Big Time Gambling Boss (1968)

Original title: Bakuchiuchi: Sôchô Tobaku

Tokyo 1934. The boss of the city’s clan specialized in the gambling business suffers from a stroke while he’s refusing a plan to help unite the yakuza groups into some kind of national front that will bring drugs and prostitution to “the continent” (read “China”).

The succession to the now bed-ridden and mute man’s position is fraught. The best candidate would be the deeply honourable Nakai (Koji Tsuruta), but he’s refusing the role because he came to Tokyo as a refugee from an Osaka clan following trouble with the law there. Apparently taking on the leading role in his adopted clan would be against the Code of the yakuza. Anyway, going by Nakai’s interpretation of things, the designated successor to the position of boss should be Matsuda (Tomisaburo Wakayama), Nakai’s sworn brother.

As a matter of Code and honour, Nakai may even be right about that. Yet right now, Matsuda is imprisoned for his role in an attack on a rival gang that left that gang not much of a problem anymore, but also saw some of Matsuda’s own young men dead. In general, while nearly as traditionally honourable as Nakai, Matsuda is a bit of an emotional powder keg, leading from the front with quite a bit of violence. So he is somebody the clan as a whole doesn’t really want in its highest leadership position.

Prodded by shifty advisor Senba (Nobuo Kaneko with the most astonishing bit of Hitler facial hair), the clan decides to make the boss’s son-in-law, the somewhat lower-ranking and sweaty Ishido (Hiroshi Nawa) the successor, clearly not the strong choice.

Ishido’s ascension ceremony is to take place during a big gambling do for the highest-ranking yakuza in the country.

At this point, Matsuda has been released from prison and is less than happy with the situation. To his sense of personal betrayal comes the fact that not the obviously ultra-competent Nakai is to be the group’s boss, but the weak Ishido. And Matsuda is not the kind of man who can play the diplomatic game, even if it means burning all bridges.

Soon, the plot becomes a complicated machine of obligations, honour, friendship, and betrayal, full of relationships that are much more complicated than they at first appear to be, and violence that is less than cathartic.

When it is spoken about at all in the West, Kosaku Yamashita’s Big Time Gambling Boss – actually the fourth film of a series, though one that usually has not continuity of plot or characters between films – has the reputation of being one of the greatest yakuza films of the ninkyo eiga style. I can’t disagree with this assessment at all – this is pretty much a perfect film, one that stretches the possibilities of the ninkyo style to its absolute limits. That its writer Kazuo Kasahara would go on to script Kinji Fukasaku’s Battles Without Honour and Humanity series seems just the logical consequence of where this one goes.

Certainly, Gambling Boss shares the later films’ tendency to turn an in theory very simple plot about yakuza intrigue into a web of duties, obligations and interpretations of a code of honour where one’s human feelings only further complicate things. Nearly every single character here has to come to grips with their own conflicts between the supposed honour of their societal rules and their actual humanity – Nakai’s and Matsuda’s internal and personal conflicts are the film’s main thrust, but the younger yakuza that take on the role of Nakai’s replacement sons, and the two men’s wives all go through the same struggles.

Nakai’s wife Tsuyako (Hiroko Sakuramachi), to take an example, at first seems to only fulfil the genre role of the dutiful wife, but one second act conflict suddenly reveals her inner life and the struggles she goes through while keeping up appearances, providing the film not only with a sudden jolt of “wait, that’s not how ninkyo eiga work!” but also emphasising one of the film’s thematic undercurrents: the utter destructiveness of a way of life that knows no compromise and lets problems grow and fester until they are only resolved in the most violent and destructive ways. Every character in the movie goes through this, or something comparable, and all of them end up destroyed or dead – and the film clearly isn’t applauding this as the only honourable way to exist but treats it as the tragedy it is.

There is indeed a great deal of compassion for its characters in the film, not the sentimental kind yakuza movies (and their fans, me not excluded) generally prefer, but one that feels more humane, sadder and more subtle.

In large part, this effect of greater emotional nuance is enabled by Yamashita’s restrained and intensely focussed direction. This is a film without any distractions in staging, tight framing that is meant to keep the viewer as close to the characters as possible, and not a second of material on screen that isn’t important to the characters or the plot. This means none of the actors can afford to overact or fall back on the simpler tricks in their toolkits – every moment of drama is earned through their complicated portrayals of complicated feelings and relationships. Even Wakayama, not an actor who appeared to like to be subtle (and whom I usually love for it), follows suit, and gives one of the most nuanced and human performances I’ve ever seen from him. Consequently, the film develops an uncommon emotional pull, a feeling of witnessing a genuine tragedy evolve, instead of a series of ritualized scenes that end in an explosion of violence.

