The Drifting Avenger (1968)

Original title: Kôya no toseinin

A gang of stagecoach robbers stumble into the Old American West cabin of an expat samurai (three minutes of Takashi Shimura are better than no Takashi Shimura), shoot the man and his wife and leave their cowboy son Ken (Ken Takakura), also pretty shot, for dead.

Because this is a western, Ken survives with a righteous lust for vengeance only tempered by the samurai code his father taught him, and rides out in search for the killers. He still doesn’t quite have the killer instinct he’d actually need to conclude the whole avenging business successfully, and lacks some of the technical skill of the proper gunman as well, so it comes in useful he soon encounters the experienced Marvin (Ken Goodlet), who is good with guns, paternal advice and being an old west kind of guy. He also happens to be the father of one of the killers, though that conflict isn’t quite resolved as you’d expect, or made as much of as you’d hope for.

Ken does seem to have a thing for fallen in with relatives of his prospective victims. For he also develops paternal feelings for the son of another one of the killers, and also gets close to the same man’s soon to be widow, who takes her husband’s fate philosophically even before he is dead.

Vengeance, it turns out, is a place full of relatives who are rather more okay with having their family killed than Ken is.

Despite being more than just a little fond of classic Japanese genre cinema, I’ve never been able to see any of the westerns some of the major studios at put out, so my only actual contact with this somewhat surprising genre has been Takashi Miike’s Sukiyaki Western Django until now – and that’s of course neither a classic era studio movie nor sane nor normal. On the other hand, there’s been so much back and forth influence between chanbara in Japan and the western in the US and Italy, it’s not as if I’m moving through unknown territory here.

Still, this is my first proper Japanese western (if one shot in Australia with an Australian cast apart from its star and a couple of intro characters). The film was directed by Toei contract man Junya Sato, whose direction tends to the technically competent yet workmanlike, at least in most of his films I’ve seen. This certainly applies to Drifting Avenger. There’s nothing here that’s badly staged or ugly to look at, but there’s also a certain lack of flair and visual energy – as a western director, he’s certainly no Leone, Boetticher, Ford, or Corbucci. Which is a particular shame because the Australian landscape would at the very least offer up some spectacular – if not very American looking – vistas beyond what Sato shows here.

The script is more routine than inspired as well, with some attempts at complicating Ken’s quest for vengeance via entanglements between honour and humanity that equally speak to western, chanbara and yakuza film traditions but that never feel as emotionally or intellectually captivating as they could. The film’s structure is a little too episodic for this to work as well as it should, particularly since it repeats plot beats between Marvin and the other killer’s family that would have been better explored through a single set of characters.

The situation isn’t helped by the fact that Takakura and Goodlet are the only professional screen actors in larger roles – the rest of the Australian cast only has this as their single film credits, and the lack of experience and ability gets in the way of proper emotional and thematic exploration, even though everyone is dubbed into Japanese. An all Japanese cast out of Toei’s stable of character actors, stars and pros would have provided much needed personality to everyone. And while Takakura is great as always, he does need other actors to play off of when emoting, instead of the walking talking cardboard he has to cope with here throughout.

Still, The Drifting Avenger is not a terrible movie by any means, just one that’s never more than very basically entertaining.