“In his period spectacles, of which The Taira Clan Saga is most epic in scope, Mizoguchi resembles Shakespeare in his ability to establish a narrative viewpoint that is godlike in its omniscient serenity and wholeness; like Shakespeare also, he refuses to separate psychology from history in showing the life of men in society” (Tom Luddy). In twelfth-century Kyoto, during a power struggle between the landed gentry and the monastic forces, a young man of the military class seizes power and changes the course of Japanese history. Raizo Ichikawa plays the young samurai whose moral growth is at the core of the film.