Spanish title: El Samurai Asesino
Stars: Toshiro Mifune, Michiyo Aratama
Directed by: Kihachi Okamoto
Distributor: Films de Mexico

"Friends and enemies, looking for glory but never obtaining it!"

When our lobby card dealer mentioned he had an inexpensive one in stock for a samurai movie with "some guy called Mifute… Mifube… Mifune maybe?" – we kind of jumped at it.

"Would it be The Seven Samurai? Maybe Yojimbo? Sanjuro? Some other Akira Kurosawa-directed classic perhaps?" We could hardly wait to get it in our hot little hands…

Alas, while this didn’t turn out to be a promo item for a Kurosawa film, it still represents a classic of the samurai film genre, starring the single greatest Japanese actor of all time – Toshiro Mifune.

One interesting aspect of the card involves the distributor of the film – Films de Mexico. They don’t show up in a lot of our collection, and they’re not easy to find in Google searches, but for those looking for details of such things, their address was De C V Monterrey, 101-7g, Piso Mexico.

The story is a little more complex than most – involving a situation that has become known as ‘the incident at Sakurada Gate’, in which a group of assassins teams up with a samurai (in the days when the samurai were all but considered useless in the eyes of China’s warlords) to kill a shoganate’s counselor. The twist? The counselor is the samurai’s father.

If nothing else, go rent this for the epic finale; one of the greatest action endings you’ll ever witness.

As for this lobby card, it’s just awesome. The splash of blood behind a determined, sword-swooshing Mifune – can’t beat it, although the card seems to have been printed on sub-standard stock, and thus isn’t coping with the years as well as one would hope.