Kanto Street Peddlers: Clan Violent Loyalty (1970)

After having spent only a couple of years behind bars for his role in the climax of the first movie, Bunta Sugawara now roams Japan in this second movie of the street peddling focussed ninkyo eiga series to keep out of Tokyo trouble.

As will surprise nobody who ever watched a ninkyo eiga or two, Bunta soon falls in with group of deeply honourable street peddling yakuza who control an important festival site, but are beleaguered by the intrigues and occasional casual violence of a gang of proper baddy yakuza who want to get at that turf and its riches by any means necessary.

This sequel was again directed by Norifumi Suzuki, who spent a lot of his time in the ninkyo realm before he found his true calling in pinky violence and dubious comedy.

Here we find the director pulling his preferred comedy shenanigans back for much of the film beyond a couple of comical interludes. Instead he concentrates on melodrama and bad yakuza nastiness (even in the less extreme ninkyo eiga variant of the yakuza movie, things could get a bit unpleasant at this point in time, as long as only the villains were doing the really bad stuff). Despite some inelegant shuffling out of and into the movie of characters – some actors probably shot another movie for Toei in parallel, or ten – the film is rather more focussed than its predecessor. This provides Suzuki with opportunity to put more effort into creating more complex character relations and go deeper into the politics of the street peddler world. All this is then used to make the melodrama more intense once the shit hits the fan, until everything culminates in the expected beautiful bloodbath.

That climax isn’t quite as wonderfully done as the one in the first Kanto Street Peddlers, though Suzuki still puts a lot of effort into creating an energetic fight that doesn’t use the standard by the book camera set-ups or blocking of such scenes. In general, Suzuki appears very interested in using all kinds of tricks to make the genre standards Seiko Shimura’s script goes through visually memorable and through this emotionally involving. This works rather well for the movie, and also demonstrates a side of the directors that’s easy to overlook when he’s throwing naked female wrestlers and pratfalls at the camera: he’s genuinely good at the quiet emotional moments, and knows how to provide the Toei stable of thespians with openings to really strut their stuff. As it usually goes when a director does this, they repay him with giving a little extra.

Three Films Make A Post: Getting in is hard, getting out is hell.

Do Not Enter (2026): A group of YouTube Urban Explorers get in over their heads when they enter an old abandoned hotel where they’ll not only have to cope with a violent group of rivals led by an ex-colleague but also a mysterious murdering monster (Javier Botet doing his usual shtick).

Surprisingly enough, director Marc Klasfeld doesn’t stage this as a piece of POV horror – there’s only very little footage of the sort in here – but shoots it like a “proper movie”. Which seems like a curious decision, given the set-up, but then, this is not a film demonstrating too many sensible behind the camera decisions. All changes to the clockwork-tight David Morell novel this is based on are either superficial modernizations the movie then does nothing of use with, or feel made to slow things down and make them less interesting. The sets are pretty nice, and if you’re into heart-based gore, there’s something for your specific kink in here, but otherwise, this is such a generic piece of cinema, one might just as well not bother with it.

Kanto Street Peddlers aka Kantô Tekiya ikka (1969): At their height, even the more mediocre and generic outings of Japanese studios like this contemporary ninkyo eiga about battling street peddlers produced by Toei and directed by Norifumi Suzuki, were impossibly entertaining.

This does waver sometimes awkwardly between earnest, leftist, ninkyo and the kind of goofy nonsense comedy Suzuki loved so much to drag into every single one of his films, but also contains a bunch of Toei house actors – Bunta Sugwara is our hero, Minoru Oki is actually playing a good guy; Bin Amatsu at least is still evil – I can’t help but love to watch even in lesser material, and looks and feels so much of its time and place it is fascinating even when it isn’t exactly good and a bit slow. Plus, this ends on a fantastic climax that hits all the ninkyo clichés – our hero strutting manly through the rain to the final slaughter while he sings terribly on the soundtrack – which it presents with much verve, imagination – the POV shot start to the battle alone is worth the whole movie – and all the blood one could wish for.

Bored Hatamoto – The Mansion of Intrigue aka Riddle of the Snake Princess’ Mansion (1957): This is still the earliest (between the 22nd and the 25th, depending on source) in the long-running series of jidai-geki pulp detective films starring Utaemon Ichikawa as the titular hero with the moon-shaped scar you can find with English subtitles.

It’s not one of my particular favourites of the series – three comic relief characters plus a teen sidekick are a bit much for me even though we get a really good seppuku joke late in proceedings – but there’s still a lot to like here. Director Yasushi Sasaki stages some fine battles (we’re still in the bloodless and noiseless stage of screen fighting in Japan here), there are Japanese actors in whiteface pretending to be Dutch, and there’s a wonderful pulpy energy to proceedings, all dominated by Ichikawa’s commanding presence. Plus, as if this were a 70s Bollywood masala, our hero infiltrates the main villain’s lair by taking part in a sweet dance number.

An Ode to Yakuza (1970)

aka Yakuza Masterpiece

aka The Big Pay-Off

Original title: Yakuza zesshô

Mid-level yakuza Minoru (Shintaro Katsu) hasn’t ever met a problem he didn’t solve with violence. Even though this does lead to a degree of respect among his thuggish brothers, he is not a man equipped for much of a visible emotional range between rage and the kind of nastiness you’d expect this kind of man to show towards, say, women like his girlfriend Kanae (Kiwako Taichi).

The only exception here is Minoru’s eighteen years old half-sister Akane (Naoko Otani), whom he has taken care of since she was a little girl. To Akane, he’s about as sweet and kind as he can be, or at least he believes he is. To the outside observer he’s controlling and overbearing, trying to run his sister’s life even though she’s very well equipped to have more than just a little say in her own life story. In truth, Akane can’t help but notice an undertone of more than just brotherly affection from him, something, to be fair to the guy, Minoru can’t even quite admit to himself. Obviously, he is driving away every man interested in Akane is merely because he is being protective, right?

