Hideo Gosha’s Samurai Wolf (Kiba Ôkaminosuke) is a gritty, hard-edged, bloody recalibration of the traditional chambara film (action-oriented, historical sword-fighting film), which had been broadly popular in Japan throughout the 1950s, but was waning in popularity by the mid-1960s. Gosha had already directed a number of such films, including his feature debut, Three Outlaw Samurai (Sanbiki no samurai, 1964), which was a prequel to a popular television series, and Sword of the Beast (Kedamono no ken, 1965). Those films put him well on his way to becoming known as a renegade artist, one who wasn’t afraid to get messy and color outside the lines, which is exactly what Samurai Wolf does.

Set in the remote wilderness of feudal Japan, Samurai Wolf introduces us to the ronin Kiba Ôkaminosuke (Isao Natsuyagi), which means “Furious Wolf,” who is in just about every way the inverse of the chambara’s tradition of noble, morally upstanding samurai. A perennial outsider and wandering, penniless loner, Kiba is scruffy, unkempt, and badly lacking in manners (we first meet him in uncomfortable close-ups as he scarfs down bowls of rice, much of which gets stuck in his beard and none of which he has money to pay for). Yet, he is a master swordsman who, despite his outwardly untoward appearance, is nevertheless a man of honor who has a heart for the underdog and a willingness to put himself in harm’s way for the good of others (he never explicitly invokes a code of honor or chivalry, as many of his cinematic samurai forebears had done, but he clearly feels pulled in that direction). Isao Natsuyagi, who was a relative newcomer with a background in theater, plays Kiba with a brash mixture of gruff charisma, confidence bordering on cockiness, and sentimental charm. In many ways he is a man of deep contradictions; while at one point he happily notes that he hasn’t had a bath in more than a year, he also keeps with him a pair of shears that he regularly uses to trim his shaggy beard and, in one scene, uses to gently clip the toenails of a young prostitute.

In Samurai Wolf, which was the first of two films to feature the character, Kiba finds himself caught up in a feud between Nizaemon (Tatsuo Endo), a local gang leader, and Chise (Junko Miyazono), a blind widow who has inherited her town’s courier post. Nizaemon wants to control all the mail routes, and he has graduated from blackmail to open violence, which Kiba witnesses firsthand when several of Nizaemon’s gang members attack and kill two of Chise’s couriers on the open road. Kiba is immediately drawn to Chise’s plight and is convinced to help her protect a shipment of 30,000 gold coins from the shogun that Nizaemon is clearly planning to ambush (the whole thing may very well be a set-up). The plot thickens when Nizaemon hires his own expert swordsman, Akizuki Sanai (Ryohei Uchida), who was responsible for the massacre of the aforementioned prostitute’s former home and the death of her family, which adds an element of personal vengeance into the mix.

It is not hard to discern the influence of 1960s Westerns—especially the European spaghetti variety—on Samurai Wolf, which is ironic given that spaghetti westerns were heavily influenced by the samurai films of Akira Kurosawa, especially Yojimbo (1961), which provided the template for Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars (1964). Kiba is very much a late-western kind of hero—he would be right at home in a Leone or Corbucci or Peckinpah film—and the perilous situation in which he finds himself, with its interplay of personal vengeance, political corruption, and general power mongering, is right out of the spaghetti western playbook, as is the ’Scope cinematography by Sadaji Yoshida and music by prolific genre composer Toshiaki Tsushima, one of whose earliest assignments was composing music for Gosha’s Three Outlaw Samura (he would go on to write music for more than 100 chambara, yakuza, and pinku-eigas). The result is a broadly entertaining film that draws from and undercuts the samurai tradition in equal measure, illustrating in broad strokes Gosha’s place in Japanese B-movie lore.

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