La légende de Zatoïchi - Le fugitif

this is one of the so-so add-on(s) of this 'blind swordsman' series. after couple of the prequel and sequel in black and white, it suddenly turned into a colored one. but there were many flaws in this series that by nowadays standard, they were so obvious and inevitably decreased the greatness of this series:

1) In this follow-up film, Zatoichi's short hairdo suddenly fashioned in modern cut. his short hair was trimmed so evenly and nicely and blow dry up and held on his head firmly. a wandering Yakuza blind masseur would have such fashion taste to have his hairdo nicely treated in an expensive saloon was beyond my comprehension.

2) The fighting scenes looked more false and phony once in colors. the swords never cut open the clothes and no blood was splashed all over the places, even when cut by Zatoichi's sword and fell into the pond, no blood ever showed up in the water, yet when Zatoichi was cut by his opponent's sword, his arm would have blood. but judging by where it was cut, the artery on his arm should have cut deeply and the blood would never be so easily to be stopped. but the worst effect of such synchronized swords fighting was those clothes never being slashed open and no blood appeared whatsoever, it just looked so fake and unconvincing, more like the stupid productions of Chinese 'Shaw Brothers' Kung-Fu movies, all of them just looked so stupidly fake and moronically synchronized.

3) For a blind man, no matter how sensitive his hearing ability, there's no way he could have detected the positions and locations of so many enemies around him. but Zatoichi seemed to have the supernatural power to rightly detect his enemies' locations and where to lodge and cut his opponents' bodies. the most unconvincing flaw of Japanese samurai movies was the sudden stop in action when one of the guys was cut and the others just stood around to await the next synchronized movement. it seems when all the people surrounding their targeted person would allow the guy to finish the fatal cut of their comrades to be completed thoroughly and then to start the next fighting sequence. this is such a unbearable fake scene almost appeared in every Japanese samurai movie.

4) When a hunting rifle was implemented in this film, the primitive long gun seemed to be very easily reloaded. by judging this movie series era, the primitive rifle would need fuse to ignite the gun powder to push a round bullet ball out of the barrel, it would need gun powder to be stuffed into the barrel and chamber first then inserted the lead ball bullet to complete the reload, yet in this film and all the other series, the rifle simply operated so modern than what we usually saw in the fighting scenes of the American Civil War.

The screenplay of this film is just too bland and lukewarm to make this particularly a great and memorable one.

Ichi, the blind, wandering swordsman, happens upon a small festival and enters an open sumo competition. Exploiting sighted competitors' assumptions about his disability, he eliminates five consecutive men and claims the top prize. This draws the ire of local yakuza, who identify the legendary swordsman from previous misadventures and place a bounty on his head. As he swiftly eliminates would-be assassins, Ichi is exposed to the clan's inner turmoil and interferes to the best of his ability. He also bumps into an old love, advises a young admirer and tangles repeatedly with a skilled, testy ronin.

This series had already swapped directors a few times by this point, but maintained a sense of continuity in both visual and thematic senses. Less so in this instance, which feels blander and more workmanlike than the others, force-feeding the character into unfavorable situations and missing subtle details that would have merited a closer look in previous chapters. Shintaro Katsu remains essential in the leading role, expertly alternating between faux merriment and quiet stoicism to suit the situation. Yet, despite this being his story, he's played as more of a willful fly in the greater ointment than an enigmatic focus and his big action scenes (now far more frequent) are largely misdirected. We get one excellent duel - the climactic final showdown with an equally-skilled rival - but the rest of the film's fights are of the twelve-on-one variety and that's not what Ichi does best. If anything, those brawls test the limits of what an audience can be expected to believe. An expert samurai, compensating for his blindness by noting the tight squeak of an adjusted grip or the expectant air of an incoming strike? That's where it's at. I can lose myself in such a fable. A cornered fighter, dodging six trained blades in a whirlwind of pure, chaotic, dumb luck? Now I'm having second thoughts.

One might mistake this for the first Zatôichi in colour, so bold are the colours during the opening credits that they'd challenge even Imamura's hyper-lush "Kamigami no yakubo" (1968).

What the films achieve wonderfully is that they still allow the necessary plotting to take its time. In modern fare I think we'd be having all the quiet moments and hesitations removed, let alone all the human drama. Thus the film really has genuinely suspenseful moments and genuine drama. Otane reappears, and we are allowed to see a loose end tied in the drama.

I'm going through the films in chronological order just now. It will be interesting to see where the series goes as it matures; these early films have all been very brilliant.

This fourth Zatoichi film in fourteen months

The recurrence of a lost love might have made for an interesting change of pace, and change of tone for this series, but that mostly takes second stage to a contrived, yet shallow, story of redemption, without much resolution.

The climactic battles are reasonably good here, but it all feels alternately a bit too choreographed, and poorly choreographed, as the innumerable thugs all seem to politely wait their turn to attack Ichi, who barely gives them a passing glance, before they fall over dead, bloodlessly, and without even so much as a tear to their clothing.

I found the sake bottle scene to be too silly of a gimmick, like the slicing of candles with his sword, as well.

Still watchable, though, but a drop in quality from the earlier installments.

The following review is an extract from the book "Shintaro Katsu´s Zatoichi: Complete guide to all movies", which is now available on Amazon.

"(...) Zatoichi agrees to be transported in a jinrikisha (a type of proto-taxi in Japan of the Tokugawa era, and other Asian countries). Persecutors who want to kill the blind man see how he rides the vehicle, as they keep a close watch on him. At the edge of the road, Zatoichi and his carriers meet a woman with a baby who feels unwell. Chivalrously, Zatoichi proposes to the mother to get into the car in his place; he will continue on foot. A few meters ahead, the jinrikisha is attacked, the killers strung the person inside thinking that it is Zatoichi ... and killing instead the young mother (...).

(...) Zatoichi, who feels responsible for the tragedy, decides to take the baby to the town of Miyagi to give it to her father Unosuke, the husband of the deceased.

(...) This issue is the eighth sequel to the excellent "Zatoichi monogatari" (Kenji Misumi, 1962). The director of every film about the adventures of the blind swordsman is not always the great Kenji Misumi, but this is the case in this "Zatoichi kessho-tabi" that we are dealing with today, and whose international title in English comes to be, without much sense, "Fight, Zatoichi, fight". We say without much meaning because that title is not necessarily descriptive of the film (Zatoichi fights in all his films), and we are inclined to think that it is not the literal translation from Japanese either.