Even here, at the climax, the movie refuses the sure-fire way to please the audience of its genre. Instead of showing is the mandatory showdown between Nakai and a large group of enemies, the film cuts away from it. It makes sense too, for the violence that’s actually important for Nakai came before and will come after that fight, and that violence is brutal, and short, and looks the exact opposite of fun.

Three Films Make A Post: A Disgrace to Criminals Everywhere.

Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998): After more than two decades, I’m still not sure if I exactly like Guy Ritchie’s debut movie, but then, I’ve been known to have problems with movies whose main characters are all arseholes and idiots, particularly when  the film they are in appears to loathe them (see also, Thor: Love & Thunder). What has endeared the film to me from the perspective of today is how insanely it is of its time: starting with the piss-coloured non-colour scheme, the showy editing, the post-Pulp Fiction ideas about coolness, and certainly not stopping with its very specific kind of digressive storytelling. As a time capsule, this is about as pure as it gets, and when the inevitable late 90s revival is coming around, this will be one of the aesthetic core texts.

Infinity Pool (2023): I was a great admirer of Brandon Cronenberg’s Possessor, but this sometimes body horrific critique of the late-capitalistic mindset which is here exemplified in extreme hedonistic exploitative tourism doesn’t work too well for me. Often, it appears to be rather too in love with exactly the things it wants to criticize, but my main problem really is how little I found myself caring about anything and anyone in it going through their surrealisted-up version of rich people problems: Alexander Skarsgård’s doing his by now usual “weak man” shtick without ever finding a note from which to empathize with the guy, and Mia Goth’s ultra femme fatale is certainly riveting to watch but also empty of any nuance or humanity. The only actual identifiable human being, Cleopatra Coleman’s Em, is shelved relatively early, and from then on out, the movie is all about rich people being surrealistically horrible. The rather more interesting elements of the film concerning Philip K. Dick-style identity problems never really go anywhere interesting, so I found myself a bit bored by a very well shot film that uses the most obvious metaphorical systems in the most obvious manner.

Re/Member (2022): What would we be without time loop movies? Because you can time loop anything, Eiichiro Hasumi’s example of the form unites some typical YA business with ghosts and the fascination of Japanese pop culture with weird rules. Which does at least lead to a bit of originality, for there are very few movies about a group of teens bonding while time-looping through the experience of searching for the body parts of a dismembered little girl while being hunted by a monster.

The character work is very much like you’d expect in a Japanese teen movie, and Hasumi does tend to lay it on a little too thick in melodramatic sequences, but on the other hand, there’s also a sense of playfulness and fun on display when it comes to changing up the ways in which a group of teenagers might be ripped to pieces, farting around with game rules, or making third act twists entertaining.

Layer Cake (2004)

A man (Daniel Craig) whose name we’ll never learn, let’s call him XXXX like the credits do, works as a new style drug distributor. He abhors guns, isn’t a fan of violence and aims for the professionalism of a modern business man. XXXX isn’t quite as stupid as he sounds, so he does employ ex-soldier Morty (George Harris) as his right hand man. Morty’s good for looking threatening so that things don’t turn violent, though he’d be perfectly capable if push came to shove. XXXX is not planning on staying in the business for very much longer – his retirement nest egg is basically complete. We never learn if the new school business drug lord retires to Spain like his elders would, alas.

Retirement is dangerous in the crime business, of course, and even more so in movies, so it’s not going to come as a surprise to the audience when our protagonist’s life turns rather more exciting and complicated than he likes it. At first, things seem harmless enough. The local mob boss Jimmy Price (Kenneth Cranham) just wants to enable a little business deal between XXXX and one of Price’s old pals, a man going by the moniker of The Duke (Jamie Foreman); also, XXXX is supposed to look for the wayward daughter of another old associate of Jimmy. Both of these things appear easy enough on the outset, but quickly, XXXX finds himself embroiled in layers of intrigue, is hunted by a Serbian assassin, learns some hard truths about the people he trusts as well as his actual position in life and on the food chain. Why, things will get so bad, there’s a good chance the only place he’s going to retire to is an early grave.

Matthew Vaughn’s feature debut Layer Cake is a very fine film situated in the British arm of the post-Tarantino tradition. In its approach to gangsters and its idea of coolness it is certainly also influenced by the early films of Vaughn’s old cohort Guy Ritchie, but lacks the latter guy’s vulgarity. The dialogue – script by J.J. Connolly based on his own novel – is tight, clever, often funny and rather more ambiguous than it at first appears. Which also goes for an intensely layered and constructed plot that manages to be complicated but also tuned like clockwork.

