Case of a Young Lord 1 & 2 (1956)

Original titles: 若さま侍捕物手帖 地獄の皿屋敷 & 若さま侍捕物手帖 べらんめえ活人剣

These two one hour films directed by Kinnosuke Fukada (about whose body of work I otherwise know very little) are really one two-part movie, so I’m treating them as such here.

Edo era Japan. The somewhat excitable city is struck by a curious series of break-ins into the warehouses of a recently deceased pawnbroker during which nothing is stolen. These break-ins are perhaps committed by a mysterious samurai wearing a female oni mask. Because violence appears to be imminent, and indeed soon a murder occurs, the police ask for the help of a young man who’ll only ever be called the Young Lord (Hashizo Okawa) during the course of the series.

He’s apparently a rich loafer from a somewhat important family (one might argue he’s the most important young loafer in the whole of the shogunate), spending his youth on sake, a geisha with a huge crush on him and occasional song, but he’s also a brilliant amateur detective. The Young Lord soon figures out some connections between the break-ins and a plate once bestowed upon the family of a hatamoto by an earlier shogun, the noble marriage market, and other things of interest.

Apart from that mysterious masked samurai, there are others with an interest in the whole affair. Some of them of the kind of murderous disposition (and a bunch of henchmen) that makes it a happy coincidence the Young Lord is also a brilliant swordsman.

For a sick day morning of light entertainment, there’s little that’s better than this sort of jidai geki/chanbara mystery Toei were so adept at at the time. This series – two thirds of which are available with decent English subtitles if one knows where to look – is based on a newspaper series by Masayuki Jo, and adds a lot of pulpy fun to the nicely plotted mystery business, including not just that delights like that samurai in the wonderful mask (whose identity reveal is even more delightful in a “were they even allowed to do that in 1956?” sort of way), running battles with hordes of assassin mooks, and an honest to the godhood of your choice mechanical death-trap.

This joyful pulp goodness is filmed by Fukada with a sense of verve and the usual high technical skill of Japanese studio filmmaking of the era. The night sword fights are particularly well staged, even though this still belongs to the “waving swords around” era of sword fighting choreography, and doesn’t feature the blood or cutting noises that would come to be so stylistically important to all sorts of Japanese genre cinema in the coming decade.

Ozawa makes for a pleasant lead, and shows a particularly effective ability of shifting from lightness to grimness and earnestness, so we the audience have no problem believing that his pretty young man is also very dangerous indeed when ne needs to be.