Kiyone Sakurai, an apprentice swordmaker makes a sword for his guardian, Kozaemon Onoda. Onoda breaks the sword while defending his lord which eventually leads to his death at the hands of Naito, when Naito demands to marry his daughter Sasae. Sasae vows to avenge her father's death and pleads for Kiyone Sakurai to make a special sword for her. So Kiyone go to the master swordsmith Kiyohide Yamatomori to learn their craft and forge the sword.
With Bijomaru, director Kenji Mizoguchi (Ugetsu) must have made one of the first films in Japanese cinema where a woman gets to bring the pain to the bad guys, and in 1945 that wasn't exactly the norm. Clocking in at just over an hour, Bijomaru feels like a well-balanced samurai skirmish, and I like how the making of a sword is such a big part of the plot and not a romance or a story about a helpless geisha.
It also gets harder and harder to find films in decent quality from this far back in Mizoguchi's filmography, so being able to reach this deep is always a treat.
Genre: Drama
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