Three Outlaw Samurai is a 1964 Japanese chambara film by director Hideo Gosha

Hideo Gosha

was a Japanese film director.Among his most famous films are Goyokin and Hitokiri, released in 1969, and The Wolves, released in 1971. His most famous film in the West is Sword of the Beast, released by Criterion....

.

The film is an origin-story offshoot of the original Japanese television series of the same name. The film involves a wandering ronin

Ronin

A or rounin was a Bushi with no lord or master during the feudal period of Japan. A samurai became masterless from the death or fall of his master, or after the loss of his master's favor or privilege....

 (Tetsuro Tamba) who finds himself involved with two other samurai (Isamu Nagato and Mikijiro Hira) who are hired to execute a band of peasants who have kidnapped the daughter of a corrupt magistrate.

Cast

• Tetsuro Tamba
  Tetsuro Tamba
  was a Japanese actor.-Biography:Tamba is perhaps best known by Western audiences for his role as Tiger Tanaka in the 1967 James Bond film You Only Live Twice . By then, he had among other roles appeared in two films by director Masaki Kobayashi: Harakiri and Kwaidan...
  
   as Sakon Shiba
• Isamu Nagato as Kyojuro Sakura
• Mikijiro Hira as Einosuke Kikyo
• Yoshiko Kayama as Oyasu
• Kyoko Aoi as Omitsu
• Hisashi Igawa as the Magistrate

Release

The film was released in Japan in 1964. On February 14, 2012, the Criterion Collection will release a DVD

DVD

A DVD is an optical disc storage media format, invented and developed by Philips, Sony, Toshiba, and Panasonic in 1995. DVDs offer higher storage capacity than Compact Discs while having the same dimensions....

 and Blu-ray disc

Blu-ray Disc

Blu-ray Disc is an optical disc storage medium designed to supersede the DVD format. The plastic disc is 120 mm in diameter and 1.2 mm thick, the same size as DVDs and CDs. Blu-ray Discs contain 25 GB per layer, with dual layer discs being the norm for feature-length video discs...

of the film.