Looking for a movie containing an "honor challenge" (1 Viewer)

[Gary Cliff]

"Honor" is not nearly as important in North American culture as it is in other cultures, or in western culture of ages past. Is anyone aware of a scene from a movie which depicts one character making an "honor" challenge to another where the second does not rise to the challenge, but rather backs away disgraced?

 

[Justin Spike]

K19: The Widowmaker, when they had to volunteer to fix the reactor.

 

[Lew Crippen]

Hiroshi Inagaki’s Samurai trilogy contains at least two such instances (if I recall correctly). Basically the story follows the progress of the protagnist’s (Musashi Miyamoto, played by Toshiro Mifune) progress from callow youth to sage samurai. While he is beset by many adversaries, the main antagonist is another, more politically connected samurai, Kojiro.

In the second installment, Kojiro forces a meeting with Musashi that turns into an ambush (of some 70–80). Musashi slays a fair few number of the bad guys, before fleeing in order to save his life. So one view would be that Kojiro backed out (after being honor bound to appear, or at least play fair) and another would be that Musashi did not fight until killed (one of the points is that Musashi has progressed far enough on his journey to see the futility in staying to fight for honor, only to die).

In the third installment, Kojiro tries to force another meeting (you can look at this as Musashi being the fastest gun in the West and Kojiro the young gun trying to cement his reputation) with Musashi. He fails and now tries to call Musashi out (so to speak) by killing some (relatively) innocent Samurai.

Musashi, though he knows he can easily defeat Kojiro, leaves and withdraws from the world to become (I really can’t remember here) a farmer, while Kojiro goes on to be on of the Shogan’s favorites (a goal that Musashi had for himself at one time).

One of the themes of this trilogy is the definition of honor and how does one properly conduct oneself.

This trilogy is available on Criterion. There are no extras to speak of, but the disks are well worth picking up.