Street Of The Masterless Samurai is a standard samurai saga, rather different from the previous film I'd seen by its director, the interesting 1966 documentary, Silence Has No Wings. It opens with swordplay in the rain and climaxes with the violent spectacle of a small group of ronin coming to the aid of a whore in the forest, grotesquely held down between two bulls who are about to tear her apart. (Is this the Japanese equivalent of the melodramatic heroine tied to the railroad tracks?)One of them is even got up in full body armor and riding a horse. In between though there is little action, as the ronin who linger in a countryside roadhouse can't rise to the challenge of a sinister entourage of samurai who dress up at night masked in blue (almost like the KKK!) to terrorize several local women who are struggling to make ends meet as prostitutes.The setting is 1836, during the last decades of an apparently corrupt Shogunate.The most vividly etched of these tavern characters is "Bull," a yojimbo or bouncer, who appears burly and tough but later instead of fighting the arrogant samurai that he looks like he's going to duel, sells himself to them out of desperation and even degrades himself by crouching like a dog and retrieving a sandal for one. In the end he will redeem himself by committing suicide and bringing down his boss with him. This character,by turns comic, pathetic, and tragic, is played in his last screen role by Shin Katsu, famous for his earlier Zatoichi vehicles,and even if the film isn't all it could be, it's worth seeing for his acting.
Review of Ronin Gai
