With the last three Osone films in this series, we reach the modern chronological parameter of the period film--the decade preceding 1868, the year the Meiji emperor ascended the throne and the new Japan began. The Tokugawa shogunate, which had lasted over 200 years as the military and political arm of government of a sealed-off Japan, was tottering but had entered into controversial negotiations with the Western powers for an open-door policy and was attempting to suppress the opponents of this policy. The Tokugawa foes, closing in for the kill, descended on Kyoto, the capital, to support the imperial faction in its aim of keeping Japan isolated and expelling the foreign powers from Japan's shores, totally unaware that Japan, for all practical purposes, was defenseless against Western firepower.
“The film centers on four royalists--Katsura, Takechi, Sakamoto, and Genkotsu the priest--who battle the Shinsengumi, the vigilante group organized by the doomed Tokugawa government to hunt down plotters with impunity. The fifth man of the title is Isami Kondo, the head of the group. The confused and unsettled times are caught by Osone, who uses crowd scenes at carefully spaced points in the film to convey the feel of a capital that is roiling with turmoil and which is becoming a flashpoint for a major conflagration.
“Takahiro Tamura, in the role of Katsura, plays a role his father Tsumasaburo Bando essayed several times. (The film is dedicated to Bando and is a companion film to The Five Men of Edo (Oedo gonin otoko), which he made in 1952.) Ikumatsu, a geisha who sides with the royalists, is played by Michiko Saga, the daughter of Isuzu Yamada, who plays the madam of the inn where the final showdown between the imperialists and Kondo takes place. Yamada is photographed so exquisitely in a black gauze kimono that she looks as though she had stepped out of a genre painting.” --Frank T. Motofuji