One of Vaughn’s great achievements here is how easy and pop he makes Connolly’s complicated script with a dozen moving parts look, providing a film that by all rights should get bogged down in exposition with an quick and clever flow, and elegant forward momentum.

Apart from being a great, post-modern (at least in the sense that it knows and thinks about all the tropes of its genre and stands in dialogue with them) gangster movie, Layer Cake also works rather wonderfully as a deeply sarcastic critique of the kind of modern businessman XXXX aspires to be, someone who believes doing morally wrong things in a professional way somehow keeps the responsibility for his actions away from him, but whose veneer of civilisation is pure hypocrisy once push comes to shove and he loses his illusions about his own importance and rank on the food chain. At the same time Vaughn never makes the mistake of turning XXXX completely unlikable – for one, there’s Daniel Craig’s patented charisma (bottled by some aftershave company or other, or so I’ve heard) but there’s also the fact this guy is loyal to his friends to a fault, and for all his sins, wouldn’t stab anyone in the back who hasn’t stabbed him before. Which is important, for otherwise, why would the audience care about him?

In short: Le Doulos (1962)

aka The Finger-Man

Burglar Faugel (Serge Reggiani) has just been released from prison, and becomes involved in a needlessly complicated game of betrayal, revenge and trust, that has him – and the audience – doubt his friend Silien (Jean-Paul Belmondo) while trying to escape the attention of the police and some nasty colleagues.

If you go into Le Doulos having mostly experienced the final four or five movies of director Jean-Pierre Melville, you might be in for a bit of a shock. Sure, the characters’ fashion sense and Melville’s at once cynical and romantic view of their world is there and accounted for, but where the late films show a focussed sparseness in their plotting, and a slowness that’s also fastidiously detail-oriented, Le Delous is all over the place.

It’s slow alright, but this slowness finds the characters meandering through the kind of painful overplotting that needs ten minutes in the end to explain at (and it’s really at, not to) the audience what was actually going on; before that, the film is mostly characters wandering around, talking a lot, sometimes entering the sort of scenes of stylistic magic you usually expect from Melville but soon enough going off again into directions of little interest or filmic power.

Speaking of the talking, after having seen Le Doulos, I can’t help but wonder if the sparseness of dialogue in later Melville films isn’t a result of the man realizing that he has no hand at all for staging dialogue sequences. At the very least, the film at hand regularly comes to a complete standstill in dialogue sequences that take double the time they should – even if you keep the general more wordy nature of French films and cinema of its time in mind – Melville seemingly having no idea how to get out of any scene whatsoever, and so just staying there, and staying there, and staying there forever. Let’s not even talk about how inelegant and awkward the whole plot twist and long, long detailed explanation at the end of the film is.

It’s all very peculiar particularly since other early Melville films don’t show this massive load of flaws at all; young Melville certainly had his own ideas about pacing, but they actually felt like ideas, unlike here, where they suggest incompetence, or a director trying to share his feeling of boredom with his audience – not things I otherwise connect with Melville’s films.

Technorati-Markierungen: french movies,in short,gangster,crime,jean-pierre melville,jean-paul belmondo,serge reggiani,jean desailly

The Boss (1973)

Original title: Il Boss

Sicily. After the old bosses have been driven into exile by the authorities, everyone left, be it newcomers from Calabria, the former small fry, or those dons not deemed important enough to get rid of, begins to violently scrabble for territory and influence. Gang wars minor and major flare up.

Right in the middle of it is Nick Lanzetta (Henry Silva), a guy who won’t think twice blowing up a private porn cinema exhibition for an enemy clan with some well-placed grenades. When the daughter (Antonia Santilli) of his boss Don Giuseppe (Claudio Nicastro) is kidnapped by the Calabrians of Don Corrasco (Richard Conte), the old man asks Nick to get her back. The first problem with this project is that the guy the next step up the ladder of Don Giuseppe has explicitly forbidden any action, literally leaving the girl’s fate up to God with a nice little shrug; the second one is that Nick has plans of his own.

If you’re one of the people who tend to be taken aback by how polite the portrayal of the mafia can get in many gangster movies, and how much films can buy into the concepts of honour etc that make up the PR of the group, you won’t need to approach Fernando Di Leo’s Il Boss with any trepidation.

