Kenji Mizoguchi's The Loyal 47 Ronin (1941-42)

Such opacity in a film could be seen as an artistic failure.  Yet once one has overcome the initial hurdles of understanding, this is not the case with The Loyal 47 Ronin.  On the contrary, with or without the inserted close-ups, the rigour and sweep of the film's mise en scene becomes exactly what is notable and wonderful about it, the reason I go back to The Loyal 47 Ronin, on the rare occasions it is shown publicly, as to a precious and compelling masterpiece.

-- Mark Le Fanu, Mizoguchi and Japan (British Film Institute, 2005)

I watched this incredibly beautiful film recently on Turner Classic Movies (it is also, somewhat surprisingly, available on HBO Max) and found its black-and-white elegance as lovely as von Sternberg, its camera movement as assured as Preminger's, its narrative of a story well-known in Japan elusive as history itself.  The story, which takes place in 1701, has been made into dozens of films in Japan, and is about the loyalty of the Ronin, samurai whose master, Asano, has been condemned to seppuku (harakiri) because of a violation of protocol in Edo, the capital, where he attacked Lord Kira. The samurai, led by Ooshi (Chojuro Kawarazki), wait for a year, planning to kill Kira for vengeance.  Almost all the action and violence is off-screen and ends with the samurai bringing the head of Kira to Asano's grave and submitting themselves to the shogun for punishment, the film concluding with all the samurai being condemned to seppuku and walking one-by-one to their ritual suicide. 

The film, originally made in two parts, runs for almost four hours and includes many fascinating details, all filmed in long-shot and usually with a slow-moving camera (cinematography by Kohei Sugiyama), including Asano's wife's ritual hair-cutting and Ooshi's family bidding him good-bye, as well as the fiancee of one of the samurai disguising herself as a man in order to try to free her betrothed. There seems to me little evidence that this film endorses the bellicosity of Japan's government at this period, even though that was what the Japanese government hoped to get when they commissioned the movie.  It seems to me that it questions bushido (the samurai moral code) more than it endorses it, as Mizoguchi's films generally question traditional social roles in Japan.