Shiranui kengyô

Based on a play by Nobuo Uno, Shiranui Kenko is a story about Sugino Ichi who showed unusual talent in evil ways since his early childhood.

Sugino Ichi (Shintaro Katsu) was blind since he was a child, but he used his talent to commit crime to make his living. One day he meets Kurakichi, a thief, and he becomes part of his gang lead by Shiranui Kenko. He is ordered to refuse the loan request by Namie (Tamao Nakamura) - a wife of samurai Tojuro Iwai. Sugino Ichi tells Namie he will loan the money in exchange for him having an affair with her. Namie's husband finds out and Namie commits suicide. Next, Sugino Ichi schemes to kill his boss Kenko Shiranui, and take over as the the second Kenko Shiranui. His scheme seems to be succeeding, but not everything is going the way he expects.

Starring Shintaro Katsu, and his future wife Tamao Nakamura. Katsu plays a seminal role as the blind masseuse 2 years prior to his leading role as Zatohichi. This movie also was the first hit for Katsu, and established him as a bankable actor for Daiei corporation. Following year this movie was released, he marries his co-star, and his stellar rise to stardom starts.

It's a story about evil which sometimes plays the central theme in early Japanese samurai movies. Tamao Nakamura played a similar role of wife getting raped by a person she asks favor from in Daibosatsu Toge. Even with theme like this, this movie has lot of class and is high in artistry. It's certainly one of the better samurai movie from the early '60s, and is worth a watch.

Shintarô Katsu has been blind since birth. Even as a child, he knew how to use his blindness to manipulate people for his advantage. Now he is an adult, apprenticed to the Tôdô-za, the guild of blind men. He uses his apparent guilelessness to accumulate wealth as the head of a criminal gang. Can he gain control of the guild? If he does so, what are the limits to his power?

Katsu is best remembered for the innumerable movies and TV shows as Zatoichi, the blind swordsman. This Shakespearean sort of tale is an early role in the model, and it is very well done, with his early misdeeds keeping the audience wondering when they're going to catch up with him. It's based, like Zatoichi, on a germ of reality: a guild of blind men was established near the beginning of the 15th Century, and they were the only men permitted to become masseurs. Like all Japanese organizations, the few at the top could become extremely wealthy, while those at the bottom lived in terrible poverty.

Quite surprised to find out that Shintaro Katsu had already played a blind masseur before he started the Zatoichi series, I was eager to see this film. Yikes, what I got was very unexpected.

The film starts out with a few scenes of the main character, Suga-no-ichi, as a blind child. The sightless scamp is already concocting schemes to swindle people out of money. Cut forward to Suga as an adult, now a priest working under the also blind head priest who is Secretary of Religious Affairs for the Shogun. Curiously all the other priests in this temple are blind, it's not explained in the film why this is. Suga gets sent out on errands by the head priest and he uses this as a chance to rob, swindle, rape and murder while wandering around Japan. Suga joins a band of thieves while running his own schemes independently. But foremost in Suga's mind is the position of Secretary of Religious Affairs and he hatches a plan to get it.

Shintaro Katsu is excellent in the role. A number of Zatoichi mannerisms are already present in his portrayal of the blind masseur. The film is well directed and photographed in black and white. Unfortunately, the character of Suga is so despicable that the film is tough to follow, only Katsu's performance makes it tolerable. There is nothing of the noble Zatoichi here. Also there's no sword work, this is not a chambara film at all. The film might have worked better if it was played with more humor and less rape, but it's rather serious about the whole story. The ending is a cop-out. Interestingly, Katsu's brother, Tomisaburo Wakayama, played a similar, though much less despicable, character in the "Wicked Priest" series a few years later.

Recommended for Katsu fans, others might want to rent a Zatoichi film instead.

If you're a big Zatoichi fan like me, this might genuinely be one of the most unsettling movies you'll ever watch.

It'd be even worse than finding an old Avengers-style movie where Robert Downey Jr, Chris Evans, Mark Ruffalo etc spend the whole movie acting like the droogs during the first 15 minutes of A Clockwork Orange.

But it does assure me we don't live in the darkest timeline, because in the darkest timeline, there exists one Zatoichi film and 26 Suginoichi films...

Shintaro Katsu plays blind masseur Suginoichi, a character who in this earlier film is, aside from his affliction and occupation, the complete antithesis of Zatoichi the honorable and big-hearted Blind Swordsman. An outcast born in poverty, even as a young boy he's an accomplished extortionist with big plans for his future. The film then follows Suginoichi as an adult, when a chance meeting with an ailing traveler who's carrying a large sum of money launches him on a Grand Guignol spree of murder, theft, betrayal, blackmail and rape.

I have to hand it to Katsu: Suginoichi has to be one of the most fascinatingly repellent characters I've ever seen. He has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. He hates the world and everyone in it, especially women, and they'll all be made to pay. The lesson he's taken from life is that if he can rise fast enough, he'll be able to keep one step ahead of retribution for his evil deeds. And for a time, a long time in fact, he prospers, but in an ironic and highly appropriate twist, Suginoichi's comeuppance arrives when a nasty trick he played on the occasion of his first murder backfires at the worst moment.

If you watch this film expecting something like the Zatoichi series, especially if you're looking for dazzling displays of sword-play, you'll be sorely disappointed. If on the other hand you like dark period dramas, shot in the starkly beautiful black-and-white in which Japanese cinematographers once excelled, I recommend checking this one out.