that stayed with me, but the desire created by the capsule review to see a particular film. Shogun Assassin was one such film. All I knew about this film until the time I was 19 was encapsulated in Maltin’s three sentences (one quite long, the other two fairly short.)
And yet, despite having seen Shogun Assassin twice before this week’s column, I had never delved any further into the rather protracted history of the film. If I had, I would have discovered that the last of Maltin’s sentences is (gasp!) wrong, after a fashion. I also would have realized that Shogun Assassin isn’t really a Chapter Two. But it is. Kind of. Are we clear on that? Then, l shall begin. And since this is me, I’ll start in the middle.
I had never had any luck locating Shogun Assassin at the smaller, independently owned video stores in Sisters or Bend, so imagine my surprise when one of my college chums discovered it at a Hollywood Video (RIP) location in a town several miles outside of Portland. It seemed surreal that a chain video retailer dedicated to having multiple copies of all the new releases would have such an obscure film. But this was proving to be a fortuitous year for such matters.
Another friend, who had a late night weekend show on the campus radio station, uncovered the song that I had heard when I was six and been tortured as to its identity for over a decade. Any time it came on the radio, I either had to leave before it was over or the DJ never announced who the artist was (Did I think to ever call in and ask what the song was? Of course not.) No points for obscurity, here. It was Madness’ charming top 10 hit “Our House.”
The funny thing is, I don’t remember the actual experience of sitting down with my friends to watch Shogun Assassin. Our first time watching Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive is vividly captured, but for this, a film whose name had been on the forefront of my cinematic thoughts for so many years, nothing in particular stands out. Perhaps the excitement and buildup eclipsed the initial viewing. It wouldn’t be the first time.
I caught it again about three years ago at Portland’s Hollywood Theater as part of a semi-regular Grindhouse Film Festival. The 35mm print was worse for the wear after travelling on such a circuit for who knows how long, but it felt fulfilling to see it on the big screen, one or two scenes in particular. Watching it now for the third time (the 2006 DVD release, though there is a Blu-Ray edition coming out this summer featuring, among other extras, Samuel L. Jackson talking about his love for samurai films), I feel like my thoughts have begun to settle about the film, even as I finally realized I didn’t have much knowledge about Shogun Assassin’s “production.”
Shogun Assassin is a 1980 film that “Americanizes” and edits together the first two installments in the 1970s Japanese samurai series Lone Wolf and Cub (six films released between 1972 and 1974). These films were themselves inspired by a manga of the same name that started and ran through much of that decade. There was also a television show that ran concurrently in Japan for three seasons. The six films sport such testosterone-pounding (English) subtitles as Sword of Vengeance, Baby Cart to Hades, and White Heaven in Hell.
And so, Shogun Assassin pulls about 12 minutes from Sword of Vengeance (whose running time is 83 minutes) and just over 70 minutes from the second film in the series, Baby Cart at the River Styx (81 minutes) and edits them together into a single feature clocking in at 85 minutes with credits. I figured it would be beneficial to see both of the originals at the same time as I re-watched Shogun Assassin but was only able to rent the former. Most of the footage used from that film is from the earliest scenes and is employed in a similar manner in Shogun Assassin: to set the stage for our hero, Ogami Itto, as he is framed for disloyalty to his master, sees his wife murdered, and becomes a wandering ronin (master less samurai) accompanied only by his young son, Daigoro.
The key differences between Shogun Assassin and its forbears - and they are quite key - are that a new musical soundtrack has been added, the speaking voices have been dubbed, and voice-over narration has been added, in the form of a fairly consistent running commentary by Daigoro. (We never hear him speak otherwise.) Let’s consider each of these in turn and how Shogun Assassin is aided, or not, by these changes.
While the soundtrack does retain some of the musical cues of the Lone Wolf and Cub films, an entirely new score was commissioned by the American producers and co-composed by Mark Lindsay (former lead singer of Paul Revere & the Raiders) and W. Michael Lewis (who had a good thing going with these sorts of flicks for a while, also doing music for Enter the Ninja and Revenge of the Ninja). Relying primarily on synthesizer (with performance credit given to the “Wonderland Philharmonic”), the score is moody and in a minor key, but used to enhance and not overpower the scenes, like an ambient wave washing over the visuals. For me, it was reminiscent in parts of Tangerine Dream’s cinematic projects around that time. In key scenes of swift and brutal violence, the wise choice was made to keep the score silent and only allow for the sounds of blades meeting and flesh weeping blood (a decision carried over from the Japanese films.)