When the film starts, Akane has just about had enough of the whole thing, and decides the best way to get Minoru off her case is to seduce one of her teachers, so Minoru will have to stop seeing her as a pure, little girl.

Which isn’t even the emotional breaking point of Yasuzo Masumura’s pretty incredible melodrama, but a good enough point to understand where the director is going with his film.

Seen from a certain perspective, the tiny yakuza sub-plot and the film’s title(s) can seem stitched on to an intense, somewhat sleazy melodrama, but really, is there a better example for a kind of traditional patriarchal brutishness that treats excluding (at best), using, and mistreating women as a matter of principle than the yakuza?

And isn’t is exactly this sort of social machinery that drives the – most often at least quietly feminist – genre of the melodrama? So this isn’t so much a case of Masumura cheating with labels as him looking at the yakuza world from an angle even critical traditional yakuza movies tend to avoid.

This is, social aspects aside, of course also a film about people who drive each other to desperation out of ideas about love and identity that can’t come together, love – and Minoru and Akane do indeed love one another in their ways – that can only express itself destructively, and acts of escape that only make everyone’s situation that much worse.

All of this is driven by Masumura’s subtly heated direction that seems to trap his characters in the abyss of their own feelings, but also by two fantastic central performances. Katsu – one of the all-time greats in Japanese genre cinema not just because of the Zatoichi films – manages to make Minoru brutal, ugly, and genuinely disgusting, but also as sad and lost as any man you’d care to imagine, controlled by pressures internal and external he genuinely can neither grasp nor understand; whereas the very young Otani shows Akane’s intelligence and courage, her awakening understanding of love and her own sexuality as well as the way her brother’s brokenness has already begun to cause cracks in herself as a complex web of emotions she desperately needs to escape.

So, Yakuza Masterpiece is the proper title for this, even though the deeply ironic An Ode to Yakuza is probably the better one.

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.

Noboru Ando’s Chronicle of Fugitive Days and Sex (1976)

Following an attack on a business man he ordered, gang leader – historically he wasn’t a “proper” yakuza - Noboru Ando (Noboru Ando) has to go on the run. A process that consists of a lot of drinking, watching TV, and spending time at all of his many girlfriends’ places. Most of these women love Ando very much indeed, so he has to cope not just with proving his potency again and again, but also fending off various attempts from the various ladies to follow him on the lam.

As you may or may not know, before he became an actor, Noboru Ando was an actual criminal, clearly a darling of the Japanese yellow press, and just as clearly pretty damn awesome at building his own public mythology, like a John Ford western character gone mad. This isn’t even the first movie to dramatize the misadventure that earned Ando the prison sentence which in turn earned him his acting career, but it certainly is the first and only one based on the decision to turn the whole affair into a mix of standard yakuza tropes, some broad satire, and pinku style sex.

Directed by softcore auteur Noboru Tanaka, this puts a heavy emphasis on typically highly unerotic – and often very funny - sex scenes during which Ando does his very best not to move a single facial muscle. Does he enjoy the act as much as his writhing, moaning, love-sick partners do? He certainly ain’t telling. Also appearing are a “sexy”, hot dog based dance (not committed by Ando, because not even yakuzasploitation like this would be that cruel), tuberculosis jokes (I got nothing), and a climactic fight during which a very young looking Renji Ishibashi holds off the police while Ando attempts to finish a bit of spontaneous sex with a random partner. Which he doesn’t manage, so we finish on an indelible scene of Ando jerking off in a police car while cops look on, displeased. Again, I’ve got nothing.

If you’re of a certain mindset, this will make Chronicle sound like a slam-dunk of the weird and the wonderful – and I haven’t even mentioned the scene of Ando and Ishibashi walking a beach philosophising about being bacteria in the national host body. Indeed, when the movie is on point – particularly during its final twenty minutes or so – it is quite the experience of smut, absurdity and weird energy. But it is also slow, lacking in any dramatic progression or tension, and incredibly repetitive – watching Ando not moving a facial muscle during sex one time is great, watching this ten times causes it to lose a considerable amount of its lustre, so the whole thing is more than just a bit of a slog.

Still, the idea of the film alone is worth some mind space and time, and the moments when Chronicle of Fugitive Days and Sex is as bizarre as it promises to be make up for all that unsexy sex and scenes of watching characters watch TV, at least to a degree.

A True Story of the Ginza Private Police (1973)

Original title: 実録・私設銀座警察

1946, Ginza shortly after the end of World War II. A group of traumatized and incredibly violent soldiers realize – as much as these guys have the self-consciousness for it – their shared nihilism. Thus enabled to embrace their worst selves, they begin taking over the district’s organized crime business through rape, murder and all kinds of blunt-force trauma.

After a time, when Japan starts to stabilize a little, and hunger and desperation become less of a valid factor (or excuse) for vile deeds, the comparatively less insane Iketani (Noboru Ando) strikes out on his own to build a somewhat more civilized criminal empire based on blackmail and rather more controlled violence. Something a group whose main killer is a drug-addicted soldier (Tsunehiko Watase) who murdered a baby and beat his wife to death in the film’s opening scene cannot offer.

I’m not often going around calling films “nihilistic”, but Junya Sato’s early entry in the cycle of ripped from the headlines, “realistic” jitsuroku yakuza cycle is absolutely that. From that still shocking beginning you really have to see to believe to an ending where everybody loses in the most brutal manner and the world clearly doesn’t care whatsoever, this is feel bad cinema of the highest (lowest?) calibre. The characters are all pieces of shit – whose lack of humanity is explained but never excused by their war trauma – doing horrible things to innocent and guilty alike for the whole of the film’s running time with a complete lack of remorse, moving through a society too tired and bitter to even react to them with the proper outrage or willingness to defend itself against what they embody.

The fruits of their crimes are the most basic creature comforts, and the greatest plan anybody of them can imagine is to grab more and more power he’ll perhaps sometimes use to finance an underling marrying his mistress – and even that will cost a lot of people their lives.

