With starvation ravaging the land, Yoshimura's wife offers to commit suicide so their family can have meat on the table... Yoshimura elects instead to leave his family of three (soon to be four) in search of gainful employment. Before you can say wandering ronin, he's teaching swordplay to the Shogun's men and dispatching them what needs dispatching. His buddy Saito, however, doesn't really like him and friction develops between the two. Saito even attempts to cut Yoshimura down, taking him by surprise, but the latter proves too adept at swordplay to be so easily dispatched. They develop a reluctant friendship (at least on the part of Saito), with Yoshimura attempting at every turn to cash in on what he knows so that he can send the money back home. In one of the film's most interesting scenes, Yoshimura examines the body of a fellow samurai who has been killed and determines that the dead man was slain by a left-handed swordsman. Saito is a lefty. Rather than risk the wrath of higher-ups, Saito pays Yoshimura to keep his mouth shut. In another scene, their divergent philosophies are made clear. "I'm only alive because no one will kill me," Saito laments. "I kill because I don't want to die," the ever-practical Yoshimura responds. At one point, someone sums up the whole notion of duty and conscience: "A real samurai apologizes by spilling his guts." There are a couple of great fx shots in WHEN THE LAST SWORD IS DRAWN and the two leads are outstanding. The filmmaking is superb. The one and only complaint I have is the long, drawn out ending: it has to be the longest crying jag I've ever seen in a samurai movie.
Review of When the Last Sword Is Drawn
