鞍馬天狗 御用盗異変 / Kurama Tengu Goyō-tō Ihen / Kurama Tengu Official Thief Incident (1956)

Release date: March 13, 1956

Director: Kyōtarō Namiki
Studio: Toho
Cast: Kanjūrō Arashi, Takamaru Sasaki, Ryōtarō Oki, Shinobu Araki, Chikage Ōgi, Tomoko Matsushima, Mitsugu Terashima, Isao Yamagata, Akihiko Hirata et al.
Availability: No known online streaming, no known recent screenings. A DVD can be purchased from YesAsia.

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I apologize for the long gap between posts, which unfortunately might happen often, since I live in America and it takes ages for stuff I buy from Japan to get to me. This seems to be a fairly obscure film: no ratings on IMDb, no Letterboxd page, no Wikipedia page (Japanese or otherwise), no one has logged it on eiga.com. I'm dipping into my own personal DVD collection for this one - which means screenshots! (As always, all images are copyright Toho, I own nothing but the disc.) Also, the DVD came with a booklet with some lovely posters I've never seen on the internet, here's one of them.

If you're reading this blog, I'm willing to bet you're the kind of person who already knows what Kurama Tengu is. I can't possibly cover the whole breadth of the series here, but in short, “Kurama Tengu” is the title character (he does have a real name, but in this review I'm going to refer to him as Kurama Tengu, since most characters in the film do) of a series of books written by Jirō Osoragi, adapted into many films over many years, starting in the early 1920s. Kanjūrō Arashi is probably the most widely known actor to take up the title role, and the first film starring him (Kurama Tengu: Kyōfu Jidai, or Frightful Era of Kurama Tengu, released in 1928) set an example for jidaigeki to come, with its energetic swordfighting and charismatic lead. Arashi is not the first, last, or only actor to play this role, however, and even during his tenure, other films with other actors in the lead were being produced. The film we're looking at today is the second-to-last to feature him.

My DVD did not come with English subtitles, but it did come with Japanese subtitles, so I was able to watch the whole thing with my phone pointed at the screen to translate. Which felt super janky, but it worked. So here we go.

So the plot concerns the actions of a group of "Official Thieves", sanctioned by the Satsuma clan to raise distrust in the Shogunate among the citizenry. They run riot in Edo, but are internally divided between those who believe they should stick to their mission and those who are using their status as an excuse to have their way with women and generally act without constraints. Kurama Tengu goes to the head of the clan to explain that his plan to hurt the government is only hurting the common people, and asks him to stop his men from causing such havoc. We then divert for a moment to some of the Satsuma goons catching a wayward boy, who escapes them - but will become relevant later - and then the scene changes to a worker at an inn finding a murder victim wearing a tengu mask in one of his rooms. The murder victim is revealed to be a samurai of some importance named Amakusa.

Now, the boy - Sugisaku - seems to be someone known to Tengu; I'm not sure if he was a character in a previous film, but he talks about regretting leaving Sugisaku in Kyoto during a time of upheaval. Whatever the case, at the same time as Tengu is investigating the murder and trying to figure out what to do about the Official Thieves, Sugisaku is looking for Tengu and trying to find his way back to Edo. He ends up being taken in by a woman named Otaki... and this is where Hirata's character comes in. He's playing some kind of old-timey scientist (named Irie), which is really funny to me; even in jidaigeki, he can't escape getting typecast. More specifically, he's playing a very dedicated scientist who's invented something for a good cause that could be used for evil, and he's afraid of it falling into the wrong hands... hmm... somehow this sounds really familiar... anyway, the Shogunate gets wind of this and wants to use it to destroy the Satsuma clan and their thieves. Meanwhile, Sugisaku takes up with a group of other street children whose families were killed by the Satsuma clan's thieves.

I had to do a double-take because I thought Sugisaku's dragon hood was a Mechagodzilla mask before I remembered this movie came out in 1956.

Tengu's got a target on his back: people close to him keep turning up murdered, all wearing tengu masks. He meets with Irie, who initially thinks he's the one who stole his research and used it for the murders, but they come to an understanding. Otaki, however, still believes Tengu is a killer, and goes after him with a pistol. We learn that her vendetta against the Satsuma clan's thieves is because she was kidnapped by them after witnessing them kill her father. She confesses all this to Irie, and the two of them separate to work out their feelings, Irie going back to his house and being so distraught that he's caught unawares by the Satsuma men, who kidnap him.

Tengu, now knowing Irie's stolen "medicine" is in the hands of the Satsuma clan, has Saikuniya, their leader, take him to where he's hiding it... but it's been stolen once again. I should mention there's been somebody else in a tengu mask lurking around in the background for all this time, and Tengu confronts them and unmasks them to find that it's a woman with a grudge against him for killing her husband in self-defense. (At this point I am thinking this movie has a lot to do with previous films I haven't seen.) She admits she's the one who stole the medicine in an attempt to finally kill Kurama Tengu.

Lord, this was worth the $40 and the four weeks it took to get to me.

In the final act, Tengu quickly wraps things up by freeing Irie from the palanquin the clan had been using to bring him to whatever fate they had in store for him. Fighting off a whole host of bad guys, Irie returns to his secret lab, and... you guessed it, burns it all and takes his own life, leaving nothing of his research left to be misused by evildoers. Really not reminded of anything here, nothing at all, not even slightly. Tengu puts down the official thief plot and rides off - not quite into the sunset - while Sugisaku and his new friends call after him.

This was a really fun movie. I was afraid it was going to be mostly about Sugisaku and his gang of street urchins, but there's not too much of that; the plot moves along at a steady pace and doesn't branch off into different paths so often as to become tedious. I liked what I saw of Kurama Tengu as a character: he fights for the common people and is very open about it, even saying he'd use his sword against the Shogunate were it ever to do anything that would endanger the people. He seems to be a hero who fights not for any specific faction but for the force of good as a whole.

And I have to say this is a REAL treat for Akihiko Hirata fans. This was an unusually dynamic role for him and it's really fun to see him be the "damsel in distress" (thankfully his girlfriend is packing heat). It's also extremely funny that he is basically playing Ye Olde Serizawa here. This is another film that makes me really, really wish I wasn't seemingly the only person outside of Japan with an interest in this kind of thing. More people should watch this.