Looking Good: The Invisible Swordsman (1970) on Arrow Video Blu-ray

“You’d steal a man’s noodles while he’s helping you, eh?”

Pinning down firsts is often like shooting at a moving target. Whenever you find something that seems like the first, a deeper dive or a broader definition in terms will usually turn up something earlier that has at least some claim on that title. Nonetheless, The Invisible Man Appears from 1949 is often held up as the earliest extant tokusatsu picture – a Japanese genre, the name of which literally means “special filming,” used to describe movies that rely heavily on special effects.

While other countries don’t have Japan’s specific tokusatsu tradition, invisibility effects have been a favorite of moviemakers since the dawn of cinema, with the most famous instances probably being the franchise of invisible man movies kicked off by James Whale in 1933, which went on to spawn four sequels in the 1940s, not to mention numerous remakes in the years since.

Released on a double-bill with Gamera vs. Jiger, The Invisible Swordsman sees Daiei studios returning to the invisibility well that they previously mined in The Invisible Man Appears and The Invisible Man vs. the Human Fly – to even sillier results.

Sanshiro (Osamu Sakai) is the son of a brave and noble (albeit apparently penniless) samurai. Unfortunately for both him and his father, he is also a bumbling coward who is “not cut out for fencing.” For Western audiences who know old movies, think of it like if Don Knotts made a samurai movie, and you’re on the right track.

When Sanshiro’s father is cut down by the mysterious Phantom Thieves who have been plaguing Edo of late, Sanshiro has to, as one other character puts it, “Stop lamenting your own ineptitude and find the courage to avenge your father.”

How does he go about doing this? While standing on a bridge and crying out to his dead father, he sees a shinigami taking his father to the land of the dead. When he tries to wade into the river after the boat, he is stopped by a yokai identifying itself as Shokera, who tells him how to make a potion that will make him invisible.

After a few mishaps, Sanshiro manages to brew the invisibility potion and uses it to get comeuppance first against a drunken ronin who, as it so happens, turns out to be connected with the Phantom Thieves who killed Sanshiro’s father. The Invisible Swordsman does not weave a terribly complex web.

Around the same time that The Invisible Swordsman hit Japanese screens, Disney was making a string of live-action science-fiction comedy films starring a young Kurt Russell centered around Medford College, the setting of its earlier Absent-Minded Professor and Son of Flubber films. The second of these Kurt Russell vehicles was 1972’s Now You See Him, Now You Don’t, which involved invisibility, and gives you some idea of the kinds of invisibility gags you can expect from The Invisible Swordsman.

There are lots of people reacting in wide-eyed shock to objects floating around, lots of villainous samurai swinging swords wildly at thin air, and lots of instances of footprints appearing in water or snow to the accompaniment of overdone sound effects.

Naturally, the invisibility potion has a number of arbitrary but easily-tracked rules, including that Sanshiro must remain unobserved throughout the brewing process, and that the invisibility only last for half an hour, with three sneezes giving away the ticking clock – the first warns him that time is almost up, the second reveals his kimono, and the last heralds his return to complete visibility.

The Invisible Swordsman is directed by Yoshiyuki Kuroda and is essentially a follow-up to the Yokai Monsters trilogy, also from Daiei, of which Kuroda directed the second and third installments. As such, it is perhaps unsurprising that the strongest moments in The Invisible Swordsman are those that involve yokai, from Sanshiro’s initial encounter with the shinigami and Shokera to a later scheme to thwart the shinigami’s plans to take the soul of his love interest’s father.

“Why don’t you ask your father yourself,” the shinigami says, when Sanshiro demands that it tell him who killed his dad. “I’d be happy to take you to him any time. Just tie a rope around your neck or jump off a tall cliff.”

Those who have seen the Yokai Monsters films – or many of Daiei’s Showa-era Gamera films, for that matter – know that they are, among other things, quite silly. This is part of their charm, but it’s also a delicate balancing act that the films are capable of stumbling over at times, and your appreciation of them will likely depend at least a little on your tolerance for silliness.

The same is true of The Invisible Swordsman, which is not, at heart, a supernatural fantasy nor a samurai revenge tale but rather a comedy of bumbling slapstick, relying on the ineptitude of both its heroes and its villains for very nearly 100% of its humor. For me, that sort of thing rarely works, and The Invisible Swordsman largely lacks the rubbery monster charm of those other flicks.

At the time of this writing, my review of The Invisible Swordsman is the fourth one ever on Letterboxd. So, whether this installment is a particularly essential one or not, it’s hard not to argue that Arrow’s release of The Invisible Swordsman is opening the film up to Western audiences in a way that it probably hasn’t ever been before. And odds are that, among those audiences, the goofy humor of The Invisible Swordsman will find at least a few people for whom it works better than it did for me.

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Orrin Grey is a writer, editor, game designer, and amateur film scholar who loves to write about monsters, movies, and monster movies. He’s the author of several spooky books, including How to See Ghosts & Other Figments. You can find him online at orringrey.com.