This is a film very much working the same field as the post Battles without Honour and Humanity yakuza film, portraying the mafia and its members as brutal, traitorous thugs who only ever use their fabled honour and responsibility when it is useful as a weapon for them, otherwise breaking trusts with not even the slightest sign of second thoughts. Not that the film is any nicer to the legal authorities - those are either too cynical to even still be able to countenance any kind of action beyond mopping up the blood the gangsters leave, or corrupt to the bone like Gianni Garko’s Commissario Torri here. Also not getting away un-scorned are politicians (as corrupt as Torri just more polite about it) and the youth movement (only in it for sex and drugs). Needless to say, this is about as angrily political a movie as you’ll find in the field.

Di Leo portrays his cast of bastards and assholes – the least immoral character is probably Don Giuseppe’s nymphomaniac daughter (the portrayal of women isn’t great by today’s or even 1973’s standards) – with what feels like seething anger, barely held in check, and no hope for anything about the way Italy was in the 70s changing at all. You might call it nihilist, but in my experience, true nihilists don’t get angry at the state of the world like this, but revel in it.

Because Di Leo is also one of the great commercial directors of this genre, he packages his rage in a series of (often darkly funny) dialogue scenes that bitterly portray the state of his country, and just as many brutal, tight and absolutely relentless action scenes that do tend to get more than a little crazy. Henry Silva and the rest of the cast are of course perfect for portraying these specific kinds of assholes and monsters, often adding a self-conscious theatricality to their scenes that’s an ideal way of demonstrating that their characters’ only real use for emotion is faking it to look like human beings. They’d also rip the hearts out of Coppola’s mannered Mafiosi in the blink of an eye, making this a rather useful antidote to The Godfather (which is nonetheless a great film trilogy, don’t get me wrong).

Il Boss may very well be one of the very best European gangster movies, blowing up the competition before desecrating their graves, one supposes.

In short: The Nickel Ride (1974)

Former carny man Cooper (Jason Miller) is working as lower middle-management for the LA mob. He’s mainly taking care of warehouses used for stashing stolen goods, but he’s also fixing boxing matches, threatening someone here or there, and so on. He is a bit of a local celebrity on his home block, and has is married to Sarah (Linda Haynes), who’d probably catch a bullet for him if she’d see it coming. Right now, Cooper is working on a project that might very well get him one step up the criminal ladder. He is trying to procure a whole city block of warehouses, legally if you ignore the bribes, which would make things much easier for criminals around the city, or so he believes.

But as the film starts, things begin to go slowly unravel. The officials he’s trying to bribe become evasive, boxing matches aren’t as easily fixed as they should, and his boss (Tony Hillerman) is sending him a weird Southern guy (Bo Hopkins) he is supposed to take care of. Though you don’t need to be a genius to realize the man’s actually supposed to keep an eye on Cooper. Once things start slipping, Cooper deteriorates fast, exacerbating his problems with rash decisions that’ll only make them bigger, and beginning to fear a quick, sudden death by his associates.

While certainly being a noir-ish gangster movie, what mainly resonates for me about Robert Mulligan’s quiet and atmospheric noir-ish gangster movie is its deep sense of paranoia. This isn’t just the portrayal of a man who built his life on violence seeing age taking some of his abilities away, or that of a man trapped in the gangster version of a job without much perspective. Most of all, it is the portrayal of a guy who wakes up one morning and starts to realize that the world is slipping around him, that the things he once thought secure are anything but, and that his safety is an illusion. Cooper is quickly slipping into the paranoia that naturally must come with this sort of realization, seeing enemies everywhere – where they are and where they aren’t and slowly realizes that his hopes for the future have brought him inevitable doom.

Miller’s portrayal of this process is highly nuanced, avoiding any kind of hyperbole, instead finding a very precise way to show Cooper losing his grip on a world that’s all too willing to get rid of him.

Precision is an important word for the whole of the film: before we even realize we are already witnessing Cooper falling, Mulligan has created the social world of dark and grimy streets and people of dubious jobs and morals around him slowly and carefully, making very clear what’s at stake for Cooper and why.

The Nickel Ride is full of clever decisions. A nice example is its use of Bo Hopkins’s patented Southern folksiness, or rather, how Mulligan and Hopkins (in a really clever performance) suggest an abyss of menace lurking just beyond a corny exterior, turning a Hopkins standard character into a perfect focus for Cooper’s paranoid (and not so paranoid) nightmares.

