Rebellion stars two of the greatest Japanese actors, Toshiro Mifune and Tatsuya Nakadai, as vassals in the service of a daimyo in 1725 Japan. It is peacetime, so there is not much for them to do: they test weapons for sharpness, check the storehouses, and do their best not to feel like irrelevancies. Isaburo (Mifune) feels particularly ill-suited to this sort of life: as he confesses to Asano (Nakadai), swordsmanship is the only thing he feels he’s any good at. Asano knows this is only partly true — yes, his friend is indeed an accomplished swordsman, but also has a sense of moral outrage that other men sometimes never manifest in the whole of their lives.

One day a curious development arises. Their lord sends them a woman, Ichi (Yokô Tsukasa, also of Yojimbo and the 1962 version of Chushingura), a former mistress who sent the household into an uproar. Apparently she came home one day, found her lord a-sporting with another woman, and went into a fit of anger. Obviously this will not do, and so she is being sent to their household as a way of both getting rid of her and saving face on all sides. At first they even try stalling for time, refusing to accept her out of “unworthiness”, but more because they simply don’t know what to do with her either.

Ichi is gracious and deferent, much to everyone’s surprise, and Isaburo decides that his own son, Yogoro (Takeshi Katô, also seen in Seijun Suzuki’s Fighting Elegy and Kurosawa’s The Bad Sleep Well) is in need of a wife anyway, and arranges for them to be married. Isaburo’s mother finds the arrangement scandalous at best: who would want to make room in their household for a woman who is clearly damaged goods? But she and Yogoro become deeply enamored of each other. They have a daughter, Tomi, and all seems well for a time.

One night Ichi describes in detail what really led to her being thrown out of the lord’s house. Things did indeed unfold the way they had been described, but not for the reasons attributed to her. If there is one thing she does not want hanging over her, it is the burden of false motives. She had to leave her own son, the lord’s heir, behind because of this, and has never completely accepted the shame that goes with abandoning a child. What surprises her all the more is how Yogoro accepts her despite this. The way the director, Masaki Kobayashi (Kwaidan), films this revelation is striking: he puts her in one room, combing her hair absently, her husband in another room, and shows the flashback in a combination of intercuts and freeze-frames.

The next day there comes news: The heir has died, and Ichi must return to the lord’s castle so that she can sire another child. Yogoro is incensed, and so is Isaburo. Not only is all the work they did to accommodate her into the household going to be for nothing, but a woman they have come to love dearly is being taken from them for no particular good reason. Asano does not think it wise to resist, but he also knows that he cannot talk his friend out of anything. This sets the stage for a slow-burning showdown that takes up the final half-hour of the film, where father and son stand off against soldiers sent to their house to bring the offenders to justice.

I am of the opinion that there is no such thing as a good movie that is too slow, only audiences that are too impatient. Rebellion unfolds its story with great care and deliberation because to rush through material this sad and angry would be a mistake, and would leave it without impact. This is particularly important in the scenes where Isaburo and his superiors trade words like chess pieces. How you say something in their world is as important as what you say, and so at first Isaburo has to find the best possible way to keep what sounds like a troublemaking hussy out of his household. Later, he finds even more elegant ways to stall for time, to keep his superiors at bay and to make them seem like the ones doing wrong in the eyes of the world.

There is, of course, a concluding fight sequence — a samurai movie without a swordfight of any kind is like a noir movie without a gun — but it is not milked for its excitement the way it might be in a lesser movie. It is a consequence of what has come before, and it is filmed in that light. That doesn’t keep Kobayashi from doing some visually creative things with it, of course: the penultimate conflict involves Isaburo wading through a field of neck-high reeds and tearing up snipers who pop out of the grass. The very first shots are equally striking, and probably prophetic: a long, carefully controlled shift in focus from the tip of Isaburo’s sword to his scowling face. His sword, as we will learn, is as much of his life as he has to offer.

I mentioned before Mifune and Nakadai were the two best actors Japan has produced thus far. They could also not be more dissimilar: Mifune’s screen presence was unmistakable, and there was no mistaking him in any film. Nakadai, however, was a chameleon: in Sword of Doom, Kill! and this film he projects such dissimilar auras that someone not already familiar with him would never realize he was in all three. Here he plays a man of great competence and not-so-great larger virtue, and who knows that one day he will have to be tested on each and will probably lose on the latter.

Kobayashi was normally a very economical director, making the most from the least. Even his visual feast Kwaidan was made up more of silences and empty spaces than noise and activity, and it was all the more impressive because of that. Rebellion is similarly stark — its black-and-white widescreen photography is used to isolate the characters, not group them together. That said, Kobayashi commits a flaw of excess in Rebellion’s very last scenes, which go on at excruciating length and verge on self-parody. This might have worked for a movie operating in a more openly operatic vein, like one of Kinji Fukasaku’s period actioners, but here it’s just messy and jarring.

When it was all over, though, I found myself thinking most not of the histrionic final moments, but of the gloomy scenes just before the climax: Isaburo extinguishing a candle by slashing it in half, or digging a hole in the middle of his indoor garden of black sand to bury those he could not protect. And then there is the showdown between him and Asano, where they talk at first as stranger, then as allies, and then finally as despondent friends. Between these moments and the sunny banality of the opening scenes runs an unbroken thread of causality, made all the more tragic by how only we have seen how inevitable it was.