Now, now, I know what you’re all thinking. Ragnarok SOLD OUT! Well, fuck you, no I didn’t. This isn’t some sappy-ass art house piece of bullshit. It’s part one of a samurai epic starring Toshiro Mifune, so there. It even has a cameo appearance by Akihiko Hirata. If any of you think I’m losing my touch for watching a Mifune movie, Academy Award or no, then I think you may want to take a long, hard punch at your face in the mirror, ‘cause brother, you ain’t no friend of mine.

Takezo is a restless young man, living out a dull life in a sleepy little village. His relatives and fellow villagers all hate him, and he feels that he should be out in the world. When civil war erupts, he jumps at the chance to prove himself as a fierce warrior, and drags off his only friend Matahachi to join him. Matahachi leaves behind his betrothed, Otsu, and this will be important in a minute.

After their platoon is scattered by the enemy, they get lost and wind up at the dwelling of a young girl and her mother. They are nursed back to health, and one night the impetuous Takezo fights off an entire troupe of bandits single-handedly. The mother makes a pass at him, but not being interested he takes off. When he comes back the next day for his buddy Matahachi, he finds ol’ fudge-pants and the women have been run off by the raiders, who came back looking for revenge. Matahachi, being the chicken-livered worthless son of a bitch that he is, immediately forgets Otsu and marries the old lady for her money. I would like to take a moment here to say that cowardly, unfaithful betrayers like Matahachi should be skinned alive, lit on fire, and trampled to death by giant asbestos-covered spiders with donkey penises for legs (I give you my personal guarantee that nowhere else will you find imagery like this in a review for a movie that won an Oscar). Once they are dead, their body should be raped to pieces by a rampaging bull hippopotamus, while their soul is forced to give eternally rotating hand/blowjobs to the ghosts of Mengele, Goebbels, Goering, and Hitler, who ejaculate a mixture of bubonic plague, pubic lice, hydrochloric acid, and cold-sore pus into their eyes every five minutes.

Takezo returns to his village to tell Otsu and Matahachi’s mother the news, but he’s accused of deserting his platoon and killing his friend, and the entire second act of the movie is a manhunt for Takezo. He’s eventually captured by Takuan, a Buddhist priest who hangs his ass up in a tree to humiliate him and teach him a lesson. Otsu, feeling bad that old lady Matahachi sold Takezo out when all he was trying to do was bring her solace, lets Takezo down and they run off, only to be recaptured by Takuan. Takuan sends Otsu away to another village while he locks Takezo in a room full of philosophy books for three years. When Takezo comes out, he’s a new man, ready to accept the fact that his wild ways are errant. He is given a new samurai name—Musashi Miyamoto—to celebrate his mental and spiritual growth, and offered service in the emperor’s castle, but refuses on the grounds that he hasn’t quite become the man he should be to serve his country, so he bids Otsu farewell, and heads off to travel, and train, and come back ready to kick some serious ass (because it’s Toshiro Mifune, and that’s what he does).

With a simple, archetypical story like this, the characters are really the proof in the juice, and you don’t get any juicier proof than Toshiro Mifune (that sounded gay, didn’t it?). For most of the movie he’s running around in the woods, making crazy faces, killing people with his sword, and shoveling food into his face like a rabid hog. The few moments when the hatred of his villagers is weighing on him and he breaks down are, I think, made all the more poignant by his nearly psychotic behavior the rest of the time. He’s not really a wild-man; he’s just an outcast without the knowledge or maturity to know how to deal with it. The little bit we see of him after Takuan lets him out of the tower is composed, intelligent, even regal. I can’t wait to dig into Part II to see what he becomes.

And then we come to poor Otsu. There really isn’t a lot for her to do aside from being jilted and then hunted for letting Takezu down from the tree, but she loves so faithfully and completely that, when we see her reading the letter from Matahachi’s new wife after she’s been waiting for him to return for so long, we really, really want those giant penis-legged spiders to show up and wreak some unholy havoc. Granted, Musashi leaves her again in the end, but with a promise that he’ll be back, and what we see of his reformed self, we know he’s going to keep that promise and anyone who stands in his way of keeping it is going to end up in several pieces twitching on the ground.

The whole thing is set against a breathtaking backdrop of Japanese mountains and countryside. The colors are oddly washed out for a Criterion DVD – you’d think they’d digitally sharpen everything up, unless the master prints are so shitty and degraded that this was the best they could do. Still, for a color movie from 1954 it looks pretty damn good, and I’ve never been a stickler for pristine picture quality anyway. My favorite movies are washed out and grainy.

If you’re looking for something a little different from your usual diet of Bert I. Gordon and Albert Pyun and Cy Roth, check this out. It’s not quite as punchy as a Kurosawa flick, but there’s a lot here to be enjoyed, from the scenery to the performances, and no fan of samurai or Japanese cinema in general should be without it.