KAIZOKU BAHANSEN ("The Pirates," 1960)

The director Tadashi Sawashima, who died last January at age 91, specialized in samurai and yakuza films. I suppose a pirate film would occupy a middle ground between those two categories, depending on whom the English title refers to. Depending on what you read -- I recommend an essay by the scholar Bernard Scheid in the anthology The Sea and the Sacred in Japan -- "Kaizoku Bahansen" is something of a redundancy, since both words have been translated as "pirate." Kaizoku seems to be the more unambiguous word, while bahansen, in the film's historical context, has more to do with illicit trade. During the mid 16th century CE, Japan's Sengoku or civil war period, China forbade maritime trade, but Chinese traders maintained clandestine relations with their Japanese counterparts. The argument of Sawashima's film is that the bahansen in general were peaceful traders, but acquired a bad name because a few bad apples raided and plundered coastal China, Korea, and other places. Thus, in the film, Kamon (Hashizo Okawa) is initially outraged to discover that, though raised a merchant's son, he's actually the son of a renowned bahansen. He discovers this when his natural father's old cronies press him, for all intents and purposes, into the service, though a younger leader (Eiji Okada) wants nothing to do with the landlubber. Kamon begins to change his mind when he's told that his father and mother were murdered by outright pirate Uemondayu, who's been ravaging the seas under the bahansen banner. Having some pretty girls with the fleet also helps win him over to the cause. Fortunately, he proves a natural with some innate cunning, winning a mast-climbing contest by distracting his competitor with the sight of one of those women. With his sea cred thus established it's on to high adventure on the high seas.

Toei spent some money on this film, which deploys several full-scale ships on open water, though they resort to more predictable model work on occasion and many night scenes on board are understandably shot on soundstage interiors. All in all, there's less of a ship-in-a-bottle feel here than in contemporary pirate programmers from the U.S. Sawashima directs energetically, cross cutting and moving his camera closer and closer to the principals to build up momentum for the film's sea battles and keeping his climactic shipboard fight moving at an urgent clip. If anything, his direction is most frantic and over the top in the scenes where the good bahansens return to and depart from their home port. The home folks go nuts for their seafaring heroes, their enthusiasm illustrated by insistently repetitive shots of celebration, from sailors throwing themselves into the water to meet welcoming rowboats to shots of cheering females. The director's galloping camera gives these festive scenes more of an epic feel than anything else in the picture.

In the end it's a simple story of good and evil, but its goodness of purpose is marred by a trip to a primitive island previously ravaged by Uemondayu, populated by badly blackfaced Japanese extras who give the good guys exactly the treatment you might expect from the most racist American movie, short of throwing our heroes into the proverbial stewpot. If you took offense at the Faro Island scenes from King Kong vs. Godzilla, you'd better steer clear of this picture.  But if you think you can stomach some unenlightened moments, you'll find Kaizoku Bahansen a pleasant enough adventure film that gets more entertaining as it goes along.

RED PEONY GAMBLER: GAMBLER'S OBLIGATION (1968)

Junko Fuji starred as Oryu, the Red Peony, in a series of eight films from the Toei Studio from 1967 to 1971. These are romanticized yakuza films of the sort that might have made Kinji Fukasaku vomit in his mouth. At the least, they make a distinction between good yakuza, the sort who run honest gambling parlors, and the less savory sort who, as in this second installment, prey on ordinary people through loan sharking and running sweatshops. The setting is the "Middle Meiji period," approximately the turn of the 20th century, so that characters use pistols, telephones and other nearly modern devices and a contrast can be drawn between people who go too modern, like this film's big-bad who goes back and forth between Japanese and western dress, and characters like Oryu who, despite her pistol, embody traditional values in their dress and demeanor.Oryu is a yakuza and, in theory at least, the oyabun of a clan inherited from her father, but unlike some women of the milieu, she doesn't flaunt her outlaw identity but dresses and behaves modestly, until forced into violent action. She can shoot, stab, slash and do judo throws like a champion, but while she travels around learning the gambler's trade and the ways of honorable yakuza, she remains somewhat ashamed of her vocation. She doesn't show off her yakuza tattoos, and only displays them to a female friend in this picture in order to warn her, in effect, "Don't end up like me." Badass Oryu may be, but like many wandering heroes of Japanese cinema, her life often seems like a curse, or at least an unhappy destiny.

Gambler's Obligation is helmed by cult director Norifumi Suzuki, who gives the proceedings plenty of widescreen panache. Oryu's having a good time as the film starts, working for the benign oyabun Togazaki and merrily banging a festival drum as the opening credits roll. A skilled gambler, she's able to shut down the winning streak of Oren (Mari Shiraki), a tattoo-flaunting women who recurs through the picture as a road-not-taken version of Oryu herself. Togazaki sends Oryu away for her own good when he decides to deal with his wicked rival Kasamatsu, which allows this sequel to reintroduce the comedy-relief yakuza clan from the first film, headed by Tomisaburo Wakayama. When Togazaki the elder is killed in the battle, Oryu returns to help the old man's son and daughter-in-law hold on to their businesses as Kasamatsu, backed by the quietly menacing Shiraishi (Bunta Sugawara), muscles in. Acquiring her own little band of followers along the way, Oryu travels to Tokyo to plead the Togazaki cause with a yakuza conclave, but the tide seems to be flowing inexorably against them.