Sato portrays post-War Ginza as an utter hellhole without human kindness or even the good old beauty growing from the gutter – there is nothing here to strive for, no happiness, no future, and a past that’s just going to make the characters more angry at the world and themselves.

Visually, this is an absolute assault on the senses with a blaring free jazz score and later some freeform noise ascribed to Masanobu Higurashi over jittery handheld camera and barely a scene that isn’t drenched in mud, blood, or screams. The film is so intense, the violence still so direct, it borders on an actual assault on the audience. True Story is absolutely relentless, daring its viewers to look.

It’s a masterpiece of its kind, though perhaps not the kind of film to watch when you’re already on a low point of your opinion on humanity.

Winter’s Flower (1978)

Original title: Fuyu no hana

After fifteen years spent in prison for murdering a friend and traitor to his group, yakuza Kano (Ken Takakura) is released.

Not much awaits him outside. Well, there’s an empty apartment bought for him as a make-up gift for his sacrifice, and, for complicated reasons, the now teenage daughter of the man he killed. While he was in prison, Kano wrote letters “from Brazil” to the girl, pretending to be her uncle, while providing her with money and protection through his yakuza friends. Now, outside, he’s circling around the borders of her life. She has turned into a symbol of a life not lived where guilt and the daughter he never had meet, and he’s sad and wise enough to know that actually meeting the girl would not lead anywhere good.

So the sad middle-aged man goes back to the yakuza life. He’s doing so only reluctantly, and he is encountering old friends and associates that mostly seem just as dissatisfied with it as he is, just less conscious of how much they are going nowhere. Unlike Kano, they are blaming the times instead of themselves.

Mirroring what happened fifteen years ago, there’s pressure for Kano’s group to unite with another, bigger, more powerful, more modern and more ruthless one. Very much despite of himself(or is it because of himself?), Kano is letting himself be drawn into repeating the same bad choices he made when he probably didn’t know any better.

Yasuo Furuhata’s Winter’s Flower is very typical of the yakuza films Ken Takakura starred in at this stage in his career, when the genre wasn’t as successful anymore, and Takakura had been doing predominantly other types of films for quite some time. In the yakuza films he still made, often directed by Furuhata, and not really fitting into the ninkyo/jitsuroku divide, Takakura was always a man of his actual age, either having left the yakuza life only to be drawn in again, or not quite managing to in the first place.

These are films dominated by a quiet, very middle-aged, sadness and melancholia. It’s not the railing at the skies of the young, but the quieter kind of desperation of lives badly spent, promises broken and hopes that have just faded away, perhaps alleviated by a hope for some kind of simple, quiet contentment that the men in these films inevitably can’t quite keep their grips on. These are qualities Takakura embodied as much as those of the upright yakuza of his earlier years, with a subtle, and never whiny, gravitas that feels as if it came from lived experience – his performances in this part of career are all deep gazes and small gestures as far away from melodrama as possible, and feel as true to an actual inner life expressed this way as I can imagine.

This is how Winter’s Flower works as a whole – there are opportunities to great melodrama and violence in the plot, but Furuhata decides to focus on quieter readings of situations and characters that develop the pull of truthfulness by an insistence on quietly observing Kano and his world. Melodrama is for the young, and this is a movie neither about, nor for, them, and so the unflashy, steady direction doesn’t try to sell this tale to them.

As a middle-aged guy myself, I can relate.

Three Films Make A Post: So, what does Jirocho do, exactly?

The Kingdom of Jirocho 4 (1965): In this final of four Jirocho movies starring the great Koji Tsuruta and directed by Masahiro Makino, things change: about half of the characters are recast – generally not for the better – and something like focus appears, one might even say this one’s got a plot. Tonally, there’s still quite a bit of the funny business, but much of the film is taken over by Jirocho’s wife slowly and very dramatically dying of what I can only assume is consumption.

The production as a whole feels cheaper, and rather like a project everyone involved was trying to get over with as quickly as possible. However, there are still enough aesthetically or emotionally pleasing moments here to make this a somewhat satisfying viewing, at least if you’re into ninkyo eiga.

Magnificent Trio (1966): This isn’t exactly one of the more spectacular offerings from Chang Cheh’s early wuxia phase. Its actual emotional and moral core lies surprisingly enough with the female characters – particularly those played by Margaret Tu Chuan and Chin Ping – but this being a Chang Cheh joint, he puts emphasis on the much less interesting business of his male trio, of whom only Lo Lieh’s doubtful hero is actually interesting. There are bits and pieces in the background of Jimmy Wang Yu’s and Cheng Lei’s characters that could be thematically interesting but the film never really gets into those.

What’s left is a decent mid-60s Shaw Brothers wuxia – that’s still nothing to sneeze at.

Para Betina Pengikut Iblis: Part 2 aka The Female Followers of the Devil: Part 2 (2024): Rako Prijanto doubles down on the insanity of the first part of the story, and tries to squeeze even more melodramatic acting, trashy yet awesome gore, and general disreputable mayhem in, while also adding a bit of religion, fights between the now three Female Followers, a bit of a demonic zombie apocalypse and martial arts of doubtful quality.

If that doesn’t sound like a good time to you, dear imaginary reader, I don’t know what to say.

Blood of Revenge (1965)

Original title: 明治侠客伝 三代目襲名

Osaka in the late Meiji period, quite literally the end of an era in Japan. Upright Asajiro (Koji Tsuruta) is the right-hand man of his yakuza clan boss. The boss really wants his clan operations turn away from criminality and become completely straight. To achieve this, he attempts to build up a fully legal construction business, hopefully eventually to be put under the leadership of his immature son, guided by Asajiro. Alas, the actually legal construction business that is their main rival goes in exactly the other direction and has financed their own yakuza clan.

These fully-owned criminals are of course not at all honourable, assassinate the clan boss and do their darndest to destroy Asajiro’s clan by means subtle and direct. As if trying to do legal business and straighten out a young fool weren’t enough of a job for a man.

