RED SUN (1971)

Red Sun manages to vacillate between traditional cowboy movies and the far more cynical westerns that would dominate the 1970s. It mixes several genres but is primarily a noteworthy late-era spaghetti western, starring genre stalwart Charles Bronson alongside Toshirō Mifune in one of his last great samurai roles. An important though often overlooked entry in genre cinema, this new 4K restoration on Blu-ray from StudioCanal presents a perfect opportunity to revisit and reappraise a classic western that is typical in many respects, yet unique in others.

After appearing in several westerns in the mid-1950s, Bronson had truly made his mark on the genre as O’Reilly in John Sturges’s The Magnificent Seven (1960), itself a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai (1954), which starred Mifune. Both films were hugely successful and made stars of the actors, so it seemed natural to blend the genres rather than just culturally transposing them. At the time, this was a refreshing approach, and the main appeal of Red Sun lies in watching these two typically macho actors bounce off each other to reveal unexpected emotional facets.

The genesis of Red Sun can be traced back to 1968 when an idea was being touted of pairing Clint Eastwood with Mifune. After all, Eastwood had starred in Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars (1964), another western based on a classic Kurosawa samurai movie, Yojimbo (1961), which starred—you guessed it—Toshirō Mifune.

By the time the screenplay landed in the hands of director Terence Young, Eastwood had been swapped for Bronson who ironically, had been Leone’s first choice for his Dollar Trilogy’s now iconic Man With No Name. As they say, what goes around comes around… Young and producer Robert Dorfmann had just worked together on Cold Sweat (1970), a thriller starring Bronson, so one assumes that’s where the deals were struck.

The script came with a suitable pedigree in its main writer, Denne Bart Petitclerc, who contributed a few episodes for The Legend of Jesse James (1965-66) television series before consolidating his career writing for NBC’s long-running western series, Bonanza (1959-1973), and working his way up to the show’s executive story editor. Incidentally, Charles Bronson had appeared in both those series.

Petitclerc also wrote the pilot episodes for NBC’s other primetime Western series, The High Chaparral (1967-1971). He was joined on Red Sun by William Roberts, who provided the screenplay for The Magnificent Seven, and they were working from a story outline by Laird Koenig, who had also written for The High Chaparral. So, this story was in the hands of genre experts demonstrated by the inclusion of the essential, crowd-pleasing tropes plus a few less predictable elements.

The first Japanese ambassador to the US was the Meiji statesman Mori Arinori, who arrived in 1871 at the height of the oft-romanticised post-civil war era of outlaws, posses, gunslingers, and train robbers. This is the historical setting for Red Sun in which the fictional Lord Sakaguchi of Bizen (Tetsu Nakamura) travels by train, carrying a gold-adorned ceremonial sword as a symbolic gift from the Emperor to the President.

The opening scenes echo Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) as the train draws to a halt to replenish its water tank at a desert station. This time, though, it’s Link Stuart (Bronson) who’s already waiting on the platform. When Kuroda Jubei (Mifune), one of Sakaguchi’s samurai retainers, steps from the train to take stock of the situation, his gaze falls upon the rugged stranger. It’s a subtle exchange of glances, but each man recognises the other as something extraordinary and out of place. They don’t yet know it, but their destinies are about to become entwined, and as the narrative unfolds such unspoken interactions will, as much as any of the sparse dialogue, continue to convey their changing feelings for one another.

It turns out that Link is the leader of an outlaw gang, and as soon as he boards the train, a sheriff (Georges Lycan), believing that he is travelling alone, confronts him. However, Link’s gang are already all aboard, and his right-hand man, Gauche (Alain Delon), intervenes, forcing the sheriff to jump from the moving train.

On Link’s signal, his men produced their guns and began working their way along the passenger carriage, taking money and valuables. Link tried to keep everyone calm, making light of the situation with his entertainer’s patter until one man reached for a pistol and was coolly dispatched by Gauche. It didn’t bother him in the slightest that he managed to kill a second, innocent passenger with the same bullet. However, it was the payload locked up in the secure carriage that was their goal, and when the train slowed to avoid sheep on the lines, it was ambushed by bandits who brought enough dynamite to blow it open.

The train robbery scene was a spectacular piece of action involving plenty of coordinated horsemen, a division of soldiers, a dynamic shoot-out, and pyrotechnics. All made possible by a budget approaching $6M, which was respectable for the day and certainly generous for a Euro-western—a Franco-Italian co-production shot in Spain using locations in Almería and Andalucía, already familiar from many spaghetti westerns, and boasting an international cast of top names from the US, Japan, France, and Switzerland. It was well handled by Terence Young, who was used to directing movies with even bigger budgets such as his three early entries into the James Bond franchise, Dr. No (1962), From Russia with Love (1963), and Thunderball (1965). The finale would also deliver an outstanding action sequence, played out in a burning cane field, that wouldn’t be out of place in a classic samurai movie.

