Customer Reviews

The Bushido Blade [VHS]

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1 star:		(9)

 

 

If you are a true Richard Boone fan, as I am, you can appreciate his usual loud expressionate voice is true to his character. This being his last film, made me curious about the film. He part is fairly brief, but convincing. Frank Converse as the Marine who goes inland to retrieve the sword, keeps the story going with lots of action, along with Sonny Shiba, is a good blend of characters. The big sailor, who stumbles into some sumu wrestlers, is hilarious. Keeping an eye on his nephew also adds to the story. I first saw this film back in 1980 on Cinemax, I have the VHS tape. I have watched it several times. What's a movie without a little malarkey. It's just fun to watch.

Simply put, this film is garbage. I rented it because I love samurai films. I saw that the cast included the great Toshiro Mifune, and assumed that it had to have some worth. Boy was I wrong!!!

Incredibly American ego-centric poo-poo. The film's main character is an American marine who is working with Admiral Perry. In order to seal the treaty between America and Japan, a sacred blade was to be given to America as a gift of allegiance from Japan. The Bushido Blade is quickly stolen so that the deal cannot be completed. Although the Americans fail to see the importance of such a gift, they send the marine to retrieve it from the evil samurai who had stolen it. Constantly insulting the Japanese for holding a mere object in such high regard, the film shows its small mindedness and lack of appreciciation for Japan's culture and the high art of sword making. The story goes on with the typical plot twists and some disgustingly unrealistic battles. Namely a fight between the American marine and the best swordsman of a lethal Samurai clan. Of course the American wins. That should give you a pretty good clue about his movie.

!!!STAY AWAY AT ALL COSTS!!! Don't even rent this piece of crap. It will sap the intelligence straight out of you brain and rob you of 100 minutes that you can never have back. If there's one thing in my life I regret, it is watching this idiotic film.

Any fans of samurai films, Sonny Chiba and Toshiro Mifune, do yourself a favour and stay away from this ignorant, stupid film. The hamminess of the American actors, the portrayal of Americans as big lumbering stupid clods and Japanese as just crazy....this film is infuriatingly bad.

This hackneyed excuse for a samurai film is an example of great actors (excluding Frank Converse) needing work. The action sequences are laughable and if you may not have noticed, this is an Arthur Rankin/Jules Bass production, famed American cartoon producers, Frosty the Snowman being one of their most well-known works. Someone should have told them to "thumpity, thump, thump" back to Saturday morning fare. This one reeks about as much as the scene where the sailors refuse to take baths. Shogun may have been melodramatic, but there isn't an ounce of drama used here. Buy this one at your own risk. Only thing of value is the plastic box it came in. You can use it for another DVD and the DVD as a frisbee.

How can you make a movie with the extra cool Toshirô Mifune... and have it be this bad?

"A swashbuckling Samurai saga that beats SHOGUN!" - Star-Bulletin

This grand statement must be about the heavily edited 2 hour version of Shogun. The original television miniseries is as much of a revelation compared to that film as eating sushi is to fish sticks from "The Gorton's Fisherman."

"The Bushido Blade" stands as an utterly cheesy film in the genre filled with stiff and stuffy performances despite the star-studded cast, unremarkable and unmemorable visuals, and a rather generic story filled to the gills with clichés.

All you have to do is sit through the first act to realize that you just opened a huge can of worms. The second act doesn't really do much to hold your attention while the third act felt, more or less, like a real letdown.

Sure, the film was supposed to end tragically, in a way, but "The Last Samurai" did a much better job at it, even though it had its elements of Westernizing a story that is supposed to be richly Japanese.

Even the Shogun miniseries had this problem of Westernizing, but efforts were made to keep that to a minimum to where the average viewer could experience a respectful depiction of Japanese culture while being able to understand the story (read the original novel if you want more depth of the culture through the eyes of a Westerner). Alas, "The Bushido Blade" makes no discernible effort to preserve such an experience; it is so lopsidedly Western that it seems to mock Eastern ideals.

Then again, what more could you expect with this kind of film from the likes of Rankin-Bass?

I KID YOU NOT!

This film was produced by the same group of guys who also brought you the famous stop-motion "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" from the 1960s and the animated "Thundercats" from the 1980s! Even the music is Rankin-Bass fare, being composed by none other than Maury Laws!

