Misumi stayed at the helm for the next two films: Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart at the River Styx (1972) pits Itto and Daigoro against striking supervillains: the Akashi-Yagyu clan of female assassins and the BenTenRai brothers, a.k.a. The five subsequent entries largely dispense with subtleties and multiply the creative gore. Between the river of greed and the flaming river of fury, he swears, "I'll walk on the white path of righteousness.I shall have my vengeance," later adding, "I'll abandon the way of the warrior and live on the Demon Way in Hell.walk the path of blood and death." Itto's origin story also emphasizes the contradictions of this ronin's compromised bushido ("the way of the warrior"). Sword of Vengeance emphasizes mood and establishes character, periodically breaking out into outré blood-spewing ultraviolence, with selective use of sound to put greater focus on the violent acts as the rest of the world drops away. The first film establishes Itto's conflict with what will prove to be many strands of the treacherous Yagyu clan. In the series' first entry, Lone Wolf and Cub: Sword of Vengeance (1972), director Kenji Misumi and screenwriters Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima seem relatively hesitant to fully exploit this child-endangerment angle, but subsequent entries emphasize Daigoro being in the thick of things. The franchise's more direct translation ("Wolf with Child in Tow") lacks the same poetic ring, but aptly describes the intentional absurdity of its central image: a killer with a baby cart and, at times, a Baby Bjorn. A Shogun's executioner slandered wth charges of treason and sent on the run, Itto is also the single father of three-year-old Daigoro (Tomikawa Akihiro). Lone Wolf and Cub refers to the assasin handle of Ogami Itto (Wakayama), an anti-hero done wrong. Now, these films defined by their arterial sprays of blood are just the stuff for the Tarantino crowd, looking to source the similarly comic-booky American chanbara Kill Bill back to its forebears. Now collected in a Blu-ray box set by the Criterion Collection, the six stylish films can be seen as ahead of their time, both visually (inventive cutting, dreamy double-exposure, bold close-ups, and so on, in striking Tohoscope compositions) and thematically (take-no-prisoners tales of vengeance). The six Lone Wolf and Cub pictures could be fairly branded exploitation pictures in their quantity of sex and violence (and nudity and gore), but they also qualify as comic-book movies, and perhaps the first in the modernistic style to which we've become accustomed.Īdapted from a 1970-1976 run of manga that came to 28 volumes, the Lone Wolf and Cub films were fast-tracked as a failed bid by producer and Zatoichi star Shintaro Katsu to turn his brother Tomisaburo Wakayama into an equally bankable franchise star. The Japanese chanbara, or swordfighting genre, came to arthouse prominence in America with Akira Kurosawa's 1954 classic of samurai cinema, The Seven Samurai (among other Toshiro Mifune films), but cult-movie status came with the Lone Wolf and Cub series, Toho's blunt-force action franchise with a soupcon of social critique, which might be called the swordfighting equivalent of, say, our Dirty Harry franchise.
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