Reviews & Ratings for
Priest of Darkness More at IMDbPro »Kôchiyama Sôshun (original title)

15 out of 16 people found the following review useful:
Kabuki Adaptation And Film Perfection, 22 August 2005

Author: Steven_Harrison from GSO, USA

Based on a well-known Kabuki drama titled "Kochiyama to Naozamurai", which Yamanaka distills into a masterpiece of jidaigeki (period film) as shomingeki (everyman drama), blending the two into something he apparently had rights to entirely in Japan during the 30s. Through a series of intrigues, Kochiyama, Naojiro (who becomes Hirotaro for the film), Ichinijo, and Hirotaro's sister Onami (played by a young Hara Setsuko) all pretty much have the worst day or two of their lives. This thoroughly pessimistic film isn't much of a surprise considering 1937's Humanity and Paper Balloons (a paper balloon, by the way, being played with by a child provides one of the most memorable scenes in this film, or any film, about half way through) but Million Ryo Pot (1935) seems impossibly optimistic in comparison, you'd almost think they were made by different directors (except for the perfection of course.) McDonald (who I've been reading a lot of lately, not on purpose, it just seems my interests are lining up with hers) surmises that the last two films are a response to the rise of fascism (especially the ni-ni rokyu incident) in Japan, and I can't imagine a better reason.

If you have a chance to see this film, or any of Yamanaka's work, do so. They're enjoyable and stick in the back of your head forever. Unfortunately only three of his films survive, but I would rate them as some of my favorites. Ten stars and very highly recommended to everyone.

Steven

1 out of 1 people found the following review useful:
Fake monk, true knife, 23 November 2011

Author: chaos-rampant from Greece

The story of Kochiyama about two petty conmen outwitting a rigid ruling class was usually presented on the kabuki stage as two separate plays, Kochiyama and Naozamurai. For the purposes of the film, Sadao Yamanaka selects the first of these bandit plays, retains the basic structure, downgrades characters from their more high-minded kabuki versions and mercilessly parodies left and right.

The result is a film where a samurai retainer loses his token sword - a small knife, itself an opportunity for belittling a symbol - which through a long chain of bartering is eventually sold back to him but as a fake, such are the machinations of a society openly bent on status but secretly powered by deceit; where the poetic gesture of a double suicide is shockingly confounded when one of the two lovers crawls out of the water alive; where the two rascals who spend the film drinking, conning, and blustering, get to be the unlikely heroes who must do the right thing.

So a text rich in irony is reworked in such a way that those original ironies are turned on their heads as well. Where the original heroes showed confidence, here they are unnerved, and their antagonists from the samurai class are rendered pompous but basically harmless buffoons.

Most of the film takes place in the narrow roads of Edo's shantytown, inside a tavern, or the low-class gambling den on the floor above. It is in line with the colorful world Yamanaka presented in the Million Pot Ryo, seamy life on the streets a little out of glory's way.

The only downside, a significant one to my mind; it is incessantly talky and perhaps difficult to follow without some prior knowledge, and features none of the discerning eye for a transitory world Yamanaka exhibited in his earlier film. It is not as fresh or joyously cinematic. It does not imagine visually first, or in ways that really move. The dharma dolls from that film we can also see here lined up in a shelf, but the karmic wheel is not spun. It's purely from a theatric tradition what unfolds, a complex series of ironic resolutions well told.

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