Three Outlaw Samurai
| Three Outlaw Samurai | |
|---|---|
| Directed by | Hideo Gosha |
| Produced by | Ginichi Kishimoto Tetsuro Tamba |
| Written by | Keiichi Abe Eizaburo Shiba Hideo Gosha |
| Starring | Tetsuro Tamba Isamu Nagato Mikijirō Hira Yoshiko Kayama |
| Music by | Toshiaki Tsushima |
| Cinematography | Tadashi Sakai |
| Edited by | Kazuo Ota |
|
Production
company |
|
|
Release date
|
|
|
Running time
|
93 minutes |
| Country | Japan |
| Language | Japanese |
Three Outlaw Samurai (三匹の侍/Sanbiki no Samurai) is a 1964 Japanese chambara film by director Hideo Gosha.
The film is an origin-story offshoot of the original Japanese television series of the same name. The film involves a wandering ronin (Tetsuro Tamba) who finds himself involved with two other samurai (Isamu Nagato and Mikijiro Hira) who are hired to execute a band of peasants who have kidnapped the daughter of a corrupt magistrate.
The film was released in Japan in 1964. On February 14, 2012, the Criterion Collection released a DVD and Blu-ray disc of the film.
Bilge Ebiri, commissioned by Criterion Collection to write an essay on the film, wrote:
"Three Outlaw Samurai is a supremely confident big-screen debut, whose surface simplicity masks a scathing vision of society lurking beneath. In some ways, it recalls Kurosawa's samurai narratives, with its tale of renegade rōnin who come to the aid of the dispossessed. But Gosha's personal obsessions are all over the film, particularly in his depiction of the loss of honor through blind loyalty (and its liberating opposite, the regaining of honor by betrayal), and in the sharp contrast he makes between the refined, comforting worlds of power and social duty and the wild, almost animalistic existence of those who choose freedom. And unlike Kurosawa, whose characters tend to be classically drawn and endlessly layered, Gosha often works in broad strokes: his characters are archetypes, which he then deconstructs and plays off one another. A samurai can go from fighting alongside a group to fighting against them in one brief shot, as in Three Outlaw Samurai. These characters may be simple, but Gosha’s real interest is in the portrait of society he is creating—and that is anything but."
Glenn Erickson, in an article for Turner Classic Movies published after the Criterion Collection Blu-ray release, wrote:
...
Wikipedia