About three years ago, a couple friends of mine camped out in the upper reaches of MCI Center to see his holiness Paul McCartney play his first DC show in years. Since they are (were?) blond and relatively attractive, they were whisked by Sir Paul's management to the concert's front row, where they succeed in getting the ex-Beatle to play a reprise of "Here Comes the Sun," the lucky facks. I spent that particular night at the AFI's Silver Theater in Silver Spring, which I went to a couple of times a week back in my moodier high school days. The night's entertainment was the awesomely-titled "Sword of Doom," ostensibly a samurai slasher in the same vein as "Yojimbo" or "Samurai Rebellion." In truth, it's a genre masterpiece every bit as perfect as other legendary formal exercises--in the few days after I saw it, it seemed to do for the samurai film what "Dirty Work" did for the slacker comedy. It got the thing more right than any movie had gotten it before.

Sir Paul be damned, I've spent the last three years convinced that my little cinematic find put me on the better end of the AFI-Paul McCartney deal. Like the Brightblack Morning Light, Venice is Sinking, pupusas and the Sundance Channel, I carried "Sword" around in my back pocket, convinced that I'd stumbled upon the best-kept secret in international cinema--a psychologically complicated, cinematically daring samurai epic with fight scenes that carefully straddled the often-violated line between balletic beauty and disquieting, stomach-churning violence. For three years, I recalled Tatsuya Nakadai's performance as the psychotic Rynosuke as a Marlon Brando-like star turn, although his performance is reminiscent enough of David Bowie, Rutger Hauer and Clint Eastwood to give me the sneaking suspicion that all three of them built careers around ripping him off. As for Toshiro Mifune's 4-minute cameo--well fack me, I won't even try to do it justice. It's just one of the most astonishing fight sequences every filmed, and it gets more and more brilliant every time I watch it. The only thing that comes close to it for me is the three-way staredown at the end of "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly," and even that lacks the directoral subtelty that makes the snow battle so unforgettable. There's a severed hand or two, but the gory deatils seem are compared the quietly homocidal, always chill-inducing stares that pass between Mifune and Nakadai.

I saw it again at Film Forum tonight (they're doing an awesome Nakadai retrospective), if only to confirm that I wasn't going off of a distant, idealized gut reaction. My worries were unfounded--"Sword" is every bit as good as I remember it being, and perhaps a bit better. It's a slasher the first time around, but it takes a second viewing to realize what's being slashed--specifically the popularized image of the noble samurai and the system of honor and duty that supposedly governed him. Every samurai movie--including the super-cynical "Harakiri"--has at least tacit apologetics, as if to say that the arc of Japanese history can only be critiqued to a point. Not so in "Sword," which was a genre deconstruction in a time when "deconstruction" didn't really exist.  The Mifune scene is a case in point: I'm pretty sure the bit about "killing against my will" sounds just as ridiculous in Japanese as it does in English.

"Sword" is playing at Film Forum at 1 PM and 3:20 PM tomorrow. Skip work, skip your internship, skip class, get up before noon, shell out five bucks for the Megabus if you're in Boston, New York, Toronto, Buffalo, Baltimore or Washington, DC. Just freakin' see it.