A Bloody Spear at Mount Fuji
Chiyari Fuji
Japan
1955
94 Min
Black and White
1.37:1
Japanese
Synopsis
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
Director
Tomu Uchida
Born in 1898, Uchida joined a theater troupe in his youth, perfecting a sense of stagecraft and theatrical aesthetics that would become the backbone of his films. He turned to directing in the late 1920s; comedies and police actioners dominated his early production, but Uchida also developed a fledgling realist aesthetic rare in the industry at the time. In 1945, he fled Tokyo and joined the leftist Manchuria Film Association, spending ten years there. His return to Japan heralded a new outburst of creativity, as he applied his talents to everything from social critiques to theater adaptations, samurai movies to gritty noir. His late-fifties output in particular could serve as a sampling of nearly every genre and pleasure that Japanese cinema can offer, and also as a snapshot of the country’s postwar aesthetics, concerns, and imaginings. “Uchida crystallized the social, political and artistic passions of an epoch crucial to modern Japan,” critic Max Tessier wrote, “and did so with a… read more
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I must face the cold to find him
By sodr2 on January 4, 2012
Basically you have the kings of Japanese cinema gathered together and creating one of the finest films in its genre (just a shame this doesn’t get the recognition it deserves). I was completely swept… read review
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