Massacre Mafia Style (1974)

aka Duke Mitchell’s Like Father, Like Son

The somewhat unfortunately named Mimi Miceli (Duke Mitchell, of course) has spent much of his childhood in Sicily after his mafia don father had been driven out of New York. Now, a grown man of indeterminate age (because this is an epic, I suppose the very middle-aged Mitchell is supposed to be in his early twenties at the start of the movie, slowly aging towards his actual age), Mimi decides to follow his dream of moving to Los Angeles, making nice with the local mafia by ransoming a local Don (don’t ask me), and taking over black-owned pimp businesses by shooting a lot of pimps and prostitutes. And yes, you need to prepare for a lot of casual racism to make a viewer squirm in this one.

Things go rather well for Mimi and his best buddy Jolly (Vic Caesar) for some years. But eventually, his love for the overkill and his very selective respect for mafia traditions do lead to his retirement to the porn industry. Until his old colleagues get concerned about dear old Mimi there too.

This is the single movie nightclub singer, former comedian, singing voice of Fred Flintstone and part-time indie mafia movie auteur Duke Mitchell actually managed to finish in his life time, and having watched it after his posthumously finished Gone with the Pope, I’m really rather sad that these two are all the Mitchell movies I’ll ever get to witness in my lifetime. Not that this is the kind of film any mainstream viewer or film critic will ever call good, but it’s such a clear labour of love and such a singular and peculiar experience I’m certainly calling it good, despite the flaws that come to pass when a movie is made by the seat of someone’s somewhat shabby silk pants.

So yes, many of the actors – particularly those in one-scene roles – are wooden, but it’s the specific sort of woodenness arthouse filmmakers hiring non-actors to play people in their own professions or class so often get praised for. This really fits into one of the film’s great strengths, its ability to provide a viewer with the feeling one encounters a trashy, crass, but also semi-anthropological view into the lives of the entertainment and gangster working class in surroundings they really might have populated, showing tastes and styles they really might have had, written, directed and acted by a guy who actually knows the people he’s talking about first hand.

Adding to this particular element of the film’s equation are the scenes where Mitchell falls into long speeches about Italian American culture, the cultural importance of mothers, or bread-cutting rituals. These speeches are stiffly written and delivered with Mitchellian hyperbole and sentimentality, of course, but that only adds to the entertainment value as well as the film’s off-beat authenticity, Mitchell imagining himself into a Mafia philosopher who – like many a great philosopher - never practices what he preaches.

Given its somewhat epic scope at least when it comes to its supposed temporal and spacial dimensions, it is obvious that this is a bit of an answer to Coppola’s The Godfather (about which Mimi even goes on a bit of a rant) by people who are much closer to the real aesthetics and values driving the people both films talk about. Of course, Mitchell’s rather less plushy and a lot more crass and tawdry view of the mafia and their world wouldn’t have won any Academy Awards even if it hadn’t been made for pocket money that simply can’t buy the epicness Mitchell goes for. Obviously, both films aren’t documentaries but rather dreams and fantasies about the mafia; Mitchell’s fantasies simply come from a direction I suspect would be rather closer to the dreams of actual gangsters. Even the differences between the racist presentations of African Americans in Coppola’s and Mitchell’s films fit into that mould.

While all this sounds rather more interesting than actually exciting, what really gives the film an additional kick is its exploitational value, the abandon with which Mitchell cuts from one of the long, talky sequences to copious nudity and often preposterously entertaining violence. The editing (by Tony Mora and Robert Florio who really deserve to be mentioned here) becomes incredibly propulsive particularly in these transitions between quiet and loud scenes, as if this were Seattle a couple of decades later. It’s not just the editing, though. Even though his style of staging is sometimes a bit awkward, Mitchell the director is rather imaginative when it comes to the violence, giving a lot of it sardonically humorous edge without making it “ironic”. One can’t help but think he must have seen some of the early Italian post-Dirty Harry cop movies and watched them very closely indeed, because it is an air of wild abandon closer related to them than to much of US cinema (even in the grindhouse) that drives the action here.


Take all of this together, and Massacre Mafia Style becomes an unmissable piece of US low budget cinema everyone with even the slightest interest in this sort of thing should see.

Three Films Make A Post: The Cycle Begins.

Proud Mary (2018): Graced with PR material and a title sequence that suggest some sort of cool, contemporary and conscious throwback to blaxploitation cinema times, what Babak Nafaji’s film actually goes to deliver is general tepidness. This little number meanders between uninvolving gangster melodrama and badly staged action movie, leaving its fine leading lady Taraji P. Henson to pick up pieces. Now, Henson’s certainly good, but a single actress can’t save a melodramatic movie that doesn’t seem to know how to actually wallow in emotion, nor an action film that wastes a relatively high budget on stuff most direct to DVD action films would find too unambitious.