The dubbing of the voices is handled fairly well for this sort of project. Yes, the voices don’t always match with the lips but the American team (including but not limited to director Robert Houston and writer David Weisman, who were also producers and providers of some of the voice work) seemingly did not set out to translate this into a parody of its source a la What’s Up Tiger Lily? Or Kung Pow: Enter the Fist. It is amusing to note that a very identifiable Sandra Bernhard made her screen debut (or her voice did at least) here, just two years before her first major role in…The King of Comedy.
What was done via the new dialogue and voiceover was a major oversimplification and overhauling of the plot so that the “story” could be kept confined to a single film with beginning, middle, and end, and the key action scenes from Sword of Vengeance (which is mostly setup for the series) could be lifted out and somehow incorporated. By an amusing irony then, the plot of Sword of Vengeance is so dense that to encapsulate here would almost require a separate column and the “plot” of Shogun Assassin is so minimal that it evaporates from one’s mind even in the act of viewing it. I found that watching the two films so close together tended to defeat any distinctions even further, especially since I was seeing the exact same footage in a different (but not drastically so) context.
But the film’s masterstroke, intentional or not, is the narration. Some research on the Web - verified in more than one place - indicates that Gibran Evans, who was seven-years-old at the time, supplies the voice of Daigoro. Evans is the son of Jim Evans, a painter, illustrator, and graphic/web designer who also worked on concert and film posters including, yes, Shogun Assassin. So Houston and Weisman obviously didn’t venture far to find young Evans.
The punch line is that - at least for this fan of voice over narration - Gibran’s work ranks among the best ever. I don’t know how much praise is warranted - if he was directed to read with a flat and consistent inflection or if he read all of his lines in 30 minutes in one studio session with no modulation but his voice matches perfectly with the sad passive eyes of Masahiro Tomikawa, and even now I can hear his tones sifting through my brain.
Occasionally, the lines are used for humor, as in one scene where Daigoro attempts to keep an accurate body count. Mostly, Daigoro’s voice emerges as that of someone who seems wiser than his years but still can’t quite grasp the enormity of what is going on, who speaks to the audience though he doesn’t speak to the characters. In other words, from a narration standpoint, this is Days of Heaven meets The Piano. Always staying just this side of deadpan thanks to a tremor of sorrow that infects even his recounting of happier times, Gibran’s voice lifts the words out of exploitation junksville and into something approaching poetry.
Still, the two greatest assets are ones that couldn’t be messed with: the physical presence of Tomisaburo Wakayama as the samurai and the cinematography by Chishi Makiyura. Wakayama looks born to wield a sword and he supplies the deadpan gravitas when needed. He is both physically imposing and humorless and yet oddly cuddly like an, um, Kung Fu Panda. He loves his child, but is also willing to end his life to spare him the life of exile they must lead. Makiyura brings a painterly composition to the outdoor fights (such as the featured decapitation) and an extended climax upon endless sand dunes yet he finds a way to keep the spatial dimensions of the indoor clashes clear and prevent them from feeling confined and claustrophobic.
I must offer a doff of the cap and a sly smile to AnimEigo who have released not only the original Lone Wolf and Cub series on DVD here in the last few years, but also Shogun Assassin 2, 3, 4, and 5. That’s right! You can see either the original with fairly accurate subtitles OR the same film, uncut, but dubbed (and of course, there are only five Shogun Assassins because they chopped together the first two films). That, ladies and gentlemen, is a solid business plan.
And, as for that “mistake” in Maltin’s guide I referred to? Well, he has always had a listing for a film called Lightning Swords of Death with a release date of 1974, and claimed that Shogun Assassin was a kind of sequel to this. Columbia Pictures did distribute that dubbed film here but LSD is actually the third film in the Lone Wolf and Cub series and AnimEigo kept this as the subtitle for their DVD release of Shogun Assassin 2. And on that note of perfectly clear confusion, class is adjourned.
Coming up this summer: I look back at some of the block-busteriest Chapter Twos of the 2000s, courtesy of The Matrix Reloaded and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest; give Jon Favreau and Kristen Stewart their dues with Zathura, Iron Man 2 and New Moon; chime in on Sex and the City 2 (after the hate and insanity dies down); and offer a measured and considered WTF about Mike Myers’ sequels (Mr. Powers, Mr. Campbell and Mr. Shrek all included).