Pale Flower (1964)

Yakuza Muraki (Ryo Ikebe) has just been released from prison after a three year stint for a gang war killing. He quickly gets back into his old life of crime, spiced with a lot of existential ennui. Little in life appears to interest him, and even yakuza fun isn’t actually any fun to him. He’s going through the motions of the life, of course, for what else is there? Muraki is ignoring the clan politics around him as well, which, as not just the later jitsuroku eiga have taught us, is always a problem for a yakuza on the lower rungs of the ladder.

Muraki develops something like an actual interest when he meets Saeko (Mariko Kaga), an at least moderately rich girl slumming it in the low life, obsessed with gambling. Saeko carries herself with the same emotional detachment as Muraki, with the excitement of ever higher gambling stakes about the only thing that seems to bring her to life. Clearly, these two are made for each other, or made to make each others’ lives all the shorter.

Masahiro Shinoda’s Pale Flower is a venerated classic of Japanese new wave cinema, by a director who would often tend to work within genre pushing its boundaries outward from the inside. As far as I understand it – I’ve not seen as much Shinoda as I probably should have – this is Shinoda’s first really artistically out there movie, made for Shochiku but not really inside of its production machine. So there’s freedom for Shinoda not to make a typical ninkyo eiga and also fewer of the studio constraints someone like Seijun Suzuki had to fight against even with a more pop minded studio as Nikkatsu.

The result is an often icily cool movie, driven by a strangely nightmarish score by Toru Takemitsu and a visual style that’s a perfect early 60s interpretation of noir. It takes place in an archetypal Tokyo of night people, populated with characters who have lost all drive for change, and probably all belief in even wanting something like change and thus just drift along, desperately grasping for any sensation that might actually make them feel again, even though this is the clearest road to their own destruction.

The acting here is just as icy and minimal as you’d expect, big expressive gestures buried under the characters’ internal ice. However, even though their characters are frozen inside and out, Ikebe and Kaga project this lack of emotion with great intensity which seems to nearly explode in the gambling scenes. Consequently, these sequences are incredibly sexually loaded, even more so than usual with gambling scenes.

Pale Flower is a perfect film of its kind, dominated by a sense of hopelessness that it’s hard for me not to call exquisite, beautiful in the way of flowers just about to die, something its protagonists would very much approve of.

The Creature Called Man (1970)

Original title: Jaga wa hashitta

The dictator of a fictional Asian country the subtitles dub “Southnesia” (still better than DC Comics’s Quraq) has managed to flee from the enraged revolution that toppled his government. He’s bound for the USA to build a government in exile (and most probably to milk money from the CIA tit for his own re-coup). However, because his flight was organized by a big Japanese corporation (and because he used a lot of Japanese soldiers who couldn’t get enough of the killing after World War II in the coup that initially brought him to power), his first port of call is Japan.

Because the Japanese police apparently has a “don’t shoot first” policy, his superiors encourage top cop and former Olympic shooter Toda (Yuzo Kayama) to officially step down, and unofficially become their very own killer of the killers the revolutionaries have most certainly sent after the dictator. Outfitted with a souped up VW Beetle (!) and a Mauser – a gun a lot of Japanese movies of this kind really adore - with a silencer, Toda certainly is a force of murder to be reckoned with when it comes to the revolutionaries. However, there’s also a true professional killer involved - Kujo (Jiro Tamiya). Ironically, Kujo was hired by the same company that brought the dictator out after the new government agreed to honour some arms deals of the old guy. But then, the film not so subtly argues, as long as money’s to be made on other people’s suffering, big corporations don’t care too much for yesterday’s business partners.

Toda and Kujo descend into one of those classical duels between killers. During the course of the film, the professional killer regains parts of his humanity through a complicated – and baggaged with some dubious consent business because this is a 70s Japanese movie about manly men who are too weak to take no for an answer – relationship to a woman (Nancy Sommers), while the policeman loses most of the innocence he still had.

At first, Kiyoshi Nishimura’s The Creature Called Man seems to treat the political, moral and emotional background for its pretty wonderful action sequences in a style akin to contemporary men’s adventure manga like Golgo-13 (still waiting on a decent movie adaptation, by the way) – as a mere backdrop that may ground proceedings at a particular place and time but is pretty much interchangeable.

In truth, the film’s just comparatively subtle early on, taking its time to present Toda and Kujo as admirable men of violence with no pesky emotional attachments and no politics who are really good at their jobs. Which, incidentally, seems to be the way these two define themselves in front of their respective mirrors.

Only once the film has shown the audience how these men see themselves and explain their actions to themselves does it start to show us the small hypocrisies and the potentials for change in their behaviour, deconstructing Toda’s stoic willingness to kill for a cause that isn’t his own (or really, anyone’s but the dictator’s) until he eventually even accidentally murders an innocent without consequences, and reconstructing Kujo as a human being through something that doesn’t even start as an act of kindness but still turns into one. Much of this seems to prefigure the emotional interests and arcs common to Hong Kong’s later heroic bloodshed films, and I wouldn’t at all be surprised if this specific film as well as some of its late movie aesthetic choices were a conscious influence on John Woo or Tsui Hark.

Politically, the film becomes acerbic towards all good causes that eventually only cause loss of innocent life (with a brutal nod towards all the hot wars driven by the cold one), and is not always quietly disgusted by all those ways suffering can be turned into profit or real violence fetishized, as shown by a translator and evilcorp assistant played by Mariko Kaga.

All of this is embedded into a cracking good early 70s Toho action movie full of excellently staged – and increasingly big – action that always keeps the personal level of Toda and Kujo in mind too. The inevitable final showdown between the two – of course after a friendly chat – turns a simple warehouse showdown into a crescendo of slow motion, brutal jazz, and one of the best timed moment of absolute silence I have had the pleasure to encounter in this sort of scene, providing an appropriately epic feel to the climax of a film that aims and hits much higher than it at first appears to.