The Heretics (2017): Speaking of films that waste a perfectly serviceable set-up and pretty cultist masks on a so script so mediocre I would have preferred it to be just bad and uninspired direction, this Canadian movie by Chad Archibald concerning a young woman (Nina Kiri) getting re-kidnapped five years after her first encounter with a satanist suicide cult, rather comes to mind. It’s not difficult to imagine how this could actually have been a pretty great movie, even when keeping the plot twists of this all too real version, if only it had a script that had a better handle on characterisation, trauma and drama. There are handful of not terrible horror scenes in here – mostly thanks to the excellent production design I believe – but as a whole this is a vague and meandering affair that never seems to be able to settle on a tone.


Quarries (2016): So it is left to Nils Taylor’s film about a ragtag group of women (Nicole Marie Johnson, Carrie Finklea, and others) on a supposedly empowering wilderness survival hike encountering your usual group of male backwoods cannibals/serial killers. Neither the women nor the human monsters are particularly original characters, but at least the protagonists are well acted and written with enough life to make one not completely disinterested in their survival. Otherwise, this is a deeply competent movie with no surprises for genre veterans or even novices. However, that it so clearly cares for these women more than a lot of its genre brethren do makes it certainly worth ninety minutes of one’s time.

Crazy Joe (1974)

Brothers Joe (Peter Boyle) – Richard Widmark admirer and playing the crazy one more than actually being it - and Richie (Rip Torn) – the calm one - and their little gang of cronies (among those a Henry Winkler who will grow awesome facial hair during the course of the movie) are low-level mob operators who don’t feel they get the respect or the money they deserve for their services. When they’re basically patted on the back for a hit they commit, they think enough is enough, attack the villa of their capo, kidnap his number two (because the capo they planned to kill escapes) and some poor unluckies, and pretend that was their plan all along.

Cue a mafia group hearing under the lead of the scheming Don Vittorio (Eli Wallach) that concludes with the decision to let the two parties sort out their crap between themselves, two different betrayals, and a tiny mafia war, and Joe ends up in jail for a bit while Richie dies as a broken man. Joe’s reading up on his existentialist philosophy in jail - resulting in an inspired scene between him and his new buddy played by Fred Williamson discussing Camus among other things - so he’s not exactly out for revenge when he gets out, but he’s also not going to let bygones be bygones.

In this short synopsis, I make Crazy Joe’s plot sound much simpler than it actually is, for while it doesn’t aim for the sort of epic grandeur Coppola went for in a certain mafia movie and its sequel, its very own more shabby type grandeur does lead to a surprisingly complicated plot that takes place over the course of ten years or so, with the film spending its time not only on mob intrigue but also taking detours in directions you don’t exactly connect with the gangster film, and that surprised me rather pleasantly when the film wasn’t just effectively stimulating my genre glands.

For, despite being as genre conscious and imitative as a film mostly made by Italians behind the camera gets, Crazy Joe is not just interested in looking and feeling like other movies of its genre but also talks a bit of existential philosophy, changing times and the people who stand against them, US race relations, and trades in ambiguity. The last two bits pay off especially well for the movie, providing Fred Williamson the opportunity to put his typical swagger to use in ways that feel more than just his usual (and liked by me, don’t get me wrong) pose, giving that part of the plot particular resonance.

The film’s ambiguity does help its characterisations out too, portraying Joe as the kind of guy who has no compunctions killing for money (as long as it is enough money) but will also risk his life saving kids from a burning house (hey, I never said the film is subtle). As portrayed by Boyle, Joe starts as a character trying to style himself after Richard Widmark’s career-making crazy man spiel in Kiss of Death and somewhat learns to change and take control of parts of his life yet still fails. Joe fails in part because he can’t really let go of the past as much as he pretends to, and in part because the structures he is enmeshed in are the kind of conservative they are foes to all change that isn’t mandated from above. So the film certainly does the bit where you can read “mafia” as “society” too.

The whole she-bang is presented by Lizzani – your typical Italian all-genre movie hired hand for most of his career – in a not unexpected direct, semi-documentary style, with many a grubby looking shot of grubby New York streets and a nice eye for the interesting background detail. While the film isn’t particularly stylish, the comparative dryness of Lizzani’s direction works well with a film that really needs to have the feel of slightly enhanced authenticity. Consequently, what there is of violence does look messy and chaotic, not as if it were done by a bad choreographer, but in a way you’d imagine real violence of this kind does look in reality, people just stumbling about trying not to die and hurt the other guy as badly as possible at the same time. The director clearly knew when he had a good thing in his actors, so there are good performances by good actors all around, with nobody even close to phoning it in, Boyle being rather brilliant and Williamson in one of his career bests (probably because the film doesn’t need him to try so hard).

