Sleepy Eyes of Death 2 - The Sword of Adventure
                
Director: Kenji Misumi
Year: 1964
Rating: 7.0
The reins of the second film in the Sleepy Eyes series is taken over by the able Kenji Misumi who directed many of the ronin films for Daiei during the 1960s. Between Sleepy Eyes, Zatoichi and Lone Wolf, he kept fairly busy though he still managed to fit in other films as well. This second film doesn't add much new after the first one but is quite enjoyable. One of the things I really appreciate about these period films from Daiei is how they fill the screen with passerby's - street scenes are wonderfully chaotic and busy with costumed people going about their lives - selling, buying, window shopping, pickpocketing, celebrating, cooking - the myriad of little businesses and their proprietors attempting to get customers to come in. The film begins with a multitude of people going up and down a long series of steps - bumping into one another, making way, squeezing through. At the bottom is a young boy who has a wooden instrument to help older people to climb the steep steps without falling backwards.



He helps one very old man who has been missing his teeth longer than he can remember. After getting to the top, the old man sits down to have a drink and tells the person sitting next to him that the boy is the son of a samurai who was just killed in a duel and his dojo taken over. The man next to him has lightish brown hair, is tall and thin, carries a long sword and has eyes that seem sensitive and yet uncaring. This man asks the boy if he would like to see his father again. And along with the old man, they go to the dojo and he kills the new owner in a duel. After first telling him - I am going to use the Gan-shi style that the former owner used and this is how I will kill you. He does and gives the dojo back to the boy.



He and the old man go for another drink and the old man is attacked by a Ronin. The thin man saves him and finds out he is Asahina, the Finance Minister. He introduces himself as Nemuri Kyoshiro. And he is bored. As he said in the first film, if he is not involved in action, he finds life dull. That was the reason he helped the boy more than a sense of justice - but if he can combine the two, all the better. Asahina as the finance minister has been forced to cut back on the funds doled out to relatives of the Shogun and that has made a lot of people very unhappy. In particular, Princess Takahime (Yuko Hamada), who enjoys her life of leisure, profligacy and men. She wants Asahina dead.



But Kyoshiro has taken a liking to the principled old man and with nothing else to do has made himself his protector. That means killing a lot of people. Unema (Shiho Fujimura) disguised as a fortune teller is a spy for the Princess and has hired five professionals to kill Kyoshiro. She pulls a Marlowe on him - Chandler's Marlowe always takes a drink that is drugged - but like all bad villains they don't just kill him immediately. Her husband is a Christian foreigner which was unlawful and he was jailed - a near Christ figure who Kyoshiro saw being whipped and dragged along the road and he helps the man up after he falls. The Christian tells him "you have a suffering face".  One other character named Otsuya, the cute seller of soba noodles, tells Kyoshiro she can always tell when he has killed someone by his face. He replies if the world was more like you, I would not have to.