Super Movies! The one based on a comic remade as a movie that looked like a comic book

 

Title: Lady Snowblood

What Year?: 1973

Classification: Prototype

Rating: For Crying Out Loud!!! (1/4)

 

As I write this, it’s about 4 months since I started this feature, and I admit it still hasn’t quite gotten off the ground. I have continued to think over how to expand the feature, and so far, the best ideas I’m getting are the ones that would push the boundaries of what one might consider a comic book movie (see Creepshow). This time, I’m back with something that many people probably wouldn’t think of even if they’ve heard of it, even though it is in fact probably one of the most faithful and direct adaptations out there. It also happens to be the undisputed inspiration for a now more famous movie that could almost count as a comic book movie in itself. Here is Lady Snowblood, the Japanese comic/ manga adaptation that was the basis for Kill Bill.

Our story begins in feudal Japan with a confrontation between a nobleman and a geisha type who turns out to have turned her umbrella into a weapon. Naturally, it ends with the nobleman and his guards gruesomely killed, and it ill have literally no bearing on anything else that follows. We then learn that the geisha is Lady Snowblood, conceived, born and raised to seek vengeance on three men and a woman who savaged her family. It turns out that the lot of them are thoroughly petty criminals who seem to have committed their atrocity simply on the suspicion that the man of the family was a government agent sent to root out their provincial scams. By the time the Lady picks up the trail, two are already believed dead, and the last of the men has been reduced to living in poverty while his daughter works as a lady of the night (except apparently in broad daylight). Snowblood actually saves him from one of his ill-advised schemes, only to dispose of him after an interrogation. It’s a friendly newspaperman who helps her find the next in line, the utterly loathsome woman of the group. But the reporter suspects that one of the old plotters is still alive, and none other than his own father. The pair must team up to hunt him down, while the lady of the night is hatching her own plan for revenge.

Lady Snowblood was a production of Toho Studio, which I have somehow reviewed twice (see House) without getting to a Godzilla movie. The movie was the first of two based on a comic/ manga series of the same name, with a “cliffhanger” ending. It was classified as a historical/ “period” film, but clearly owed a great deal to martial-arts films of the Hong Kong studio system. The film was directed by Korean-born Toshiya Fujita, best known for teen/ exploitation films, with Meiko Kaji, featured in several of his earlier films, in the title role. Despite the historical setting, the score by Masaaka Hirao heavily featured rock and electronic music. The film was released in Japan in late 1973, followed by a sequel the following year. The extent of its distribution in other markets is unclear, though it was available on home video in the US. It became possibly the most direct inspiration for Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill; as a further tribute, Hirao was brought in for the soundtrack, which included portions of the Lady Snowblood score.

This is a movie I got to almost but not quite at random, and the best I can say is that it finally helped me understand Kill Bill (which I definitely count as one movie). The later film looks and “feels” more like a comic book than almost any movie I have featured here (the exceptions being The Punisher and maybe Mystery Men), and I’ve certainly given thought to including it here. It took just a few minutes of Lady Snowblood to see exactly how Tarantino arrived at that very unique style. I can further grant that this was undoubtedly groundbreaking at the time it came out. It should be a flat-out indictment that a clearly adult-oriented comic (originally black and white!) reached the screen in Japan almost 10 years before Creepshow. But there’s too much here that I just don’t get, and plenty more that I flat-out dislike, plus a few things I’m still trying to put my finger on. There’s the gore effects that look like literal sprinklers. There’s the historical narration that doesn’t give any more insight than we would be getting from the costumes of a Kirosawa film. There’s the bits where they talk about the heroine’s memories of family members we already know she never set eyes on. There’s the brief but cringey underage nudity. And I still can’t say just why this one went over as badly with me as it does.

If there’s anything I did like here, it’s the villains. As already alluded, these aren’t supervillains, or highly skilled assassins, or even psychotics. They’re just all-too-believable miscreants who would be a few steps ahead of prison or the Grim Reaper even without Lady Snowblood on the trail. In the process, they give a stronger impression of the time and setting than we ever get from the narrator. The first we meet has already been brought down to the gutter, debilitated by his vices and perhaps remorse, with the further unfolding humiliation of his daughter. The next that we encounter has done well enough to assemble a better class of underlings, who provide much of the action as Snowblood carves her way through them with a certain amount of effort. Finally, we meet the one who had the sense to break off his trail, even if most of his on-screen actions directly undo it, now advanced far enough to hobnob with the powerful. This leads to the best sequence of the film by a wide margin, as he faces off with Snowblood and his son while the rich partygoers dance away obliviously below. (It’s just as well that none of them are looking up…)

What I absolutely find fault with is Lady Snowblood herself. Quite simply, she is at best a pitiful pawn of others and at worst so self-centered as to be oblivious to the world around her. The story tries to paper over this with talk of her being an “asura”, somehow channeling the spirits of the dead and the greater powers of the universe, but that idea is as dark as her family’s fate. There is also an attempt to present her as a champion of the common people against their oppressors, but I simply can’t find it here. To be sure, the world will be better off without the evildoers she is after, yet by the story’s own accounts, the lot of them are minor players at most. If she had either ambition or conscience, she would carve her way to the top, then use the gears of power to grind them up and do some good in the process. Instead, she continues to waste her obvious talents on the least of the villains around her. This could be compelling and tragic, and I will admit I haven’t watched the second film so I can’t say if this was addressed with more character development. But as it stands, the character’s arc is like what would happen if Batman found the mugger who killed his parents, threw him under a train and then quit.

After all this, I still need the “one scene”. The best I can offer is a scene of the old villain and his daughter. We see them chatting as she works on a sort of wicker item they call “wives” and then announces she is going to town to sell them. We then get some very good, scenic camerawork as she walks through the countryside. After a while, she stops at a picturesque cliff overlooking the sea, then starts tossing her own handiwork into the waves below. She hasn’t tossed the last of them in when Lady Snowblood arrives, at which point the two get into a conversation that doesn’t even seem that awkward. It’s a low-key, evocative scene that builds the characters and their world. Unfortunately, it’s also about the only time we see the heroine interested in someone or something besides killing her family’s enemies.

In conclusion, the only thing I have to add is that I really didn’t want to rate this one as low as I have, in fact a first for this feature. (And I already reviewed Fantastic Four!) On my original ratings scale, I certainly wouldn’t have given the lowest rating to a foreign film, if only because I wouldn’t presume to judge how well it spoke to the culture it came from (I suppose a major reason I usually go easy on Italian movies). Here, however, I had to mark it down simply because there wasn’t a lower rating to pull back from. This movie is a long way from the bottom, but in the proverbial light of day, its most significant achievement was setting a path for later movies to do much better. Before the tribunal of history, that is a more honest verdict than trying to make it into a masterpiece it never meant to be.