Word: samurais
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...never been to Rome either. European engravers, in fact, provided a constant flow of information for Japanese painters of Namban-ga. The demand among the castle lords for paintings like A Western Prince on Horseback stemmed partly from the princes' recognizably military splendors; these gorgeously caparisoned Western samurai must have fitted the opulence of the Momoyama period's taste down to the last tassel and square foot of gold leaf...
Carved Toggles. Often in the West, miniatures compel the worthless gawking one reserves for Last-Supper-carved-on-a-peach-stone kitsch. Not in Japan, where the image and the scale were one-partly by a happy fluke of social pressure. The Imperial sumptuary laws forbade merchants and samurai to wear excessively rich garments, so male vanity expressed itself in three special kinds of objects: inros, the tiny compartmented cases for carrying seals, or later medicine; netsukes, the carved toggles that fastened the inros to one's sash; and tsubas, or sword guards. The amount of craft lavished...
...true title of this movie is Le Samurai-or was, anyway, until it was picked up for American distribution in the wake of The Godfather's huge success. The title is not the only thing that has been changed. The film has been perfunctorily dubbed into English, so that all the actors sound like waiters in a New York French restaurant. Scenes end abruptly, continuity and motivation are often tentative at best, for the movie has been somewhat truncated for U.S. release...
...Samurai-The Godson, Alain Delon appears as a French gangster with the unlikely name of Jeff Costello, an icy and dogged professional who kills the manager of a Paris night club and then is set upon by the people who hired him. The flics, too, pursue Costello. He tries to work his way out of his classic quandary with characteristic efficiency, by dodging the cops even as he hunts down the men who are hunting...
...Like a samurai warrior, Costello is obsessed by ritual, whether it is pulling on a pair of white gloves before he uses his revolver or standing in front of a mirror adjusting the brim of his hat until it is just so. The hat, unfortunately, looks like a felt pie pan, and Delon moves mechanically through the action. Melville means to pay sober hom age to all the Hollywood films that did all this but better. It is a pity that for all its virtues, The Godson's patina of high seriousness renders every scene forced and selfconscious...