Doom Love
In a nostalgic piece for the New York Times, editor and journalist Wendell Jamieson has revealed his true love: samurai films. He describes a time when he and his childhood pals would frequent the late Bleecker Street Cinema on Japanese movie day. They would absorb as many samurai films as they could, then act out the duels they’d just seen on the streets of Manhattan. His enduring favorite, which he recalls watching in “stunned silence,” was Kihachi Okamoto’s stunningly violent The Sword of Doom, starring Tatsuya Nakadai. Jamieson includes a video essay with the piece, which dissects one of the film’s action scenes, an elaborately choreographed single tracking shot down a fog-enshrouded forest road during which Nakadai levels a line of enemies with single-minded drive and catlike elegance. And the piece informs New York readers that The Sword of Doom will be screening on Friday, February 18, at Japan Society.