As the dust settled, Link and Gauche forced their way into the VIP coach, partly out of curiosity but reasoning that an international ambassador would carry significant funds for their visit. They were confronted by the two samurai who, by their lord’s command, cooperated, handing over the money box. However, when Gauche decided to take the ostentatious sword as well, the second retainer (Hiroshi Tanaka) broke rank to intervene and was shot dead. Kuroda coolly asked Gauche his name and vowed to hunt and kill him.

Meanwhile, while Link had been dividing up the loot, Gauche double-crosses him, leaving him for dead before making his getaway with the haul along with a few select men who he would murder later, thus monopolising the entire takings. Alain Delon seemed to be enjoying himself flashing his sadistic grin with glee. It was a change from the minimalist portrayals of cool hitmen he was best remembered for, such as Jef Costello in Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samourai (1967).

Thus, Link and Kuroda are forced into an uneasy alliance, one driven by greed, the other by honour, and both by vengeance. Link wants to catch up with Gauche and have enough time to beat the whereabouts of the stash out of him. Kuroda wants only to execute Gauche on sight and retrieve the sword. A central subtext soon emerges about cultural clashes and cooperation as the relationship between the Japanese and the American begins as purely transactional and devoid of trust.

Link repeatedly tries to give Kuroda the slip, sometimes with comedic results as in the scene where the unarmed Link tries to take on the samurai mano a mano. It’s a joy to watch two actors renowned for their glacial demeanours and physical presence slowly bring in subtler emotions as the relationship of their characters develops from animosity, through grudging respect, to friendship. Both begin as mythic stereotypes but gradually reveal themselves to be humans.

What’s more, both men finally find a degree of redemption in their friendship with Link’s journey being the more arduous as he transitions from villain, through lovable rogue, to become finally heroic. It seems that a culture clash is sometimes necessary to change a culture.

Now, this kind of character development cannot be rushed, and we spend a lot of screen time in the company of these two men. Terence Young realises that this is the backbone of the whole narrative and isn’t tempted to compress it into one exchange over a campfire or a clumsily compressed montage.

Mifune was dubbed in nearly all his international roles but here he was keen to speak with authenticity. Believing that the dialogue was integral to expressing the character’s emotions, he put in extra effort to learn and deliver his lines in English. Tetsu Nakamura coached him while on set so he could understand the nuances and not simply repeat his lines phonetically.

We walk with the two frenemies, eat with them, enjoy the banter that punctuates their progress, and struggle to take sides on the occasions they are in conflict. This may test the patience of a modern mainstream audience, but odds are those who would choose to watch a classic 1970s Western will find themselves absorbed.

Cinematographer Henri Alekan, a repeat collaborator of Young’s, makes great narrative use of the vast vistas. Often the sky and desert plains fill the screen, the characters tiny, almost insignificant. Or they traverse rugged mountain crags and snowfields, natural obstacles—metaphorically making manifest the seemingly immovable barriers humans create for themselves within society such as notions of class, economic disparity, prejudice, greed, and hatred.

It’s a very masculine movie up until the halfway mark when Link and Kuroda realise that Gauche’s trail has gone cold. There’s an interlude in their pursuit as they try a different tactic. Taking a detour to the bordello where they had planned the train robbery just 10 days earlier, they find Gauche’s lover, Christina (Ursula Andress) whom they hold captive until he sends men to collect her. Just to complicate things, it turns out that Christina had left Link for Gauche and Link has since taken up with the brothel madam Pepita (Capucine).

While they wait, Kuroda relaxes with Maria (Mónica Randall) allowing Mifune to shed the mythic persona usually surrounding his stoic samurai and allow us to see his character as a gendered human being in an interracial sexual encounter. A tastefully played scene that was both progressive and transgressive.

Between them, Link and Kuroda deal with the four henchmen sent by Gauche, leaving one alive to take a message back that they’ll exchange Christina for the sword and Link’s cut of the booty in one day at an abandoned mission.

So, the second leg of their journey is shared with the fiery-tempered and seemingly fickle Christina, who weighs the odds between Gauche and Link with the thinly veiled intent to side with whichever one is most likely to come out the richer. She’s also the catalyst for conflict with a bunch of unreconstructed Indians—an element usually absent from Euro-Westerns. They are referred to as Comanches but, just as Mexican revolutionaries have often given up their cause and degenerated into bandits, these Indians are portrayed as a band of lawless desperados.

