25. Zatoichi's Conspiracy , Eng Sub

25. Zatoichi's Conspiracy , Eng Sub

Everything comes full circle when Zatoichi returns to his hometown. Unfortunately, he finds that a childhood friend has become a feared crime lord, keeping the locals in debt and bilking them of their rice. Capping off Zatoichi’s feature film era before he made the transition to television in 1974, this chapter is suffused with melancholy, closing the series on a note of seriousness and emotional heft that it has well earned. In some ways, Zatoichi represents an endpoint of sorts, a culmination of Shintaro Katsu’s career. When the series began, way back in 1962 , Katsu was acting in three film series simultaneously, sometimes appearing in four or five movies annually in his various roles. Zatoichi just happens to be the one that lasted, and the one he could never quite shake. Though he acted periodically in other franchises in the mid-1960s, the blind man is who he became known as, and he didn’t do much outside of that role from the mid-1970s until his death, and he seemed to circle back to Zatoichi. Katsu would reprise the character from 1974-1979 in a successful TV spinoff series. He would direct himself as the blind yakuza again, in 1989. Zatoichi was the beginning of Katsu’s fame but it was also effectively the end of Katsu’s ability to convincingly portray anyone else. A beginning, and an ending. But was it really an ending after all? Katsu died in 1997 but Japan wasn’t done with Zatoichi even then. Beat Takeshi would direct a remake in 2003. A 2008 reboot, starring a woman protagonist, would appear, as would a 2005 stage production directed by splattermaster Takashi Miike. The latest Zatoichi iteration looks to be a film produced in 2010. There are allusions to the franchise all over Japanese cinema, and even a European cover version ( Blind Fury ) starring Rutger Hauer.

https://archive.org/details/25-zatoichis-conspiracy-1973 · Public domain (Internet Archive)