#27 — Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart at the River Styx
This is an ongoing, illustrated countdown of my 49 1/2 most essential action movies. There are many like them, but this one is mine. I doubt my one drawing is ever worth 1,200 words, but they come free with the meal. Last week I talked about how all this started because of a dog.
Sometimes the stars align in such a way that you can celebrate Father’s Day by talking about your favorite samurai dad, a guy that makes his son choose between being a mercenary in exile, or a being dead with his mom.
I’m bending the rules a tiny bit by putting a samurai/martial arts movie on here, but if you see any of this particular series I think you’ll understand — especially when you see the baby cart that fires bullets like a Bond car. For the uninitiated, the Lone Wolf and Cub films center around a former executioner and his infant son who have been forced to walk “the Demon Way”. As such, they travel the country as swords for hire while being hunted down by assassins and political adversaries. The films play out like extended tv episodes (perhaps mirroring the tv series I haven’t seen), with assassin-of-the-week plotting and an overarching escalation between Ogami Ittō (our Lone Wolf) accompanied by his little boy Daigoro (our Cub) against Yagyū Retsudo (the Wolf’s arch nemesis) and his network of killers.
How it differentiates itself from most of the sub-genre is the otherworldly mood, tone, and presentation. The environments speak as much as the characters, and sometimes they’ll just sit by a campfire in wide shots of tall grass while a spooky ambience takes over. You always feel like the pair is being watched and hunted. The films take on a post-apocalyptic feel, with lawless backdrops of injustice and brutal violence that only someone as formidable and ruthless as Ogami Ittō could survive. Many modern tropes of anime are present, one being the escalation of dangerous and sometimes bizarre challengers that will have their head split like watermelons and make that *PFfffffshshsshshpssssss* noise when they spray kool-aid everywhere. Nature is always testing the wolf.
There are 6 of these movies (not including Shogun Assassin, which is a remix/mashup of a couple of the previous films) and they’re all gorgeously filmed and often quite bleak slices of slash-em-up action pulp. Baby Cart At The River Styx is my pick of the litter. It’s a psychedelic action romp exhibiting some of the coolest anti-hero myth making in the genre. They also feature an amazing array of faces to stare at, not unlike the gallery of mugshots found in Leone’s westerns. Tomisaburo Wakayama is great to look at. I guess a lot of people view Toshiro Mifune as the ideal, ruggedly handsome samurai of Japanese cinema, but Wakayama is wild and dangerous looking in a way that perfectly fits the world his character inhabits. He’s also a little tubby, but not in a way that’s debilitating. He could probably win a Wing Bowl and a sword duel in the same day.
The movie really sets the tone right from the beginning, with Ogami planting a sword in his would-be killers head, only for the guy to grab it so his tag-partner can go in for the kill. Nobody seems to fear death in this world, so you’re gonna see some real animal kingdom tactics. This is one of the defining marks of the Lone Wolf saga (and of anime). We get to see an abundance of exotic, deadly killers pop out of the woodwork for a shot at the championship belt, only to realize they’re the Gigan to Ogami’s Godzilla. The dude with the sword in his head stands around for minute to explain to Ogami that his days are numbered because they’ll never stop coming for him, while juice sprays everywhere. The visual spectacle is great, but I also just appreciate the level of irrational confidence from the villain, like a watermelon threatening Gallagher.
That’s the thing about this Lone Wolf and his Cub, nobody can figure out how to kill them. There’s a whole Wile E. Coyote montage of elite assassins trying to stop Ogami while he walks down a countryside path pushing his baby cart. Traveling musician murderers, farmers with giant deadly radishes, and eventually a boss fight with the chief assassin all end in confounding failure. His impeccable sword technique is too strong.
Earlier in the movie, the lead assassin Sayaka and her guild of sword maidens are recruited by a ninja. He accidentally insults her so she challenges his best man to escape the room if he can. The maidens surround him and systematically dismember his body until it’s nothing but a limbless corpse rolling around on the floor. The whole scene is mostly silent, without any cries of pain or shouts of intimidation. It’s like one of those Discovery Channel specials about alligators hunting baby deer and the whole thing is pretty unnerving.
It’s the classic food chain setup of increasingly deadly adversaries — and it takes an interesting turn when Sayaka barely survives her encounter with Ogami only to realize she’s just another link in the chain. A burning boat sequence sends everyone into the water, leading to another failed attempt at Ogami’s life. Dragging her to shore with his son, Ogami disrobes everyone and has them huddle together to warm their bodies so they don’t get ill. Sayaka understandably thinks this is going in another direction and fights it at first, but then they all end up with their arms around each other while she thinks “yep, that’s me. You’re probably wondering how I got here”. This has got to be one of the most humiliating defeats for a master assassin I’ve ever seen. She spends the rest of the film following him, entranced by his skill and haunted by her failure. In the final scene, Ogami holds his sword out like a wolf showing his teeth, and she slinks back into the trees — effectively giving up.
The actual climax involves Ogami facing the three Hidari brothers — who wear identical clothing, but each have a unique weapon of choice. They approach Daigoro in the desert, and the boy smiles and points to the top of a sand dune. There’s gonna be some more watermelon slicing after that, but the true highlight is yet another foe facing his mortality in ways conventional action (and martial arts films for that matter) would never dare. The final Hidari brother gives his own Tears In Rain speech while blood sprays from his neck:
“My neck… my own neck… It sounds like it’s wailing. My neck was sliced open diagonally. The cut wails like a cold winter wind. They call it “mogari-bue,” — the whistle of a fallen tiger. I’ve always wished to kill someone, just once, and create such a fine cut and to sing this tune. Now I’m hearing it from my own neck. What a laugh.”
At least he has a sense of humor about it. I don’t think someone like Jan would get it (which I am linking to again because it’s the best interview of all time). I think you gotta see these though. They almost operate as silent films, until the blood starts flying. I don’t think you want to miss the *pfffshshshshssss* sounds, or the head-splitting villain speeches, or the amazingly catchy, psychedelic funk-rock theme music. Quentin Tarantino was so impressed by stuff like this that he spent two of his precious Ten Film slots on a wonderful tribute that I previously wrote about. This is the real deal. Watch it for Jan.