Parallel to this, we witness the doomed – this is a ninkyo eiga, after all - romance between Asajiro and prostitute Hatsue (Junko Fuji, here in one of her final completely traditionally female coded roles of this part of her career) – it certainly doesn’t help the case of their love that the head of the evil yakuza clan wants to claim Hatsue as his own. Words of aggressive possession used deliberately.

Tai Kato was of course one of the masters of the ninkyo eiga form. In this particularly wonderful effort, the violence plays second fiddle to the melodrama of Asajiro attempting to drag his people into a new age that will make men like himself obsolete, and the riveting and moving love story between Hatsue and him. Both plot lines can only end in painful sacrifice and death, obviously. As always, we’ll never learn if the sacrifice does at least achieve what it’s meant to.

Usually, the Tsuruta/Fuji pairing isn’t terribly strong when it comes to Fuji and Toei’s main romantic male leads – it might be the age difference, or simply chemistry – but here, both actors project an intensity and eventually a quiet desperation that’s as exquisitely stylized as it paradoxically feels completely real and authentic. Kato appears to have had a rather great hand with his actors, getting their best and most subtle efforts, even if they’re shooting their fifth ninkyo of the year.

In general, Kato’s films don’t treat the romance plots as obligatory elements to include on the way to the climactic violence, but treats this aspect of the human heart with full seriousness, which does tend to make everything surrounding it more emotionally involving as well.

When the violence comes, it is stark and effective, chaotic yet precisely staged, shot with intensity as well as artsy angles, carrying weight – often the weight of real violence and that of satisfying genre violence at the same time, as if it were easy to do it that way.

Kato does of course include a quietly spectacular bit of action on a train (I believe I have yet to see a Kato movie without at least some prominent train tracks in an important scene), and quite a few of his famed low angle shots, but Blood of Revenge also amply demonstrates some of his other specialities as a director – the organisation of large groups of people in a frame, the economical yet dynamic editing – the first scene is a masterclass in both – and the ability to know when to choose movement and when to choose stillness in any given scene.

That last ability seems to be particularly important in the ninkyo eiga, with its insistence on a kind of stoicism that in the end always dissolves in quick and brutal violence.

Three Films Make A Post: Their thoughts can kill!

Scanners (1981): This is sometimes treated as one of the lesser movies in David Cronenberg’s incredible run as a director from 1977 to 1996, but there’s so much to love in this version of the 70s conspiracy thriller as seen through the eyes of Philip K. Dick. Performances that are spot on or so weird they actually are spot on exactly because of their weirdness (Stephen Lack), a plot that starts in the realm of semi-plausible spy-fi but drifts further and further into the realm of the outright surreal, and a direction whose by now proverbial cool eye is all that stands between the material and utter, screaming lunacy. Plus, exploding heads are inherently cool (unless it’s your own head exploding).

Closed Circuit aka Circuito chiuso (1978): This Italian TV movie by Giuliano Montaldo does overstay its welcome a little, so that its turn from the locked room murder mystery to the outright fantastical doesn’t hit quite as hard as it could in a more concentrated form, but there’s much to recommend it: a clear love for the cinema experience of the time grounded in an ability to actually show the way cinemas at this time and place worked procedurally, a cast that has fun with the range of characters (all with secrets that have nothing to do with the case, of course) on offer, and the joy of seeing that most mock-rational of genres (as much as I have grown to enjoy golden age style murder mysteries, their ideas about logic and reason are utter nonsense) break down into the realm of the kind of fantasy that admits it is one.

The Kingdom of Jirocho aka Jirocho sangokushi (1963): This is the first film in the second cycle of films Masahiro Makino made about yakuza boss Shimizu Jirocho (Koji Tsuruta) – a real historical figure that had turned into something of a folk hero, and the embodiment of that most ridiculous of ideas, the good yakuza, honourably helping solve problems wherever he goes. This is really all set-up, showing the first meetings between Jirocho and the core members of his clan, but it does its business in such a light-handed and fun way, I hardly missed the presence of an actual plot.

Makino, apparently well-known for being a quick worker, clearly isn’t a sloppy one. Rather, there’s a lot of camera and character movement here, so much so, you’re never surprised when the protagonists break into song, as they regularly (though not quite regularly enough to call this a musical) do. There’s a joyous quality to the whole thing, unexpected from a film that finds a director repeating a greatest hit.

For fans of 60s/70s Toei ninkyo eiga – as I certainly am – there’s the additional joy of encountering a lot of the usual character and side actors, as well as a very very young Junk Fuji as a flirtatious bar maid (and alas not the female lead).

Three Films Make A Post: Toei Triple Threat

Kingdom of Jirocho 2 (1963): For large swathes of its running time, this second of Masahiro Makino’s remakes of his own material leaves behind honourable yakuza Jirocho (still Koji Tsuruta) in favour of the misadventures of “comedic” stuttering yakuza Ishi, and really strained my patience there. Apart from how badly stuttering-based humour has aged – it’s about as funny as US 30s films’ “cowardly black people” humour, so very much not at all – there’s a meandering quality to these scenes, very much leaving one with the feeling that half of this film is filler. Which is particularly disappointing because the other half is perfectly entertaining light ninkyo eiga business with one hell of a cast.

Kingdom of Jirocho 3 (1964): That last bit is also what makes the entertaining part of this third film. While there’s decidedly less – but still too much - of Ishi going around the third film mostly suffers from a lack of focus. There are perfectly cromulent subplots and even a bit of actual dramatic tension in the main plot, but there’s also a lot of side business that mostly feels unimportant and typically not terribly interesting.

Consequently, instead of an actual climax – what would be the climax in less woozy movie comes about an hour into the ninety minute film – we get another to be continued ending. Sure, part of the reason for this is the TV show like format in which these movies were produced, but it often feels as if the scripts were written while shooting on the film was already on the way.

