Zatôichi rôyaburi (1967)

Director:

Satsuo Yamamoto

Writers:

Koji Matsumoto (writer)
Takehiro Nakajima (writer)
(more)

Release Date:

12 August 1967 (Japan)

Genre:

Action | Adventure | Drama

Tagline:

The final and most savage installment of the series.

Plot:

Plot Keywords:

Zatoichi | Samurai | Martial Arts | Jail | Character Name In Title

Cast

Shintarô Katsu	...	Zatoichi
Rentarô Mikuni	...	Asagoro
Kô Nishimura	...	Uneshiro Suga (as Akira Nishimura)
Yuko Hamada	...	Shino
Toshiyuki Hosokawa	...	Nisaburo
Takuya Fujioka	...	Zato Sanji
Kenjiro Ishiyama	...	Tatsugoro
rest of cast listed alphabetically:
Saburo Date
Tatsuo Endo	...	Boss Tomizo
Jun Fujikawa
Ryuuji Fukui
Rokumaru Furukawa
Yuzo Hayakawa
Sumao Ishihara
Yoko Kajima
Tadashi Kato
Jun Katsumura	...	Mankichi
Gen Kimura	...	Fusajiro
Takuya Kitano
Kanae Kobayashi	...	Matsushichi's mother
Keiko Koyanagi
Utako Kyo	...	Large mouth lady
Tatsuo Matsushita
Kayo Mikimoto	...	Yuki
Tômi Mitsuboshi
Koichi Mizuhara	...	Farmer
Ikuko Môri	...	Tomizo's wife
Manabu Morita	...	Tetsu
Hiroyoshi Nishioka
Tokio Oki
Keisuke Ootori
Osamu Sakai
Mizuho Suzuki	...	Yamagen
Noboru Taki
Ryoichi Tamagawa
Kazuko Taniguchi
Shizuko Tsuga
Takeshi Yabuchi

Directed by
Satsuo Yamamoto

Writing credits (in alphabetical order)
Koji Matsumoto		writer
Takehiro Nakajima		writer
Kiyokata Saruwaka		writer
Kan Shimosawa		story

Produced by
Tokuko Miyako	....	planner
Masaichi Nagata	....	executive producer

Original Music by
Sei Ikeno		(as Shigeru Ikeno)

Cinematography by
Kazuo Miyagawa

Art Direction by
Yoshinobu Nishioka

Camera and Electrical Department
Genken Nakaoka	....	lighting technician

Production Companies

• Daiei Studios
• Katsu Production Co. Ltd.

Distributors

• AnimEigo (USA) (VHS)
• Artsmagic (UK) (DVD)
• Artsmagic (UK) (VHS)
• Daiei Studios
• Janus Films (USA) (subtitled)
• Madman Entertainment (2006) (Australia) (DVD) (as "Zatoichi the Outlaw")
• Nihon Eiga Satellite Broadcasting (2007) (Japan) (TV)

Also Known As:

Zatoichi the Outlaw (UK) (video title) (USA) (video title)
The Blind Swordsman's Rescue
Zatôichi 16 (Japan) (informal title)
Zatoichi Breaks Jail (USA)

Runtime:

96 min

Country:

Japan

Language:

Japanese

Color:

Color (Eastmancolor)

Aspect Ratio:

2.35 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono (Westrex Recording System)

Certification:

Australia:MA

Company:

Daiei Studios

Trivia:

The first Zatôichi film produced by Katsu Productions (Shintarô Katsu's own company).

Movie Connections:

Followed by Zatôichi to Yôjinbô (1970)

Good but could have been one of the best

If this had been done earlier in the Zatoichi series it could have been one of the best. It is good enough, as most of them are, but the plot and the characters seem too complicated for the series at this point. The situation is unusually intriguing: the farmers in the province have two champions, a benevolent boss (for once) and a philosopher-samurai who starts a sort of Grange; both run afoul of the usual local gangsters, who want the crops to fail because it increases their gambling revenues and their chances to snap up some land; their chief or powerful ally is a seeming puritan who is death on drinking and gambling but secretly indulges his own perverse appetites. (He also resembles Dracula, as the villains in the later Zatoichi movies tend increasingly to do.) These characters have enough meaning so that they deserved to be set against Zatoichi as he was drawn originally, but by now he has lost many of his nuances, and the changes in some of the characters, such as the good boss and the angry sister of a man Zatoichi has killed, need more time then the movie has to give, so that the story seems choppy, as if some scenes were missing. Other than that, the movie shows the virtues of most of the others in the series: good acting, sometimes lyrical photography, the creation of a vivid, believable, and uniquely recognizable landscape (the absence of which is obvious in the occasional episode where the director just misses it), and a technical quality that of its nature disguises itself: the imaginatively varied use of limited sets so their limitations seem not to exist. And of course there is the keynote actor, whose presence, as much as his performance, makes it all work. This must be one of the best-sustained series in movie history.