The Lone Wolf and Cub films, like Lady Snowblood, are adaptations from a series of manga created by author Kazuo Koike, first published in 1970. Criterion has gone this direction again by releasing the six-film series Lone Wolf and Cub, and to me it’s even better than the Lady Snowblood set. Earlier this year, Criterion ventured in this direction with their release of Toshiya Fujita’s two-film series Lady Snowblood, that, while not exactly a Samurai film, was an extremely satisfying release and one of my favorite personal film discoveries of the year. However, most of these releases (but for a handful of the Zatoichi films) were for films made before the 1970s, and consequently Criterion’s releases began a large gap right at the beginning of a period when some particularly innovative and particularly violent films changed the landscape. Partially, this is because they’ve released many of Akira Kurosawa’s films - his Seven Samurai is Criterion Spine #2 - but that is only part of the picture: they have released dozens of films in that genre, from Hiroshi Inagaki’s The Samurai Trilogy, about the legendary seventeenth-century warrior and artist Musashi Miyamoto played by Toshiro Mifune, to Kihachi Okamoto’s The Sword of Doom, about a violent and demented swordsman played by Tatsuya Nakadai, to the long-running 25-film series Zatoichi: The Blind Swordsman. The Criterion Collection has always brought great Samurai films to the U.S.
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