Case of Umon: Red Lizard (1962): The Umon films, with Ryutaro Otomo in the title role, were one of several shogunate era samurai detective series. I have more experience with the somewhat darker Bored Hatamoto films, but my first foray into the adventures of this less pretend-lazy detective – in a film directed by Sadatsugu Matsuda who directed his first feature in 1928 and his last one in 1969 – is certainly promising. There’s some of the moody, near-gothic staging you get in many a Japanese mystery on screen, pulpy ideas like Edgar Wallace on speed (a killer known as the Red Lizard who is accompanied by a raven is certainly keeping in the spirit), some decent swordplay, and an actually pretty interesting mystery. Even better, the final sequence during which our detective explains what has been going on takes place during a stage play he has had a playwright write for the occasion.

Brave Red Flower of the North (1970)

Original title: Nihon jokyo-den: makka na dokyo-bana 日本女侠伝 真赤な度胸花

Following the death of her estranged father in Hokkaido, Yuki (Junk Fuji) travels to the frontier he tried to tame by building a horse-breeding based economy where attempts at farming had not worked out too well. At least in his opinion.

The local horse-breeding association wants her to take her father’s place as their head to counter attempts of the yakuza-industrial complex – enemies in many a ninkyo eiga of the genre’s late stages – to take control of the area.

At first, Yuki isn’t too happy about that, but she’s played by Fuji at the heights of her star power, so she’s too morally upright not to decide to finish what her father started.

Obviously, the other side is not going to play fair, so quite a bit of violence and suffering lies ahead until our heroine is allowed to commit her own, final acts of violence against her enemies. Along the way, she befriends some ainu, breaks hearts, and has one of those longing with burning gazes and hot virtuous speeches relationships of the style we know and love with a somewhat mysterious stranger (Ken Takakura). Of course, the man has reasons to hate her family, yet oh! the honour! and oh! the barely repressed sexuality! It’s ninkyo eiga relationship perfection.

During my recent illness, I somehow stumbled into a Junko Fuji ninkyo eiga phase. Because fever is that way, quite a few of those films have by now dissolved in my mind into a mix of tears, blood and close-ups of Fuji’s face, so there will, alas, not be a series of write-ups of all eight Red Peony Gambler movies coming up this year.

In any case, this late period of ninkyo at Toei, centring around the incredible Fuji, the house troupe of character actors, romantic male leads like the triple threat of Takakura, Bunta Sugawara and Koji Tsuruta and great directors like Tai Kato, Kosaku Yamashita, Shigero Ozawa and this films Yasuo Furuhata is an incredible group of movies. Between 1968 and her too early retirement in 1972 (and her later reappearance as Sumiko Fuji), Fuji specifically does not appear to have starred in a single weak or even just middling film – everything she appeared in was good to golden.

Typically, the ninkyo eiga version of the yakuza film is treated as a rather limited genre, with too many strict beats to hold to, conservative and old-fashioned in its mores. But when you watch a lot of these films in close succession, you can actually see how different they are working inside their handful of rules. As long as your heroes and heroines are chivalric and everything ends in a ritualized bit of slaughter, there’s rather a lot of different things to be done in-between. It certainly helps that yakuza in the realm of the ninkyo does not need mean gambler or gangster, but also concerns all kinds of people that are part of the non-farming working class – coal-mining, transporting businesses and the entertainment world are all part of this world in one way or the other.

Or, in this case, horse-breeding. Stylistically, this is actually a successful attempt at mixing the ninkyo with the western (or, given the weather and geographical location, the northern), featuring the kind of musical score that mixes typical Toei style with Italian western trumpets, and features lots of horse-riding, and an emphasis on gunplay in the western style (though Fuji does get a couple of aikido moments, as is her right).

As many good ninkyo of this phase, this isn’t a film of quite as clear-cut morals than you’d expect. Yuki is as morally upright as any Fuji character – which only works because the actress is utterly convincing as the impossible ideal she is tasked to play again and again in these films – but the world around her isn’t quite as clear-cut. Her father certainly had good intentions, but we will learn he used methods not unlike those now utilized by Yuki’s enemies – the frontier business isn’t a clean one even with the best of intentions.

As always when Fuji and Takakura are together, there’s an impressive erotic tension for a genre whose loves are nearly always doomed and only seldom allowed to be expressed physically – there’s a reason these two were in so many movies together.

Three Films Make A Post: The monkey that likes killing our family …it's back.

The Monkey (2025): It has finally happened – Oz Perkins made a movie I don’t adore. In fact, I’d go as far as calling this bit of monkey business based on a Stephen King short genuinely bad. It’s the kind of horror comedy that believes a handful of gore gags and watching a bunch of characters the film itself can’t seem to find any interest in do little of note somehow does a movie make; that making this thin bit of nothing look slick (Perkins certainly doesn’t suddenly stop being a technically accomplished director) and professional somehow helps things along; that watching a film torture characters it clearly loathes for laughs is somehow funny.

Dark Nuns (2025): This takes place in the same nonsense version of exorcist South Korean Catholicism as The Priests. As such, I was hoping for a film with an equal amount of involuntary humour as that dubious bit of horror. Alas, Kwon Hyeok-jae’s spin-off doesn’t reach the heights of a movie whose dramatic climax is priests hunting for a possessed piglet; it is certainly as pompously self-serious as the original film, but never becomes quite weird enough with it to be interesting.

As a straightforward horror film, this suffers from the fact its – not completely uninteresting – attempt at mixing Shamanist and Catholic exorcism movie tropes only leads to double the amount of clichés, as much effort as poor Song Hye-kyo as a renegade exorcist nun puts into the whole thing.

International Gang of Kobe aka Kobe Kokusai Gang (1975): With Noboru Tanaka taking time out from his brilliant Roman Porn work for Nikkatsu to make a jitsuroku style yakuza film for Toei, and Ken Takakura and Bunta Sugawara in the leads, this should by all rights be a slam dunk. Despite appropriate amounts of sex and violence, it isn’t, alas. There’s a lack of focus and coherence, and while some scenes look and feel well enough, they never cohere into much of a whole. Even Takakura’s and Sugawara’s performances seem slightly distracted and off, as if the filmmakers couldn’t decide if they needed them to act or to take on their star personas, leaving them adrift somewhere in the limbo between these states.

