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I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.

As Good As It Gets

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

I found this movie to be very enjoyable with great pacing. Watching this movie, I was enthralled by the artistry involved in good black and white cinematography. The play of the lighting and shadows and the acting involved in this movie is good. For those of you who remember those old sci-fi horror TV shows where the narrator always comes on in the end and makes a closing statement/comment on the preceding episode. In the case of this movie it would've been ".....and the beast was man.". The plot breakdown has already been written in the other reviews so i will not repeat. However I feel that the "message" of the story is interesting enough that different people will come away with different understanding and feelings. For me its a commentary on how honour, duty, patriotism, ambition can and will be manipulated and used by those in authority to control the actions of the masses (for the authorities on benefit).

It is interesting that the supposed "beast" in this film is the one who acts with the most honor among all the samurai involved.It is a short film that has many stories going on.Gennosuke (Mikijiro Hira) has been betrayed by the vice-Chancellor after he kills the Chancellor of the clan and is on the run, a "beast" forced to live in the forest. He befriends a gold digger, who really has an excellent part with laughs and thoughtful lines.He also comes across another samurai who has been living in the forest with his wife collecting gold for his clan and hoping for advancement. He, too, will be betrayed, and by the same person as betrayed Gennosuke.As everything gets sorted out, there is some good swordplay, and, like the western hero we are all familiar with, Gennosuke walks off into the sunset.Definitely makes me want to check out more of Hideo Gosha.

This is a very early Gosha film and an immensely enjoyable one. Thematically this film is fairly similar to Gosha's masterpiece Goyokin. Both films follow disillusioned samurai while they attempt to break away from their past life as retainers. Compared to Goyokin, Sword of the Beast is much shorter and not as wide or ambitious in scope.The plot follows Gennosuke, a samurai that we learn has been manipulated by his clan and eventually hunted. Adding to the drama, he is hunted by a group of people lead by a former friend from his clan. Through flashbacks we learn exactly how Gennosuke has ended up in his current position. Previously he was a low level samurai in his clan, with great sword skills but little else. A high level retainer talks with and manipulates a naive and ambitious Gennosuke into taking action. As you can imagine, when he is on the run his aspect on life and his clan is much different! The most interesting aspects of the film occur when his circumstances cause him to view the samurai code much differently than he had as a retainer.The action is very well filmed with good composition and stylistic choices such as the freeze frame. At only 85 minutes, the film is quickly placed with plenty of action. While Mikijiro Hira doesn't match Tatsuya Nakadai's masterful performance in Goyokin, he still does a more than competent job. Overall, this film was a pleasure to watch. To anybody else who enjoyed the film, I would highly recommend Goyokin (thematically very similar and one of Gosha's best).

On the surface this may seem like a typical samurai action flick but like Kurosawa and Kobyashi films there are many social implications beneath the surface.The movie seems to revolve around the irony that while Gennosuke, the main character who is basically cast out of society in to the wild and forced to constantly fight for his survival like an animal, is actually the only character that tries to show any qualities above that of a beast.Every other character from a group of bandits he encounters to the group of clansmen trying to exact revenge after Gennosuke killed their leader, to a man and his wife from a separate clan trying to steal gold to improve their clan status are either acting for revenge, power, or greed. The greed exists because most of the movie takes place around a mountain where gold has just been discovered and Gennosuke is befriended by a poor man hoping to find some for himself.Throughout the movie there is constant backstabbing, deception, and generally brutal acts committed by a multitude of these characters. For instance the man from a separate clan living with his wife on a shack by the river are attacked by bandits in the woods trying to steal the gold they have already mined; they hold the wife hostage in demand for his booty but the man would rather give up his wife then part with his gold. Her saving grace is when Gennosuke shows up on the the scene and acts with the courage and compassion to save her life. The husband does come around a little later in the movie but in the end his rival clan plans to kill everyone on the mountain and save the gold for themselves threatening the couple, Gennosuke, and his persuers.Gosha does a great job with his imagery, demonstrating a wild, dark world threatening to swallow humans whole. Throughout the film, which is almost all outdoors are scenes of men disappearing into woods or buried beneath shrubbery. In fact, it's quite reminiscent of another Japanese Classic, Rashamon. Some of the shots are virtually identical, ie the sun being concealed over the forest canopy or disappearing behind a mountain.One of the best touches is towards the end when soldiers from the rival clan are planning to take the mountain, and kill anyone who knows about the gold. One of them sounds a battle horn to signal the approach, a battle horn made to sound conspicuously like some kind of strange animal call.