© Toei
Courtesy International Film Festival Rotterdam

(Chiyari Fuji). As decisively as Kurosawa before him, Uchida broke the conventions of the chambara or swordfight film with his witty, loose-limbed A Bloody Spear at Mount Fuji, about a samurai delivering a teacup to Edo. Bloody Spear marks Uchida's postwar return to Japanese cinema and to progressive principles, but this homecoming is markedly ambivalent in its values. From its shambling "on the road" opening, scored with jaunty jazz and marked by a flagrantly artificial setting and proliferation of incident, to its Shane-like ending, the film takes in a remarkable range of characters and classes, tones and traditions. Its narrative has a peculiar stalling quality, as though Uchida were determined to suspend the expectations of the samurai film by deferring the violence forever. Full of subplots and spin-offs, scatology, sentimentality, and social satire, this simple tale becomes a sprawling epic whose culmination—a fight to the death among gushing sake barrels—shocked Japanese audiences of its time with its sheer vehemence.

—James Quandt

• Written by Fuji Yahiro, Toshio Tamikado, from a story by Shintaro Mimura. Photographed by Sadagi Yoshida. With Chiezo Kataoka, Ryunosuke Tsukigata, Chizuru Kitagawa, Yuriko Tashiro. (94 mins, In Japanese with English subtitles, B&W, 35mm, From The Japan Foundation, permission Toei)