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.

In short: Deadman Inferno (2015)

aka Z Island

Original title: Zアイランド, Z Airando

Ten years after the usual raid and revenge cycle left yakuza boss Hiroya Munakata (Sho Aikawa) with few friends, expelled from the yakuza, with a bad leg, and having to go through the indignity of honest work, his best underling Takashi (Shingo Tsurumi) gets out of jail. Munakata has been taking care of Takashi’s daughter Hinata (Maika Yamamoto) for all these years. Alas, the girl’s a teen, so she isn’t awaiting her father with open arms to mend things between them but has run off with her best friend Seira (Erina Mizuno) to go to a place called Zeni Island that holds sentimental value to the family.

Unfortunately, Zeni Island also turns out to be the place of a fresh zombie outbreak (apparently caused by a combination of the flu and homebrew drugs). Now, the teen girls turn out to be rather competent martial artists, but it clearly is still a good thing the ex-yakuza are coming for them, also bringing with them Hinata’s mum Sakura (Sawa Suzuki), also rather good in a fight.

To make matters more difficult than a mere zombie problem, also making their way to the island are exactly the particularly nasty examples of yakuza-dom responsible for the fall of Munakata’s gang ten years ago, so there is a bit of vengeance in the cards too. If anyone makes it through the zombie hordes alive, that is.

Despite the zombie genre by now basically having been crossed with every other genre imaginable, there really aren’t too many zombie versus yakuza movies, so I’m willing to call Hiroshi Shinagawa’s Deadman Inferno original in this regard, as well as in its use of something that can only be called “Chekhov’s Japanese Ragga Playing Boat-Mounted Sound System”. Plus, it stars former V-cinema hero Sho Aikawa doing exactly what I want him to do, being gruff and honorable and slicing zombies left and right.

Tonally, this starts out as one of those deeply silly yet deadpan Japanese comedies (getting some decent laughs out of yakuza-style manliness treated as absurd as it is) but hits some surprisingly bleak notes before the climax, killing off characters a comedy really shouldn’t kill in rather troubling ways, before ending nicer than a lot of pure yakuza movies do. It’s a bit confusing and probably not to the taste of anyone expecting films to hold closely to formula but I found this bit of unpredictability in a film I didn’t expect any from rather refreshing. As I found the fact that all female main characters here are as capable fighters as the men, which doesn’t necessarily save one from a zombie horde, of course.


Otherwise, this is simply a fun straightforward and well-paced little film with perfectly competently made action sequences – that perhaps suffer a bit from Shinagawa’s clearly deep and abiding love for slow motion – as well as a game cast every viewer of Japanese genre cinema will recognize and love, and some nice if not spectacular gore effects.

Blind Woman’s Curse (1970)

Original title: 怪談昇り竜

A short word on definitions up front: ninkyo eiga is the old-fashioned often more than slightly sentimental sort of yakuza film about yakuza clans who are honourable, decent, protecting the down-trodden and providing a home for those people left out in the cold by a highly hierarchical and caste-based society. Given the actual history of the yakuza and their involvement in the film business, this is of course more than a bit of a self-serving affair. But that Robin Hood didn’t exist and steal from the rich and give to the poor doesn’t mean we shouldn’t make and enjoy movies about him, at least in my book.

Having spent some time in jail thanks to a gang fight that my ninkyo eiga sense tells me was probably some kind of revenge killing for her parents, Akemi Tachibana (Meiko Kaji) has taken over the role as leader of the Tachibana clan of yakuza. She is, of course, one of those yakuza leaders who would never truck in dangerous drugs, press women into prostitution or act in any way, shape, or form dishonourably. Being as perfect as she is, she does command a huge amount of respect from her men, as well as the women who followed her from her jail cell into the gang life, tattooing the rest of the dragon whose head marks Akemi’s back on their own.

However, someone seems set on acquiring her territory, probably encouraged by her being a woman (the yakuza of the early 20th/late 19th Century being known for being rather backwards in their sexual politics), and the toll her absence must have taken on the Tachibana as a whole. It’s an indirect attack, too, trying to manoeuvre her into a fight with other yakuza operations to weaken or destroy her. Things are exacerbated by an honourless traitor in the Tachibana’s midst.

This perfectly standard ninkyo eiga style plot isn’t at all the only thing going on here, though. During the fight that got her into jail, Akemi accidentally slashed the face of the non-combatant daughter of one of her enemies, blinding her. At once, a cat appeared and started licking the blood from the girl’s wound. Akemi still has nightmares about this, and believes to be cursed for what she did to the woman, so that the problems her clan is beginning to have seem like a kind of supernatural punishment to her. That’s a rather unsurprising interpretation of what is going on around her too, for again and again, elements of the horror movie are encroaching on the yakuza business. Some of Akemi’s girls and men disappear or are killed, their back tattoos cut off and presented in various gruesome ways, and what looks very much like the cat from the beginning does like to lick at or run away with the damned things. Then there’s the very strange hunchback (Tatsumi Hijikata) capering about, usually bathed in green or blue gel lighting, his behaviour suggesting something of the ogre from Japanese folk tales about him. Adding to that, there’s also a mysterious blind swordswoman (Hoki Tokuda) with a highly honourable streak offering her services to Akemi’s enemies.

Teruo Ishii’s Blind Woman’s Curse is a fantastic genre mix of ninkyo eiga and horror movie, made with a very clear eye towards which of the thematic elements of both genres are compatible and how to shift from one to the other. Ishii did of course have copious experience doing both, having directed masses of yakuza movies particularly in the earlier parts of this career – including the immensely popular Abashiri Prison films – as well as turning his talents to films of the grotesque and the horrific afterwards. The ninkyo eiga base of the film is pretty great, full of stylized shots of the great Meiko Kaji glancing at the camera with great dignity, or anger, as well as that great sense of determination the actress projects like few other of her contemporaries. Even before everything else, Kaji, the as usual fantastic cast of Nikkatsu contract players and Ishii’s always atmospheric and meaningful direction produce a wonderful example of how and why a very constrained, nearly ritualized genre like the ninkyo eiga can work something akin to magic, selling what could be simple sentimentality as an archetypal drama about the responsibility a woman has to live following her own values even when those make her life dangerous.

