Hideo Gosha might be one of Japan’s most underrated filmmakers. Once discussed alongside Akira Kurosawa and Masaki Kobayashi as the third pillar of the chanbara trifecta, his name now looks out of place next to two of the most famous and well-regarded directors in history. Though he has had two Criterion releases (one of which never received a Blu-Ray release and has been out of print for over a decade now), most of Hideo Gosha’s films were never made available in the West, and his work remains largely obscure—one of my personal favourite films, Gosha’s Fireflies in the North, has only 193 logs on Letterboxd, and only bootleg releases have ever been available outside of Japan.
Something about Gosha’s sensibilities just never appealed to Westerners the way Kurosawa’s honour-bound epics or Kobayashi’s Marxist fables did—he never seemed to catch the attention of the Cahiers tastemakers.
Watching Samurai Wolf, I have to wonder if Gosha’s films may have simply been too Japanese to catch on with mainstream European audiences in the mid-1960s. Pulpy, almost proto-exploitation thrills combine with complex characters and a dark existentialist philosophical framework to create an atmosphere that whiplashes between catharsis and profound desolation. The ever-present spectre of the ‘tonal inconsistency’ critique looms over all of Gosha’s movies.
Starting off the way any Spaghetti Western might, Samurai Wolf follows its drifter protagonist—the titular Samurai Wolf—as he wanders aimlessly around Japan. Happening upon a corrupt little outpost in the middle of the mountains, he intends to stay the night and leave in the morning, but finds himself waylaid when he discovers the town is under the thumb of an abusive gang of ne’er-do-wells. It is, of course, his duty as a wandering swordsman to free the little people of their oppressors, even if it puts him in the deadly crosshairs of Japan’s ruling elite.
It’s a standard genre film setup, but Samurai Wolf is far from standard genre fare. While it features all the gold shipments, outlaw gangs, and boss-fights you’d expect from a 60s samurai movie, the proceedings are filtered through that strange melodramatic hyperrealism that’s emblematic of the best of Japanese film and literature. It’s aesthetically lethargic, but a barely restrained subsurface intensity makes everyone feel edgy and dangerous and a little bit unhinged—a kind of perpetual piano-wire tension that other Japanese modernists, like Yukio Mishima and Junichiro Tanizaki, also explored and exploited.
Samurai Wolf is cold and cruel. The hero doesn’t get the girl—in fact, he doesn’t even want the girl—and men, good and bad, die bloody, pointless deaths. At the end of it all, our protagonist is left standing in a wasteland of his own creation, the only other survivor surrounded by the ruins of what was once her life. In the end, all they did was survive, and a lot of people died in the process.
It’s not really a surprise that Hideo Gosha’s films were a huge influence on Takashi Miike and Takashi Kitano—Samurai Wolf feels, in many ways, like a precursor to Kitano’s Outrage and Miike’s Dead or Alive.
It really is a shame that Hideo Gosha’s work has been all but ignored in the West—while his disciples have become household names (in households that discuss Japanese film), Gosha himself is all but forgotten. As is also the case with Masahiro Shinoda—another extremely influential director whose best work remains out of print in the West—the West’s understanding of Japanese film is weaker for Hideo Gosha’s obscurity. His films are beautiful and complex, and still feel radical and exciting today.
At their best, Hideo Gosha’s samurai films still absolutely stand shoulder to shoulder with Akira Kurosawa’s efforts in the genre—and, for my money, stand head and shoulders above Masaki Kobayashi’s.
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