Film Review – Lone Wolf And Cub #3 – Baby Cart To Hades

Tweet

1972 – spoiler alerts. The third of the six Lone Wolf & Cub movies based on a popular Manga series of comics sees a lot more character development and plot complexity than its two predecessors though it retains a high violence threshold. The villains faced by the wrongly disgraced and outlawed samurai executioner, Itto are no longer outright bad guys, but troubled anti-heroes trapped by their own codes of loyalty and conduct. The film starts when another Samurai stops three of his men from raping two travelling women. He knows his corrupt master respects the men, so he is forced to kill the rape victims to protect them, but he kills one of the men himself to cover up the incident. He then meets Itto and his child on the road, and in a fit of consciousness, he tries too get Itto (who he knows to be a better fighter) to kill him in a duel, but Itto refuses to co-operate. Soon afterwards, Itto protects another woman, after she has killed her landlord when he has tried raping her. This puts him in conflict with a group of female Yakuza who want to punish the woman for the murder of the socially superior male (a realistic sign of the caste and politics of the times). Itto agrees to take the brutally depicted water torture and beatings on behalf of the girl and his wishes are granted. Itto’s enemies send an assassin after him, and we see that the sword wielder is realistically afraid of someone who uses muskets from a distance. Itto realizes the killer has no desire to hurt his child so he makes the boy pretend to be drowning so the musket-assassin puts his guns down to swim to the rescue, before killing him with the sword. Itto himself proves then to have Gatling guns concealed in the child’s pram, and takes out an entire bandit army with them. Later, Itto re-meets the suicidal disgraced Samurai from the start of the movie, who again begs for a duel in which he must die. Itto honours his request with inevitable but poignant touches. An intelligent martial arts movie despite its Spaghetti Western inspired mayhem. Arthur Chappell