Lone Wolf and Cub refers to the assasin handle of Ogami Itto (Wakayama), an anti-hero done wrong. Now, these films defined by their arterial sprays of blood are just the stuff for the Tarantino crowd, looking to source the similarly comic-booky American chanbara Kill Bill back to its forebears. Now collected in a Blu-ray box set by the Criterion Collection, the six stylish films can be seen as ahead of their time, both visually (inventive cutting, dreamy double-exposure, bold close-ups, and so on, in striking Tohoscope compositions) and thematically (take-no-prisoners tales of vengeance). The six Lone Wolf and Cub pictures could be fairly branded exploitation pictures in their quantity of sex and violence (and nudity and gore), but they also qualify as comic-book movies, and perhaps the first in the modernistic style to which we've become accustomed.Īdapted from a 1970-1976 run of manga that came to 28 volumes, the Lone Wolf and Cub films were fast-tracked as a failed bid by producer and Zatoichi star Shintaro Katsu to turn his brother Tomisaburo Wakayama into an equally bankable franchise star.
The Japanese chanbara, or swordfighting genre, came to arthouse prominence in America with Akira Kurosawa's 1954 classic of samurai cinema, The Seven Samurai (among other Toshiro Mifune films), but cult-movie status came with the Lone Wolf and Cub series, Toho's blunt-force action franchise with a soupcon of social critique, which might be called the swordfighting equivalent of, say, our Dirty Harry franchise.
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