It is mainly in the form of the grotesque that horror enters the realm of the ninkyo eiga here, too, with wonderfully artificially lit scenes showing the gruesome tattoos, the hunchback dancing into scenes that were looking like what the – always very stylized - ninkyo eiga defines as naturalistic just moments before. It is as if the relatively straightforward world of the yakuza film has been infected by something otherworldly through Akemi’s accidental sin, something not uncommon in the world of Japanese horror. Ishii films these sequences in ways at once eerie and breathtakingly beautiful, suggesting a very different, horrifying yet fascinating world sitting right beside the one where people fight over territory and honour.

The movie has another trick up its sleeve, too. In her way, the blind swordswoman Aiko turns out to be just as honourable as Akemi is, really following the same kind of code Akemi does, not just mirroring her in ability and determination. They are so much of a kind that she as well as the hunchback help Akemi in certain moments because they are too disgusted by their actual allies to do otherwise. Their grudge, after all, is about vengeance as a form of justice, not about greed.


In their duel in the final scene, with Akemi accepting her probable death as the proper consequence of her actions, Aiko recognizes how much of a mirror of herself Akemi is, and, instead of killing her when she has the chance, making a cut on Akemi’s dragon tattoo that symbolically blinds it. Which, obviously, is not at all how ninkyo eiga or horror movies about curses are supposed to end, Ishii rejecting the fatalistic streak (some might say one bordering on nihilism) of both genres for something very different: forgiveness and the hope of a new day when things and people can change.

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

Tokyo Mafia 4: Yakuza Blood (1997)

(Don't even try to puzzle out the continuity between this and the other three films. It'll only give you a headache and distract you from the best film of the whole bunch).

Young, inexperienced and rather dumb street thug Ryo (Kazuhiro Mashiko) becomes a bit obsessed by the story of the Legendary Assassin supposed to first have killed 300 yakuza in a single night to take vengeance for his murdered girlfriend and then become the best professional killer in Japan, as told to him during a cameo of the inevitable Ren Osugi. That assassin is obviously none other than the hero of the other three Tokyo Mafia movies, Ginya Yabuki (Riki Takeuchi!).

As fate will have it, Ryo is at a bar where Yabuki is performing one of his jobs and kinda-sorta saves the older man's life. Yabuki doesn't seem very thankful, yet still Ryo decides there and then that he's going to become a hit man like Yabuki, too, and - if possible - something like his new idol's apprentice. The young idiot begins following Yabuki around, trying to insinuate himself as a junior assassin with Yabuki's controller (Hirotaro Honda), Oh and he begins to shoot the corpses of the victims of Yabuki's hits (incidentally, corpses are the only things Ryo's able to hit) in what I can only interpret a declaration of love.

Ryo also nearly guns down a witness, a Chinese girl named Yuan (Ryoko Imamura), but Yabuki, who until that point had merely pretended not to see Ryo creepily stalking his every move and mutilating corpses, painfully dissuades him from nonsense like this.

Yuan isn't easily pissed off by minor things like a guy trying to kill her, so soon enough, something as close to romance as you'll find in a yakuza movie starts between her and Ryo. It's enough for any sane guy to stop trying to imitate a man like Yabuki so obviously out for self-destruction, but fate (Ryo's dumbass-itude) has other plans.

This, the fourth, and, as it looks, last of the Tokyo Mafia films comes as something of a surprise to me. The film was again - like the third one - directed by Takeshi Miyasaki, but there's a huge difference between the highly entertaining, but generic competence of the director's last effort, and the free-form artiness of this one.

If you come looking for a bit of the old ultra-violence, Tokyo Mafia 4 will probably not make you happy, because there's not really that much action on screen, and the shoot-outs that do happen are over (I suspect realistically) fast. There's no impression of Miyasaki not being able to stage an entertaining gunfight here, though, it rather seems to me as if the director's just not interested in making a movie that is mainly about gunfights. Of course, there is a (comparatively) big, slow-mo gunfight with Riki snarling a lot at the end of the movie, but even that one will stay in my mind because a bunch of sword-fighting monks that up until that point looked to me like metaphors without any actual physical presence in the world of the film turn into Riki-gun-fodder.

What also will stay in my mind is the film's circling around the question about the difference between myth and reality, about what makes a man want to become just like another man, even when that man tries to dissuade him from this goal by any means necessary, because he knows he's just a drunk with a death-wish. This circling happens in the typical, sometimes semi-improvised style yakuza V-cinema often takes on when it's not about the shoot-outs or the honour or the boredom, in scenes that often border on the absurd, directed by Miyasaki with the light hand of a man willing to give his actors room. And - as is often the case with films like this - everyone plays his or her heart out. Not in a Hollywood "warning! star acts now!" fashion, but with a sense of spontaneity that produces authenticity even in a film whose budget doesn't provide the actors with any attractive settings to do their acting in (though the film has some - probably shot guerrilla style - outside locations).

It's all about creating a mood, looking at people, listening to people, and never quite outright saying what the point of the film is. So basically, it's the sort of film people produce who know that they don't have much money to work with, but can do what they want with the little they have as long as the end product contains three shoot-outs. As in pink cinema, so in the yakuza film.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: japanese movies,reviews,yakuza,takeshi miyasaka,riki takeuchi,kazuhiro mashiko,ryoko imamura,hirotaro honda,ren osugi

In short: Yakuza Deka (1970)

aka Gangster Cop

After leaving the police force with a very loud public noise, now ex-cop Hayata (Sonny Chiba!) hires on with a local yakuza group. While they certainly don't trust him, the yakuza still don't expect him to be the undercover cop out to destroy the largest provider of dirty money and drugs in Japan that he actually is. Of course, it is necessary for Hayata to prove his loyalty to the new cause, so his first real job as a yakuza is to assassinate the head of a conflicting group. Hayata only succeeds in his second attempt, and must escape assassination by mysterious forces among his yakuza friends himself afterwards, but is now still another step closer to his actual goal.

