Director Tomu Uchida worked the pre-war years of his career at the Nikkatsu studio on largely socialist films with a comedic or genre leaning. Spending the next decade imprisoned in Manchurian China, he joined the Toei studio and returned in 1955 with the luridly titled Bloody Spear at Mount Fuji – a picture that’s actually rather more thoughtful and considerably less violent than its title suggests.
It’s the story of a number of characters – principally a disgraced samurai and his two servants – on the road to Edo (which became Tokyo in 1868), in the shadow of the eponymous mountain, and the relationships that form and interactions that pass between them. Kojūrō, while a much kinder master than many of his kind, is a violent drunk and his bag-carrier Genta has been tasked with bringing him to Edo sober. Meanwhile, Kojūrō’s spear-carrier Genpachi befriends a small orphaned boy, Jirō, who has ambitions of becoming a samurai himself.
Elsewhere in the party – thrown together by a river-crossing and later torrential storms – we meet a widowed singer and her young daughter, a father taking his adult daughter to be sold into slavery for thirty gold coins, and Tōzaburō, a man who was forced to sell his own child years earlier and has spent the time since saving up the money to buy her back. At every stop the travellers make, they hear stories of a thief in disguise, robbing people on the road in tandem with their progress.
If the first half of the film is almost tortuously slow – or beautifully languid – and seemingly inconsequential, that’s as much of a deception as the robber’s inevitable disguise. Bloody Spear at Mount Fuji is Tomu (an assumed name meaning ‘to spit out dreams’) Uchida picking up where he left off and using the motion picture form to pick apart hierarchical structures and promote a left-wing agenda. The unmasking and arrest of the thief, and subsequent consequences thereof, are the first of a chain of events leading to Uchida’s ultimate goal, an overtly theatrically-handled massacre (on a small scale) that uses its own sense of incompetence to highlight the ridiculousness of social pecking orders. But there’s no happy ending here; for every triumph Uchida presents, there’s a tragedy to offset it. This isn’t grand filmmaking on a big scale, and its age betrays its occasional daftness, but it’s also consummately intelligent and rewarding in surprising ways.
There are a handful of retrospective extras on Arrow Academy’s new Blu-ray, and if there are a couple of picture drop-outs and the very occasional tramline alongside a rather crackly soundtrack, the picture itself is generally sharp and nicely contrasted, and with no sign of grain in the darker areas.
BLOODY SPEAR AT MOUNT FUJI (1955) / CERT: 12 / DIRECTOR: TOMU UCHIDA / SCREENPLAY: SHINTARO MIMURA, FUJI YAHIRO / STARRING: CHIEZO KATAOKA, DAISUKE KATO, RYUNOSUKE TSUKIGATA / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW
