User reviews

During the war, historical epics were in bloom, as that was a genre well-fitted for telling stories of glorious warriors, feudal loyalty and the emperor tradition. This Toho production is helmed by famous jidai-geki pioneer Makino Masahiro, and tells the story of the third shogun of the Tokugawa shogunate, Tokugawa Iemitsu. He is played by Hasegawa Kazuo, probably Japan's biggest moviestar at the time.

The ones familiar with Hasegawa movies know not to anticipate an accurate historical depiction, since especially during the war, historical films were historical in the vaguest of ways. If you read the wikipedia article for Tokugawa Iemitsu, very little of it resembles the actions depicted in the film. Christians aren't persecuted, the one guy trying to commit harakiri is discouraged from it, and of course there is no mention of the shogun's reported homosexuality, as being gay was very illegal everywhere in 1941.

Still, this is a very dialogue-heavy narrative, and not terrible. There were few lighter moments, some action, and couple of historically interesting depictions. The theatrical look of the film brought to comparisons to Shakespeare's heavily fictional accounts of the British court. Fun fact: the screenwriter of this film, Oguni Hideo, later penned seven films with Kurosawa, among them the Shakespeare adaptation "Ran" (1985).