Orochi (1925)

Originally posted to Facebook on 3/1/2018

Orochi was our seventh and final film from 1925, and our first Japanese film. It is an early samurai film, starring Tsumasaburô Bandô, and was part of a DVD series called "Talking Silents", which attempts to recreate the experience of seeing silent films in a Japanese theater. Apparently the custom in Japan at that time, in addition to having musicians as in Western theaters, was to have an in-theater narrator explaining and commenting on the movie.

This is an interesting approach, and the entire series looks like a great resource, since most of its films do not appear to be readily available from any other source. By and large the film was understandable without any narration, though, and the constant talking became distracting at times.

The story revolves around Bandô, who is a samurai-in-training, but is ejected from his school because of a series of altercations. From there his life spirals downward, and he gets mixed up in various nefarious activities, resulting in a stint in jail. During all of this time the narration delivers his inner feelings -- which are mainly about how put-upon he is, and how others are misjudging him. This has a grain of truth to it -- some of his problems are due to misunderstanding -- but enough are self-created that his complaining about how nobody sees his true soul starts to be a bit amusing, though it doesn't seem as though that was the intention. There are a few impressive fight scenes, particularly a tightly choreographed scene near the end of the film where Bandô fights off dozens of other swordsmen single-handedly -- a scene that is not too uncommon in action movies today, but is very different than contemporaneous action films by Douglas Fairbanks or the like. The film would have been better if there had been more scenes like this, and fewer where he is walking from place to place, Eeyore-style, feeling sorry for himself. (And the less said about the scene where he pats himself on the back for not raping a woman who has been kidnapped on his behalf, the better.) I imagine Bandô is somewhere in the lineage of film stars that led to Toshiro Mifune, and he has a similar kind of charisma, though not on the same level as Mifune (who I can only imagine would have been an enormous silent star had he been born earlier.)

Next week, having completed our films for 1925, rather than moving on to 1926, we will see our second film from 1927, for similar reasons to why we saw our first film from 1927 -- Metropolis. During November of 2017, the AFI Silver Theatre in Silver Spring had a silent festival with live accompaniment, at which we attended several films. The first -- our second film from 1927 -- was The Lodger, an early film by Alfred Hitchcock. The running list is here: https://bit.ly/2lZtfmT