Ako-Jo danzetsu (1978)

Director:

Kinji Fukasaku

Writers:

Kôji Takada (screenplay)
Kôji Takada (story)

Release Date:

28 October 1978 (Japan)

Genre:

Action | Adventure | Drama | History

Plot:

Plot Keywords:

47 Ronin | Samurai

Awards:

1 nomination

Cast

Sonny Chiba	...	Kazuemon Fuwa (as Shinichi 'Sonny' Chiba)
Kinnosuke Nakamura	...	Kuranosuke Ohishi (as Kinnosuke Yorozuya)
Tsunehiko Watase	...	Heihachiro Kobayashi
Masaomi Kondo	...	Hashimoto
Toshirô Mifune	...	Tsuchiya
Kyôko Enami	...	Ukibashi
Kasho Nakamura
Shinsuke Mikimoto
rest of cast listed alphabetically:
Shinsuke Ashida	...	Shikibe
Jun Fujimaki	...	Yajuemon
Takuya Fujioka	...	Kurobei Ohno
Seizo Fukumoto
Mieko Harada	...	Hatsu Hashimoto
Nobuo Kaneko	...	Kira
Yoshi Katô	...	Yahei Horibe
Hiroki Matsukata	...	Denhachiro Tamon
Tôru Minegishi	...	Yasubei Horibe
Yoshiko Mita	...	Akuri
Kensaku Morita	...	Jujiro
Sanae Nakahara	...	Todano tsubone
Mikio Narita	...	Kato
Yôko Natsuki	...	Osen
Ken Nishida	...	Daigagu Asano
Mariko Okada	...	Riku Ohishi
Junkichi Orimoto	...	Tokubei
Hideji Ôtaki	...	Yamada
Teruhiko Saigo	...	Asano
Yûsuke Satô	...	Yagashira
Harumi Sone	...	Torii
Mizuho Suzuki	...	Narrator
Maki Tachibana	...	Shino Ohtaka
Ryo Tamura	...	Uesugi
Tetsurô Tanba	...	Yanagisawa
Minori Terada	...	Gengo Ohtaka
Go Wakabayashi	...	Araki
Shôji Yasui	...	Uemon

Directed by
Kinji Fukasaku

Writing credits (in alphabetical order)
Kôji Takada		screenplay
Kôji Takada		story

Original Music by
Toshiaki Tsushima

Cinematography by
Yoshio Miyajima
Hanjiro Nakazawa

Production Companies

• Toei Kyoto

Distributors

• Toei Company

Also Known As:

Last of the Ako Clan (International: English title) (literal title)
Swords of Vengeance (USA) (video title)
The Fall of Ako Castle (USA)

Runtime:

159 min

Country:

Japan

Language:

Japanese

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

2.35 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono

Company:

Toei Kyoto

Goofs:

Factual errors: The movie version has all forty-seven Ronin committing seppuku at the end. Only forty-six did so. One was pardoned by the Shogun. He lived to age seventy-eight and died a natural death. He is buried with his forty-six comrades at the famous temple of Sengaku-ji.

And Toshiro Mifune as...The Next-Door Neighbor!

I rented this movie in spite of Fukasaku's name, so I'm perhaps not the most objective judge. In fact, it turned out not to be as bad as I expected, particularly after the completely inappropriate 70s cop-movie theme music. (I kept expecting one of the investigators to slam Asano up against the wall and ask him if he'd ever picked his feet in Kamakura.) But it's still basically a Fukasaku movie. Where it's a straight retelling of the 47 Ronin story, it's OK. Where Fukasaku inserts his own special brand of action melodrama, it's not; I defy anyone to sit through the murder-suicide scene without laughing.

The climax is considerably more Sonny Chiba than Chushingura, and I don't mean that as a compliment.

And how much did Toei Studios have to shell out to get Toshiro Mifune for a role that could easily have been played by a bit player who would have been glad to do it for scale? It's not that his presence makes the movie worse, exactly, it's just that...why is he there?