Not bad for a film whose main reason for existence probably was that Dino de Laurentiis wanted his own The Godfather (and didn’t get it).

Three Films Make A Post: EVERY SECOND YOUR PULSE POUNDS THEY GROW FOOT BY INCREDIBLE FOOT!

The Pack (1977): By now, I’m quite sure that Robert Clouse’s films and my approval shall never meet beyond Gymkata. This is even the case with what should be a shoe-in as a movie to at least slightly disturb a guy like me who gets pretty nervous around larger dogs (I blame a certain Doberman of my past). Unfortunately, The Pack’s dogs never do end up making me nervous, or feel as threatening as they should, mostly because Clouse isn’t one for mood building in his direction at all. He’s pointing, he’s shooting, he’s keeping things in focus, but beyond that, I always get the impression from his films he just wasn’t that interested in them himself. That’s not much of a problem in a film as insane as Gymkata that isn’t hindered by a lack of directorial vision, but in a tepid little nature strikes back film like this, you really want someone behind the camera who works for his audience’s excitement.

But at least Joe Don Baker is in it playing, of all things, a marine biologist (don’t ask), so there’s that.

The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake (1959): This, on the other hand, is quite the thing, as macabre a 50s film as you’ll probably get to see, full of outrageous pulp ideas, and one of Edward L. Cahn’s most energetic directorial efforts.

Sure, the performances are somewhat mediocre, but who needs great thespian efforts in a film that features a most excellent shrunken head based curse and has no problems at all with throwing stuff like post-mortem decapitation, a living dead guy with stitched up lips whose bodily fluids contain more curare than blood, and another gentleman whose body belongs to a dead Amazonian tribesman and whose head is that of a mad anthropologist? This, ladies and gentlemen, is what we call art.

A Dirty Carnival (2006): Yoo Ha’s gangster film mixes the traditions of classical US gangster movies made after the fall of the US studio system and of jitsuroku style yakuza films, aiming for its own kind of stylized hyperrealism. It’s a film that knows how many gangster movies its audience has probably already seen, yet somehow still manages to aim for and hit an audience’s emotions instead of the irony glands. Which I think is a particular achievement in a film that counts a director making a gangster movie among its cast, and therefore threatens to become much too meta and self-conscious for comfort. A part of the film does indeed concern itself with truth and fiction echoing one another, but it’s done quite intelligently and with so much care, this approach enriches the film as a tale instead of resulting in the empty poses of ironic distance.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,south korean movies,in short,horror,gangster,robert clouse,joe don baker,edward l. cahn,yoo ha

Three Films Make A Post: See King Tyrant Lizards In Deadly Combat!

Okinawa Ten Year War (1978): Matsuo Akinori's jitsuroku-style yakuza movie is predominantly interesting as a demonstration of the theory that you can take all the surface elements of Kinji Fukasaku's directorial style for one of these films, and have the typically pretty great Toei stable of actors (including Sonny Chiba, with facial hair) to your disposal and still not get much of a film when your script (by Ichiro Otsu, also responsible for the equally disjointed Legend of Dinosaur and Monster Birds) is as unfocused and oblivious to the thematic potential of its own set-up (like for example the Okinawa/mainland Japan divide Fukasaku and other directors have explored in much better films ) as that at hand. Scenes seem to belong to about three different films - one of them as sentimental as the hoariest of ninkyo eiga - and though many of them are perfectly fine to look at independently, they never cohere into a whole.

Le Samourai (1967): I'm pretty sure nobody's burning to hear my verdict about a well-known classic of cinema like Jean-Pierre Melville's film, and since every film critic, amateur or professional, clever, dumb or pretentious has written about films like it, I usually just watch and shut up, because there's not much of a chance I have anything to say about them that hasn't been said before.

But (and you knew there was a but coming) Le Samourai fits so perfectly into the school of slow and theoretically boring movies that turn out to be exciting and hypnotic through their slowness and lack of action I tend to swoon over in the realm of the cheap and the shoddy, I can't help but at least mention that fact. The difference between these schools is just that where Le Samourai reaches the point of excitement through minimal action by conscious design, your typical US local indie horror of the past reached it through disinterest, lack of talent or sheer luck. The outcome is pretty much the same, though. And so there truly is not much difference between arthouse and grindhouse at all.

