Lost in Criterion

Charlie Chaplin's first movie with synced sound (as opposed to his first film to feature onscreen dialogue) is the great silent film star saying no thank you to the concept of synced sound. City Lights is a great first start as we decompress from 24 Zatoichi films and relearn how to do the podcast, but I'll be honest it's rough going rewiring our brains from that.

We say goodbye to the Zatoichi the Blind Swordsman Boxet with film #25: Zatoichi's Conspiracy (Kimiyoshi Yasuda, 1973), and we end with neither a highlight or lowlight, but  a solidly middling entry. It doesn't help that not only are we tired of this, last week's set contained both the best and worst the series has to offer and this last one is just an inoffensive end to the series. We also cover the additional materials in the set with commentary from Tony Rayns and a short documentary on the life of Shintaro Katsu during the Zatoichi tv series of the late 70s from John Nathan.

Our penultimate Zatoichi episode brings us one that is possibly the best Zatoichi movie, one that is not quite the most middling of the middle ones, and one that is quite probably the most infuriating movie the Criterion Collection has made us watch so far.

Zatoichi and the One Armed Swordsman (Mimiyoshi Yasuda, 1971) is probably a metaphor for international relations as we see Ichi meet Shaw Brothers' wuxia hit The one Armed Swordsman travel through time and over seas to have a lot of misunderstandings due to the language barrier. Zatoichi at Large (Kazuo Mori, 1972) has perhaps the best pre-credits sequence of any movie ever and then settles into a rushed and blase tale of people failing to communicate even through there is no language barrier. And Zatoichi in Desperation (1972) sees star Shintaro Katsu step into the directors' chair much to the detriment of the series and our mental health.

Our itinerant samurai expert Donovan H. joins us for this set of three Zatoichi films, giving us some insight into Ichi's sword fighting style and what some of the movies we won't be watching say about Ichi's blindness. As for what we did watch: Kenji Misumi, who directed the first Zatoichi, directs his last two films of the series: Samaritan Zatoichi (1968) and Zatoichi and the Fire Festival (1970). While both suffer from the poor scripts that have accompanied many of Misumi's outings, he at least tries to make visually interesting films as he says goodbye to the series, and Zatoichi and the Fire Festival may be a top tier Zatoichi movie because of it (and the naked bathhouse brawl). Between those two, Kihachi Okamoto (The Sword of Doom and Kill!) drags Toshiro Mifune's Samurai with No Name into the Zatoichi universe in the overly long, surprisingly by the numbers Zatoichi Meets Yojimbo (1970)

It's week six our wandering journey through the Zatoichi the Blind Swordsman boxset and we get some of our favorites of the bunch. Zatoichi the Outlaw (Satsuo Yamamoto, 1967) is perhaps the most politically interesting of the films so far, introducing us to an teetotaling anarchist samurai preaching about agricultural co-ops but also showcasing some pretty egregious stereotypes about blind people. Zatoichi Challenged (Kenji Misumui, 1967) gives Zatoichi a kid again, and finds our hero fighting the exploitation of labor, both within a textile sweatshop and to save the kid's dad from forced labor as a porno plate producer. Lastly, Zatoichi and the Fugitives (Kimiyoshi Yasuda, 1968) is the most blood-soaked (and spurting) Zatoichi we've seen yet but also co-stars the phenomenal Takashi Shimura.