“Don’t think you’re gonna play Yojimbo” someone tells the man with no name (Hideaki Ito) in Sukiyaki Western Django; he then turns around and does exactly that, destroying two gangs fighting over a town that according to legend is filled with gold. But he is dressed in a version of Django’s outfit and carries two revolvers, and much of the detail of the plot is actually borrowed from the first Django movie. So we have the most extreme illustration of the cross-fertilization of film cultures yet to come from Japan.
Despite the costumes and gunfights of the Spaghetti Western, the plot is actually grounded in Japanese history, for the town is not being fought over by two yakuza gangs but by the Heike and Genji clans, also known as the Taira and Minamoto. The Heike had been all but destroyed after the sea battle of Dan-no-ura, as explained to us in an awful appearance by Quentin Tarantino wearing Clint Eastwood’s serape against a painted backdrop of Mt. Fuji. Now, two hundred years later, the Taira are beginning to regain their strength, starting the hundred years or so of the Warring Clans era that would result in the success of Oda Nobunaga who based his legitimacy in part on the claim of Taira blood. They appear in town looking for gold that will give them the money to combat the already wealthy and powerful Genji.
On top of this is laid the English War of the Roses, with the Heike taking the red rose, red costumes, and a red house, while the Genji at the other end of the street take the white costumes. The Heike leader Kiyomori (Koichi Sato) throws away the Heike monogatari and reads Shakespeare instead, demanding that everyone call him Henry. Over this is laid yet more Shakespeare in the Romeo and Juliet marriage of Akira from the Taiga and Shizuka of the Heike, which leaves a traumatized child and a rose bush that makes red roses with a white center.
On top of that we have the world of Sergio Corbucci’s Django as portrayed by Franco Nero. From this we get the hero’s costume, the hidden chest of gold, and the coffin that turns out to be carrying a Gatling gun, as well as his night with Shizuka (now turned prostitute).
The world of Django is so confused that it is impossible to keep up with, since about 30 movies were immediately made using the name in the title but with no connection to Nero or Corbucci. These were the films that really defined the Spaghetti Western in every nation but the US, where Leone and Eastwood were the kings. (The movie doesn’t have any of Sergio Leone’s extended stare-downs, for example, though Tarantino’s scene is a nod to Once Upon a Time in the West and it is filmed in the widest of Panavisions such as Leone loved to use once he had a budget.) Yet even as we say that, we should remember that it all began with a Japanese movie, Kurosawa’s Yoijmbo, which provides the framework for Django as well as A Fistful of Dollars.
There are even some in-jokes about Tampopo, perhaps because American critics had called it a Ramen Western.
Then on top of that is a touch of Mad Max, with the costumes by Michiko Kitamura based on those of the Western but applied in strange layers and combinations and headdresses that were never seen on a John Ford set yet managing to maintain the red and white distinction without any repetition that suggests a clan uniform.
Even so, it is still a Japanese movie, for at the finale the hero left without bullets must fend off the leader of the Genji (Yusuke Iseya), who has thrown away his pistol in favor of a katana.
As we might expect from all of these references and influences, it is a gold mine of study for film geeks. It is also often a mess. But that could be said for Django and all the other Spaghetti Westerns which often are only an excuse for beatings and gunplay, as well as for many of the typical jidai-geki and yakuza films that are only an excuse for similarly absurd sword and knife battles. And of course it could be said for many of Miike’s other movies, with their over-the-top violence and their sudden changes of tone and appearance. That appearance seems to change here in every scene, with some colors emphasized by digitization so almost every scene looks artificial in some way.
Perhaps the oddest choice, however, is to film the movie in English, which some of the cast speaks very well and some others have accents so thick that much of the dialogue can’t be understood at all.* Oddly enough, this is at its worst in Tarantino’s scenes, when he will suddenly lurch into a stereotypical pidgin English that sounds as if he is ridiculing all the other actors. With those limitations, as well as the limitations of the script itself, it is hard for the actors to develop any real characterizations. Ito has the best English, which unfortunately allows him to mumble, making his lines hardest to understand.
Unexpectedly, the person who comes off best is Kaori Momoi, despite her thick accent. She starts as a female version of the old man who invites Yojimbo in for food and gradually reveals herself as Akira’s mother and then as Bloody Benten, the great female gunslinger, with even more spectacular fights than Ito has.
This is one of the few Miike movies for which he took partial credit for the screenplay, so it is a movie he wanted to make. Unlike Suzuki, whose movies it sometimes resembles, it is not something he was forced by circumstances to make the best of by overloading the visuals. Despite the over-the-top gunfights and bloodshed that we would expect from Miike, something seems to be missing, a sense of having fun with all these references and homages and unbelievable excesses, such as could be found in the Korean The Good, the Bad, and the Weird released the next year or in his own Ichi the Killer, to name only one example from his other films. Though there are intentionally comic scenes, especially by Teruyuki Kagawa as the weak sheriff, they go on long after we have gotten the joke. Otherwise, things seem to be taken with deadly seriousness.
Due to the presence of Tarantino, the movie got a lot of attention originally, almost all of which focused on Tarantino’s influence, though his Django movie appeared a decade later. Almost nobody noticed the Japanese historical basis for the mayhem. Rather than trying to make a Japanese Western, as Gosha so successfully did with Samurai Wolf, Miike appears to be trying to use the Spaghetti Western and Shakespeare as a gloss on Japanese history. I can’t say that he succeeds at this but, despite the outré violence and design, it is far more ambitious than it looks on first glance.
* Some DVD releases have closed captions, so that can be remedied to some extent now. What Japanese audiences did has never been explained, to me at least. IMDB lists Japanese as one of the languages, but the actors lips match the English words very precisely, and some of the accents are so thick that they can not be English over-dubbing. (And all inter-titles and credits are in Japanese.) If there was a purely Japanese language version, it was the one dubbed.