This film made one thing utterly clear: Arthur Rankin, Jr., who served as producer, should have stuck with making children's fare.

Rankin-Bass did a better job of bring Yukon Cornelius to life in stop-motion than Commodore Matthew Perry in live action (ironic, considering that Richard Boone, the actor to play the part, succumbed to lung cancer shortly after the film was made).

My complaints are not with the film itself but with the quality of the VHS recording. I ordered this tape brand new and paid full price, but the cassette I received was clearly used and recorded over. The soundtrack from some old news/interview program could clearly be heard overlapping the film dialogue throughout the tape. It's annoying to the point where the tape is unwatchable.

Save your money and don't buy this tape.

The meeting between Commodore Perry's flotilla, and the Japanese has always been one of the most fascinating events of history, as far as I am concerned. It really is a pity that it is something that has never been done well on film. This film is no exception. The first official contact between the United States and Japan is used here as a setting for a pulp adventure story. If you keep this in mind, and don't do into this with overly high expectations, this is a reasonably enjoyable picture. It's an adventure film, nothing more. But anyone who expects high art or historical accuracy is sure to be disappointed. I do wish, though, that someone would make a historically accurate film about this pivotal and fascinating historical event. It's a pity this film isn't that movie, since Richard Boone does make a good Commodore Perry.

I must say a word, however, to those who sneer at the very idea that an American military officer of the 19th century could even hope to be a match for a samurai in swordsmanship. The idea is not as farfetched as you might imagine. In the first place, not all Western swords are the inferior trash imagined. Nor are katanas lightsabers. Some 19th century Western swords were mass produced blades of indifferent quality. Others were very well made weapons of very fine steel (and usually less brittle and prone to chipping than Japanese swords, even if they wouldn't hold an edge so well as a superbly made katana). Not every samurai's sword was a Masamune masterpiece. The Japanese, even in the feudal period, were no strangers to mass produced, lesser quality blades. Nor was every samurai a master swordsman (any more than every Wild West cowboy was an expert gunfighter). One must remember that for the samurai, the sword was only one of three major weapons, along with the bow, and the yari (a thrusting spear) -- and was in fact, the least of the three. In fact, the sword really did not even become the premier weapon of samurai culture and reach its cult status until the mid to late 17th century when the period of civil wars ended. It is instructive to note that the expression so associated with bushido is "the Way of the horse and bow", not "the Way of the sword." By the same token, Western military officers could also be master swordsmen. The sword had almost reached the very end of its use as a military weapon in the Western world, but it was not quite dead yet, and there were still a number of schools that instructed students in its use at that time. Nor are Western styles of swordsmanship so vastly inferior to the style of swordsmanship practiced in Japan. In general, the average samurai of the 19th century WAS indeed far more likely to be a master swordsman than the average Western military officer. But the idea that an American officer of that period couldn't possibly possess a level of skill with a blade equal to that of a 19th century samurai is not quite accurate either. Those who dismiss the western martial arts so blithely are usually those who know nothing about them.

I am a big fan of samurai films and Japanese cinema. Toshiro Mifune is my favorite actor. I own about sixty or so samurai and/or mifune movies. With that said, I purchased Bushido Blade in hopes that it would be tolerable. I was sadly mistaken. Don't let your curiousity get the better of you and your money. The plot is missing, the acting is terrible (except for Mifune, who speaks English in this film without understanding the language, yet he is dubbed anyway), and the quality is unbearable. In one part, a US naval officer beats a samurai in a sword fight. Give me a break!

Most American films about the Samurai culture showed a great deal of respect and interest that the real public had about their former-enemy's ethnic warrior culture. This one seems aimed at making the Japanese as ridiculous as possible. A waste of one of the greatest actors of all time, Toshiro Mifune, doesn't help. Richard Boone and James Earl Jones are also shamefully misused.

Now for the infamous fight scene. There was no way in HELL a US marine could best ANY samurai in sword to sword combat. The Last Samurai was an entertaining if flawed pic, and the scene where Tom Cruise expertly takes down serveral samurai on horse back with his Union Army sabre was quite laughable. Civil war-era soldiers where not often trained in swordsmanship, and the blades themselves where clumsy, poorly made and ineffectual weapons. The Bushido Blade, however, outdoes Tom Cruise's exaggerated fighting skills by displaying a know-nothing good ol' boy Marine dealing with particularly deadly samurai. Ethnocentrism anyone?