The year 1871 also marked the passing of the Indian Appropriations Act, which dissolved all treaties with the First Nations and no longer recognised their tribal rights, lands, and identities. Unsurprisingly, this stirred unrest and resistance in many areas.

In the context of the 1970s, it’s not much of a stretch to read a parallel with the war in Vietnam and Cambodia, where ethnic identities were being erased or remodelled to serve the interests of the foreign powers vying for control of those territories. Support for America’s involvement had dwindled, and 1971 saw the truly massive ‘Mayday’ protests in Washington DC.

In many ways, Red Sun is a typical Western with all the ingredients one expects to find in one of those pulp Western paperbacks—the ones with the wonderfully lurid cover art. Bronson is the typical rugged protagonist, Alain Delon is the classic suave, black-hatted bad guy, Ursula Andress is the feisty firecracker with cleavage, and Capucine is the strong-willed hooker with a heart. But adding a samurai to the mix disrupts the whole thing, making what could become a string of tired tropes much more entertaining and somewhat less predictable.

At the time, it was unique, and it wasn’t just down to the presence of a Japanese character in a Western played by a genuine Japanese actor. It was also an overt recognition of the influence that the samurai cinema of Japan, particularly the films of Akira Kurosawa, had in rejuvenating the Western genre.

On initial release, it garnered generally positive reviews and did well across the US due to its cast of big-name stars. It broke box office records in Japan with a theatrical run in Tokyo that lasted for an unprecedented 35 consecutive weeks. Charles Bronson was already very popular there, so a film starring him alongside their own Toshiro Mifune was a winning combination.

I can’t recall which film I saw first, but both Red Sun and John Boorman’s Hell in the Pacific (1968) left a lasting impression, with imagery and even snippets of dialogue staying with me for 40 years or so. Both films involve two macho men, one an American, and the other a Japanese, who begin as adversaries and gradually build mutual respect. Both films have long interludes with little or no dialogue. Both to a greater or lesser degree allude to war in general and the war in Vietnam in particular. Both starred Toshiro Mifune. In Hell in the Pacific, he’s a World War II naval officer, but it was his samurai in Red Sun that impressed my younger self and is probably responsible for instilling what has been a lifelong fascination with Asian culture, particularly its arts and cinema.

Mifune’s character was the first authentic portrayal of a samurai I’d seen, and I was enamoured by his mystique. Not just the preternatural sword skills and deadly throwing knives, but things like his ability to sleep while walking. Also, the whole demeanour of a man of few words but decisive actions—a meditative stillness with the underlying potential of rapid lethal release.

Culturally appropriate representations of Japanese were uncommon, to say the least. The next samurai-themed story on the screen to capture my imagination came a decade later with the miniseries Shōgun (1980) and, incredibly, it was Mifune once more taking the lead Japanese role.

FRANCE • ITALY • SPAIN | 1971 | 114 MINUTES | 1.85:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH • SPANISH • JAPANESE

Blu-ray Special Features:

• The Blu-ray edition will include four art cards.
• On the set of Red Sun. A nine-minute extract from Pour le cinema (Director: Pierre Mignot © INA—1971). Unrestored black-and-white interviews with director Terence Young and the principal cast shot on location—it’s pretty poor quality but provides a brief glimpse behind the scenes.
• New 20-minute Interview with documentary filmmaker Steven Okazaki, director of Mifune: The Last Samurai (2015). In which he gives a concise yet thorough overview of the actor’s career, from lighting technician to lead actor, and discusses his dynamic style. There are personal anecdotes about meeting Mifune. He talks about how important it was that, as a youngster, he saw a positive portrayal of an Asian man on the screen, as so many were demeaning stereotypes, usually played for laughs by white men with false buck teeth, thick glasses, and little ponytails. Okazaki draws some interesting parallels between the cinema revival in post-war Japan, the British ‘angry young men’ movement, and the ‘film school generation’ in the US. He goes on to discuss the partnership of Mifune with director Akira Kurosawa, likening it to the relationship between John Wayne and John Ford.
• Original Trailers.

Cast & Crew

director: Terence Young.
writers: Denne Bart Petitclerc, William Roberts & Lawrence Roman (additional dialogue) (based on a story by Laird Koenig).
starring: Charles Bronson, Toshirō Mifune, Alain Delon, Ursula Andress & Capucine.