The Endurance (2000): This documentary about Ernest Shackleton's failed Antarctic expedition impressed me as much as it annoyed me. There's obviously an impressive amount of research behind the film. Photographs, the expedition's own film material, and newly shot footage combine into something that's often visually magical, but for my tastes, the film too often becomes a hagiography for Shackleton whose every flaw is excused as belonging to "a great man", while the flaws of the equally heroic men around him are treated without any benefit of the doubt. History's obviously still made by great men and the backs of those they were standing on.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: japanese movies,french movies,american movies,british movies,yakuza,gangster,documentary,matsuo akinori,sonny chiba,jean-pierre melville,alain delon,in short

In short: Erotic Ghost: Siren (2004)

A gang of Yakuza whose members are gifted with typical Yakuza names like Chucky and Jews has made a big robbery. The group decides to hide out in an abandoned gold mine until a boat will get them and their ill gotten gains of one and a half million dollars out of the country.

While they are picking up supplies from a girl (AV actress Sora Aoi) waiting for them by the side of the road, their quite badly tucked away loot just falls onto her. These are not the most suave of gangsters.

Obviously, the girl now knows too much and has to be kidnapped.

At their hide out, the gangsters' egos and greed start to clash something fierce. The situation isn't much helped by the fact that the poor helpless girl isn't as poor and helpless as you might think. In fact, she is a demon preying on the greed of men, driven by a healthy love for killing her victims during intercourse. She is having a fun time setting the men against each other. Which wouldn't be all that difficult with these men even without her hypnotic powers.

Another Japanese sex and horror film about a men-murdering siren? Well I'm in. This is somewhat different from Siren X in that it is not a true pinku, but a made for DVD film with a lot of sex (yes, there's a difference - namely less sex and a longer running time in this non-pinku).

The film's main selling point is of course Sora Aoi, who (besides being really rather hot when she puts her mind to it) has a strange screen presence perfectly fitting for this role. Her fluctuation between a weird zoned-outness and inappropriate girlyness wouldn't work in your typical drama, but for a mythical creature her demeanor seems perfectly appropriate. I am in fact a bit reminded of Christina Lindberg, whose performances mostly weren't "good" by acting school standards, yet who was able to inhabit her roles through a combination of presence and intelligence.

The rest of Siren is mostly alright. The male actors are all doing their jobs professionally, the script is a little talky and could have used a re-write by someone who hasn't seen quite so many other movies (although I liked the references to Reservoir Dogs), or at least someone who didn't feel the need to throw the fact in your face.

Satoshi Torao's direction is good enough in a cheap hand-camera-loving way. He sometimes uses the dreaded digital colour filters to better, less annoying effect than usual, but mostly he seems to be trying to keep the film's obvious low budget in check and the talking head scenes dynamic through movement.

All in all, I found this to be a perfectly entertaining little film in the classical exploitation manner, which is a lot more than I usually expect from anything shot directly for the DVD market.

 

Technorati-Tags: japanese movies,gangster,horror,erotica,sora aoi,in short

In short: Get Carter (1971)

London gangster Jack Carter (Michael Caine) returns to his Northern industrial hometown to find out the truth about the supposed accidental death of his straight brother Frank. His London bosses don't want him to make a mess by crossing their local partners, but once pointed in the direction he will go, Jack isn't somebody who can be dissuaded by anything.

Get Carter is a rather very cynical gangster/revenge flick from the bizarre filmography of Mike Hodges, and probably the director's best one at that. Influenced by film noir, John Boorman's Point Blank and the painful ugliness of its setting, Caine's Carter walks through the film as someone who does not give a shit about himself anymore; he hasn't, as his gaze tells us, for a long time. When the few things he actually cares about are destroyed, he answers with the only things he truly understands: violence of the very casual kind and a rage he neatly holds in its cage until the opportune moment to let it out has come.

Hodges seems to find a certain delight in showing us some of the most consequent and least moral acts of vengeance that can be found on film, all too fitting for the city where they take place, itself an act of architectural violence.

A slight leavening of the blackest of humor only emphasizes the meanness and hopelessness of the film. I'm not sure if hopelessness is even a fitting word for the world Get Carter creates. Hopelessness implies at least the existence of hope - Hodges is not that optimistic here.

Another thing I found rather remarkable was the fact that the film avoids the temptation to let the viewer identify with its protagonist - we're there to gaze into the abyss, not become it.

Technorati-Tags: british movies,mike hodges,michael caine,gangster,in short