Breaker Morant (1980)

Breaker Morant is not the first military legal drama we’ve written about on this blog. Hell, it’s not even the first one I’ve written about this year. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about this sub-genre it’s that it always comes down to following orders. Whether it’s in WWI France or Gitmo, the tension always stems from the men giving orders and those that choose to follow them (if there ever really even is a choice). But I don’t think I’ve seen a movie yet that took this idea into such murky waters. So murky, in fact, that I still haven’t made up my mind about “Breaker” Morant and his fellow accused.

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One Sings, the Other Doesn’t (1977)

One Sings, the Other Doesn’t …and you’ll never guess which one’s which! Just kidding, this film’s many, many musical performances make it extremely obvious. Agnès Varda’s eighth feature is about the friendship between two women who could otherwise be given a number of labels. That Varda tells us (quite literally, she’s the film’s narrator) that the only difference between them that matters is singing is demonstrative of the movie’s somewhat subtle approach to being a women’s liberation story. So, living in not-so-subtle times, does One Sings, the Other Doesn’t still work?

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F for Fake (1975)

Now that I’ve written about Orson Welles’ most celebrated film, it seemed appropriate that I should turn my attention to what is actually his most influential work. You might be inclined to scoff at that claim, listing other movies like The Magnificent Ambersons (how good could that even be when Welles doesn’t even star in it?) or Touch of Evil (how much of that movie to you really remember aside from the oner at the beginning?) or The Trial (which I’ll inevitably pick the first Criterion Month it’s eligible) or even Chimes at Midnight (which I forgot to mention last time has an all-time great poster because the movie stars Welles in a fat suit). The movie I’m referring to is F for Fake, a 1973 docudrama about forgery, hoaxes, and good ol’ fashioned lies. And the reason it means so much to me is that it popularized the format that would eventually become known as the “film essay.”

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I decided to take on three martial arts movies this Criterion Month without realizing I’d also be reviewing them all in a row. Needless to say, I’ve seen a lot of people get cut up with swords over the past week. I already filled you in on the first Zatoichi movie, let me tell you now about the other two.

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The Tale of Zatoichi (1962)

First introduced as a minor character in a 1948 novel by Kan Shimozawa, Zatoichi, The Blind Swordsman, has grown into one of Japan’s most enduring characters. Beginning with The Tale of Zatoichi, Shintaro Katsu would go on to play this role in 25(!) movies between 1962 and 1973, then continue in the TV series (which lasted 100 episodes across four seasons), and finally return to the big screen for one last movie in 1989, which he also directed. It’s hard to think of a Western comparison to that kind of commitment to a role. Katsu made more Zatoichi movies than there are James Bond movies. Like in total. Can anyone else’s time playing one role even compare? I guess some legacy sequels are gonna have bigger time spans, like Dan Aykroyd has also technically been playing Ray Stantz in Ghostbusters movies for 37 years and Nick Castle has been Michael Meyers for 43 years compared to Katsu’s 27 as Zatoichi. Kelsey Grammer as Frasier? Maybe Patrick Stewart as Captain Picard? That’s my best guess, he could have more screentime (178 episodes of TNG, four movies, plus 20 episodes of Picard) over a significantly greater span of time, 36 years (1987-2023). But I don’t think anybody ever played such a concentrated dose of one character. Which begs the question: What makes Zatoichi so special?

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