The Shochiku New Wave of the late 1950s and early 1960s was a studio strategy to attract a young generation of filmgoers by making films with young directors. The obvious model was the French Nouvelle Vague, but a major impetus was the popularity of so-called “Sun Tribe” films about contemporary youthful rebels made by the rival Nikkatsu studio, starting with Furukawa Takumi’s smash-hit Season of the Sun in 1956.
So it’s not strange that most films by such leading Shochiku New Wave directors as Oshima Nagisa, Shinoda Masahiro and Yoshida Yoshishige (later Kiju) focused on the urban young. At the same, however, the most popular genre with the movie-going masses was the samurai period drama, which at its postwar peak accounted for nearly one half of all films released.
Shochiku’s first New Wave entry in this genre, in 1960, was The Tragedy of Bushido (Bushido Muzan), the first feature by director Morikawa Eitaro. Born in 1931 and a Shochiku staffer since 1956, Morikawa was not yet thirty when he made the film.
Based on Morikawa’s own script, its story of a young samurai torn between his duty toward his family and clan and his desire to love and simply live had elements of a typical genre melodrama.
But by taking this story to an extreme – the hero is only sixteen years old and his putative lover is a married woman – Morikawa both challenged a genre taboo and tested the limit of what a studio picture could show on-screen. The film also contained a pointed critique of the feudal system, in which lives were needlessly sacrificed for the rigid bushido code of honor and obligation. Although the samurai were by this time long gone, their descendants had recently a fought a brutal war under that code’s still strong influence costing the lives of millions.
The ill-fated hero is teenaged Iori (Yamashita Junichiro), who is drafted by his clan to commit ritual suicide following the death of the clan lord – an old and dread custom known as junshi. Iori tells his older brother (Mori Miki) that he barely knows the lord in question (junshi was traditionally the final act of a close and long-time retainer) but the brother cannot defy such an order from above.
His wife Oko (Takachiho Hizuru), who has raised Iori as though he were her own son, takes pity on him. Feeling that he should not go to his death without tasting the pleasures of the flesh, she seduces him while he is bathing in a pond.
Then, miraculously, a proclamation arrives announcing the prohibition of junshi. But it’s still too soon to celebrate – and the reason for the film’s English title becomes painfully clear.
Considered a Shochiku New Wave masterpiece, The Tragedy of Bushido was transferred to a new 2K digital print for a special section of Shochiku New Wave films released in 1960 that was presented at last year’s Tokyo Filmex festival. Udine FEFF is the first festival to screen it in Europe.