Poor peasants kidnap the shogun’s daughter hoping to gain a reduction in their taxes. Sympathetic to their fate, a wandering ronin (a masterless samurai) decides to help them.
With a scenario that occasionally flirts with Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, this debut film by (under-appreciated) Hideo Gosha so shook up the rules of chambara that it renewed the genre and had a diffuse influence that permeated the work of directors such as Sergio Leone and Quentin Tarantino. JB
