Having never been released anywhere before this is the rarest film in the Wild Japan Festival, and deserves a slightly longer entry.
Virtually unknown in the West Eiichi Kudo has been linked to Masaki Kobayashi (Hara Kiri, Kwaidan) and Kihachi Okamoto (Sword of Doom) for producing jidai-geki that contain in allegorical form lucid commentaries on the political climate of 1960s Japan. Set in 1678 against the political intrigues of the Edo period, The Great Melee (1964) has thus been read as a commentary of the student movement of the sixties, which was also subjected to scrutiny in Yasuzo Masumura’s A False Student (1960). But quite apart from its social relevance The Great Melee, which follows the efforts of a group of reformists to assassinate the corrupt official Sakai who is gunning for the throne, deserves recognition as one of the great Samurai films (chanbara).
The film opens with the intimate scene of Jinbo, a high-ranking retainer, taking a relaxing bath with his wife Kayo. However their idyll is rudely disrupted by the arrival of Nakajima, a friend of Jinbo’s on the run from the Shogun’s inquisitors, who are zealously purging the country of dissidents. His decision to shelter his friend implicates him and he is arrested, but as he is led away his wife runs after him and is brutally slain. Jinbo barely has time to cry her name before his captors are themselves attacked. Managing to escape in the confusion he is taken in by a self confirmed wastrel, a ronin who lives by gambling and has sold everything but his sword. This man, though utterly apolitical, gives a fine speech critiquing the samurai class rejecting their code of honour and insisting instead that it is bribery and corruption that perpetuates the system, his words echoing many a student's. Jinbo drifts back out onto the street only to be recruited into a radical reformist group by a mysterious and beautiful robed woman named Miya.
Meanwhile the captured samurai are tortured for information by Satai and his inquisitors in a sequence shot in a style that is very almost cinema verité, which lends it a sense of immediacy and links the material more closely to the real life events of the time, the aftermath of the student’s violent run ins with the riot police – who, with their wooden batons, were the closest thing to the Samurai in modern, demilitarised Japan. Just as a trace of 1960s politics has entered the genre film, so too has some of the filmmaking techniques of the period. In particular the film alternates between the gorgeous static compositions and fluid tracking shots typical of the chanbara, and the spontaneous hand held camera-work that was emerging within the aesthetic of the new wave directors. Used almost exclusively in recording the chaotic scenes of arrest and the final epic battle sequence from which the film derives its name, this violent change in aesthetic lends these scenes a force of impact that is lacking in more classical renderings of the genre.
But if this is an allegory of the student movement it is certainly not a morally clear-cut one. As in Masumura’s A False Student, the anti-authoritarianism of the student movement, Zengakuren communists in its most radical manifestation, is also found wanting. The reformist group that the largely sympathetic Jinbo finds himself connected to is made up of a colourful cast of characters, which includes Kasaka, a mad monk who believes Buddha has requested him to assasinate Satai; Hayao Bessho, an impoverished samurai whose large family lives in a cramped, tumble-down house; and Okabe, an official who is prone to bouts of drunkeness. It is Miyo, however, who is the centre of the group, its chief recruitor and the only one who makes an effort to reassemble its members after the Shogun’s crack down. It is clear that they would be lost without her leadership, although she herself is loosing faith in the movement, most probably because the majority of its male members see her more as a comfort woman than a collaborator. In one of the films many brilliant set-pieces Kasaka rapes Miyo in a Buddhist temple, to the sound of monks chanting, and dissuades her from screaming by tearing a hole in the paper wall so she can witness the Shogun’s men who have the area staked out in search of her.
Eventually the reformists hatch a plot to assassinate Tsunashige, the heir to throne and the man through whom Sakai seeks to weild power, during a formal ceremony, demonstrating beyond doubt to the bombed-out postwar generation that traditions can only lead to trouble. The narrative is brilliantly paced, with the screw of tension turning tighter than one of Satai’s torture devices until all hell breaks loose in a closing battle that is both horrific and farcical; wading through paddy fields and fighting outside the gates of the town, which are opened and closed and then opened again in a gesture of futility, the assassins are seemingly incapable of bringing the death blow to their target although they do manage to finish off a few innocent bystanders in the process.
The film is profoundly concerned with death and the meaning of life in death. In an earlier scene, when one of the reformists broaches the possibility of turning in their comrades for clemency, his comrade pulls him over to the coffin of his dead brother and knocks of the lid to reveal a mangled corpse captured in a striking overhead shot, to remind him of the consequences of such a decision. Miya recruits Jinbo on the verge of suicide over his wife’s death, convincing him to lay down his life for a worthy cause instead. However after the plot is laid down and Okabe announces that ‘our deaths will bring peace to the land’, several close-ups of the conspirators’ morose faces indicate that life is not so easily squandered. In the calm before the storm Kudo takes time to gauge the reactions of his assassins, one of many moments in the film that contribute to the excellent characterisation and ensure the success of the complex plot. The poor samurai enjoys the company of his family for the last time before killing them, so that they don’t starve after he has died, and lays their bodies out carefully upon the tatami. We don’t see the act of murder, rather the film marks the transition between a happy family and a mausoleum with a single cut; the sound of the children laughing still lingering on the soundtrack and in the man’s ears as he walks away for the final time. The film reminds us that the divide between life and death is a blink of the eye. Later he will carve into a wooden post the words ‘Hayao Bessho lay down his life for justice’ in a final bid to be remembered, before erasing the words himself.
Finally, and ironically, it is not either of the assassins who kill Tsunashige, but the gambling wastrel, who happens upon his friend Jinbo’s body and, taking his broken sword, launches a singlehanded attack on the heir, who, having only just recovered from the last attack, is walking with Sakai, both of them engaged in relieved laughter. The film closes with a stunned Sakai, sent mad by the realisation that he has lost his opportunity to gain power, he places the corpse of Tsunashige back in his palanquin and sets about attempting to convince his men that he is still alive and they should carry on with the ceremony as planned.
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