News

“Goyokin,” which translates to “Official God,” is perhaps Hideo Gosha's finest film. Written by Gosha and Kei Tasaka, many of the director's regular players, including Tatsuya Nakadai and Tetsuro Tamba, star here. Toshiro Mifune was initially cast as the character Samon Fujimaki. However, production difficulties resulted in him being replaced by Kinnosuke Nakamura. “Goyokin” was a critical and financial hit upon release and remains a highly regarded piece of Japanese cinema.

on Amazon by clicking on the image below

In snowy feudal Japan, Sado Island is home to gold mines that provide riches offered to the Tokugawa clan via ship delivery, which can be jeopardized due to poor weather on the waters. Meanwhile, a reclusive samurai named Magobei Wakizaka wanders, clearly troubled by something. The ronin finds himself the target of an assassination attempt, which he survives. He learns this attack was orchestrated by his former clan master,...

After the positive reception of the first “Samurai Wolf”, fans of the “Furious Wolf” did not have to wait long for the sequel, which was released just one year after the first feature, again starring Isao Natsuyagi as the titular hero and with Hideo Gosha as director. While the two movies about the wandering ronin may not be the director’s most commercially successful works at the time, perhaps due to the over-saturation of the market at that point in the 1960s, but there are most certainly in the same league as the “Zatoichi”-series or the tales of “Lone Wolf and Cub”. However, as with many sequels within the chanbara genre, Gosha not only built this new feature on the qualities of its predecessor, but also aimed to tell a new story including such themes as corruption, greed and betrayal, which is much more complex and contains some quite interesting characters.

In the history of Japanese cinema, the period drama, whether a chambara or jidaigeki, is a genre which many filmmakers want to explore for themselves at least once during their career, with many of them even building their bodies of work on just these types of features. While many cite directors such as Akira Kurosawa and Masaki Kobayashi as being the most important examples, cinephiles and people familiar with Japanese culture know the genre is far more varied and has a lot more names to offer. One of those directors has to be Hideo Gosha, who already made a strong impression at the beginning of his career with two lasting masterpieces of the genre, “Three Outlaw Samurai” and “Sword of the Beast”. In the years to come, he would continue making strong entries within the samurai genre, such as his two “Samurai Wolf”-movies, both starring actor Isao Natsuyagi as a ronin named Kiba,...