All the while, Hayata has found the sort of friendship where men give each other roses to shoot them out of the other's mouth while driving dune buggies with one of the yakuza, and charmed the drug-addicted lover of his new boss with his manliness. But will that be enough to save the cop when his employers find out what he truly wants?

In the big picture of 70s Toei productions starring the heroic Sonny Chiba, Yukio Noda's Yakuza Deka is nothing special. The film is as vaguely plotted as any film about an undercover cop I've ever seen, with a leisurely pace that sabotages any possible impression of tension, and with an added sprinkle of pretty unfunny comedy. For a film made by the director of Zero Woman: Red Handcuffs, this is also a peculiarly un-sleazy film, with nary a moment of sex, nudity or eroticism, unless having Sonny strutting his stuff in brilliantly ugly clothing counts as erotic, which it might very well do. There's a total lack of emotional urgency on display that even hits the scenes of characters dying in Chiba's arms; what should be dramatic (or at least trite and melodramatic) becomes the movie version of a slightly disinterested shrug.

Fortunately, this is still a Toei film from the 70s, so there are enough scenes in Yakuza Deka to make it worth watching. The copious action sequences start out kinda awesome (because they have Chiba in them, and therefore can't help but contain awesomeness), but soon enough turn ridiculously awesome - though Noda's bland direction does its best to sabotage that feeling - through their willingness to be as goofy as anyone could wish for. I didn't know you can do that with a helicopter! (Well, turns out you can't outside of a Chiba movie). Then there's the usual solid Toei funk soundtrack and some fashion choices so early 70s they just might make eyes bleed.

This collection of barely connected scenes never does add up the merry insanity of the Streetfighter movies, or a good, or even just a coherent film, but it sure is enough to make watching Yakuza Deka a perfectly entertaining time.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: japanese movies,in short,action,yakuza,comedy,sonny chiba,yukio noda

Tokyo Mafia 3: Battle For Shinjuku (1996)

(This is supposed to be a prequel taking place before the first Tokyo Mafia film, but doesn't work too well with the continuity established in the first two films. After some confusion, I just decided to roll with it.)

After hiding away for three years in Thailand, ex-yakuza Ginza Yabuki (Riki Takeuchi!) returns to Tokyo. This comes as quite a surprise to some, because Yabuki is supposed to be dead. His former gang brother Saimon (Masayuki Imai) had been ordered to kill him, but wasn't able to go through with the highly un-chivalrous deed. Now, the returned Yabuki has decided to take vengeance on the corrupt Yakuza society of the Teitokai.

While he was away, Saimon has become the de-facto boss of his group whose nominal leader drools senilely away in his wheelchair. The Teitokai are working closely with non-Japanese gangsters, leading to the usual racist claptrap long-suffering Yakuza V-cinema viewers expect.

Yabuki doesn't like this too much, and plans to attack the Teitokai's secret bank, steal all their money and use it to buy the trust of the group's foreign allies. To achieve his goal, Yabuki puts together a team of random losers: an honourable old friend and now family man who will only do this one last job for him (uh-oh), a big guy who doesn't talk much, a seventeen year old trainee hitwoman with nowhere to go and a very sleazy private eye with a heart of gold. Whatever could go wrong?

If you are able to ignore the fact that the third Tokyo Mafia film and its predecessors don't combine into a shared narrative world that makes much sense character-wise or worldbuilding-wise, you'll probably discover that Battle for Shinjuku is a much more accomplished film than its two predecessors. I'd probably care more for the continuity problems if the first two films had been more memorable, but since they weren't, I see no reason not to just ignore their existence from now on, which is the technique the film itself prefers, too.

It not being in continuity with the other films does not mean that Battle isn't built of clichés nearly every yakuza film post-Battles-Without-Honour-and-Humanity has adopted, quite the opposite. We are absolutely in the realm of snarling no-good men hiding behind a hypocritical code of honour that doesn't hinder them from being quite monstrous human beings at all, a realm where the few people who actually believe in that code are damned from the start, know that they are, and still can't help themselves, and everything else that comes with the territory.

But Battle takes these well-examined tropes and puts them together into a well-done piece of V-cinema that just knows what to do with them, as I wish more genre movies would be able to. There's also a finely developed sense of irony on display. The most chivalrous (in a yakuza sense) character is Yabuki, the guy who openly calls the code of the yakuza bullshit, while those touting it the loudest are the ones ignoring it for the slightest reasons.

New series director Takeshi Miyasaka just is a lot better at his art than his predecessor Seiichi Shirai. Where Shirai pointed and shot, Miyasaka composes shots and transitions like a real grown-up filmmaker. This - and the fact that the film has more than one action scene to break up the talking - leads to a film with a lively rhythm and a dramatic pull its predecessors mostly lacked.

The acting is also fine enough - everyone's favourite yakuza actor Riki is not in ultra scenery-chewing mood, and mostly works through cool snarling, but he is far from the bored William Shatner imitation he becomes in his less entertaining films. The star of the show this time is Masayuki Imai, though. Imai is very convincing as man caught between the political realities of his yakuza life and his belief in the traditional ninkyo values. He gives the classic dichotomy between duty and honour more dignity than it probably warrants. Everyone else manages to put a bit of personality into roles that aren't too original.

All this might sound as if I am damning with faint praise, but I did enjoy Tokyo Mafia 3 quite a bit, even though it is "only" a very competently done yakuza movie with a handful of good ideas that doesn't add anything to its genre I haven't seen before.

I'm sometimes condemning films for being "merely competent", in this case however, competence is all that is needed to make for a fine little film.

 

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