John Frankenheimer: Wenn er in die Hölle will, lass ihn gehen aka The challenge(1982)

Cast: Scott Glenn, Toshirô Mifune, Donna Kei Benz, Atsuo Nakamura, Calvin Jung, Clyde Kusatsu
SCENERY and sadism are the main things on display in John Frankenheimer's ''The Challenge,'' a hard-boiled action film with great hopes of becoming something more. The setting is modern, urban Japan, presented with a fair amount of realism and detail. And the story, by Richard Maxwell and John Sayles, works hard to contrast East and West, old and new. There is much about ''The Challenge,'' which opens today at Loews State and other theaters, to make the viewer sorry it isn't better.
After a handsome title sequence combining live and animated footage of a Japanese warrior, a preamble explains a fight in the Yoshida family. Two precious antique swords have been divided between two rival brothers, one (Atsuo Nakamura) an industrialist, the other (Toshiro Mifune) a modern-day samurai. The businessman brother will do anything, however vicious, to steal the samurai's sword.
Into this family feud stumbles a none-too-smart American boxer, Rick Murphy, played by Scott Glenn. Mr. Glenn, whose performance falls somewhere between Clint Eastwood and Chuck Norris on the spectrum of strong, silent types, is suckered into transporting one of the swords to Japan. From then on, he functions as a human Ping-Pong ball, bounced between the two rival camps.
Mr. Frankenheimer does what he can to integrate scenes of modern Japan into the story, even if he has to strain to accomplish this (there is a chase scene through a fish market that pauses for closeup shots of the fish). Both the industrialist's headquarters and the samurai's family compound are striking and memorable locations. So is a bamboo forest where Rick, under the samurai's tutelage, learns to hack down trees with a single blow of the sword. After finding his loyalty wavering from brother to brother, Rick eventually becomes a disciple of the nobler and much more prepossessing Mr. Mifune.
As part of his indoctrination, Rick spends five days buried up to his neck in the sand, while Mr. Mifune's helpers place unattainable bowls of rice beside his face. When this makes him hungry enough, he eats whatever beetles he can catch on his tongue. There is much along these lines in ''The Challenge,'' which has a regrettably vicious streak, even for a movie pretending to trace the tough, grueling means by which one can become a real man. In another memorable sequence, a paraplegic is elaborately tortured by a knife-wielding thug, then tossed off a hill from a moving van.
Without Mr. Mifune, ''The Challenge'' would certainly have a lot less weight. His presence helps add seriousness to the proceedings, especially in a final sequence that shows him roaming through the executive headquarters in warrior's garb, preparing to use his sword against the machine guns of a modern-day security police squad. Mr. Mifune is impressive even in a sequence that has him coolly serving Mr. Glenn live fish and newly slaughtered fresh lobster for dinner - the lobster has not stopped moving. As part of his real-man training, Mr. Glenn obligingly wolfs it down.





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