This film does a good job establishing Kasamatsu as a real scumbag villain. He invites Oryu to decide the Togazakis' future in a dice game, with Oren as his proxy, whom he forces to cheat. Naturally, Oryu catches her at it, and Kasamatsu has the hapless woman beaten viciously for it. Then he does some additional cheating, convincing Togazaki's wife that her husband, whose liberation from prison has already been arranged by Oryu, can only be freed by her signing away the family carriage business -- and submitting to rape. She ends up disgraced, and poor Togazaki ends up getting killed after everything everyone's done for him. That only means it's time for Oryu to settle accounts with all the bad guys.

While the Japanese clearly liked badass fighting heroines before they really became a thing in the U.S., Gambler's Obligation doesn't quite go as far as fans might expect or hope. Everything seemed to point toward a battle between Oryu and the Bunta Sugawara character, but the way things actually play out makes you suspect that someone at Toei didn't think audiences would buy Junko Fuji beating Bunta in a fight. Instead, they bring in Koji Tsuruta in a glorified cameo as a good-guy interloper with his own reasons for fighting Kasamtasu. He gets to kill Bunta, while he and Fuji share in finishing off Kasamatsu before a random enemy blows him away, since Oryu does need to be the last person standing when the smoke clears. Despite this disappointment, Fuji certainly more than holds up her end of the action while lending her character the swan-necked dignity and superficial stoicism Oryu requires.

This first sequel ends on a sad note as Oryu returns to the site of the opening-credits festival. Many of her fellow celebrants are dead now, and it's a lonely climb to the tower where she beat the drum so happily before. Now she beats it again in mourning for all the friends she's lost, if not also for the hope for a normal life that seems just a little more lost now. Earlier, the Tsuruta character had explained to her the history of her rival Oren and her lover. They seem to lead a miserable life, but Tsuruta observes, almost with a note of envy, that they'll never leave each other. If in some ways Oren seems like an Oryu gone wrong, the film suggests that, despite all Oren suffers, she has something Oryu doesn't and may never have. There are many films to go in this series, but I doubt that this will change.

009-1: THE END OF THE BEGINNING (2013)

 

The U.S. isn't the only place where moviemakers have polished up comic-book heroes for new cinematic life. In Japan, Toei released Koichi Sakamoto's update of a character created in the 1960s by manga legend Shotaro Ishinomori to commemorate Ishinomori's 75th birthday. 009-1 seems to have been a "mature audiences" conceptual spinoff of Ishinomori's better-known Cyborg 009 series. Maybe he had a lucky number.009-1 became a live-action TV show and an anime series in the 21st century. Sakamoto's film is an even more "mature audiences" take on the concept, though one of its more hair-raising elements, the machine guns built into the title-character's cybernetic boobs, apparently was there from the beginning. While Hollywood often tries to legitimize comic-book subject matter by making it "serious" to a sometimes-oppressive extent, Japan apparently upgrades similar material for adult audiences by making it kinkier.

 

Ishinomori imagined a bipolar world divided between East and West in which "J-country" is a neutral zone in which agents for both sides operate. Mylene Hoffman (Mayuko Iwasa) is Agent 009-1, investigating a human-trafficking ring. We see she's a cool customer early on; when the trafficking kingpin arbitrarily kills a niteclub waiter for serving an improperly-cooked steak, 009, disguised as a dancer, is the only girl still dancing afte the gunshot while the others cower on the stage floor. That gets the bad guy's attention. He takes her off for sex, arousing his moll's jealousy, after which 009 kills him, arousing the moll's lust for revenge. While routing the traffickers, 009 rescues a young man, Chris (Minehiro Kinomoto), who hums a tune that stirs long-buried memories in Mylene. She flashes back to childhood, when the tune was a lullaby hummed by her mother, whose face she can't remember, to Mylene and her brother. 009 falls in love with Chris, apparently not guessing what audiences ought to have figured out immediately, but there's other stuff going on they won't have guessed.

 

Above: Mylene dances with herself

Below: Busted.

The bad guys are after 009-1's mentor and maker, Dr. Klein (Aya Sugimoto). After 009 rescues the doctor, a seemingly superpowered female fighter, possibly another cyborg, appears to reclaim her, routing Mylene and everything else in her path. Botching her assignment in her distracted state gets 009 in trouble with her bosses, but she resolves to rescue Klein again and learn more about her past. She won't like what she learns.

 

009-1 gets a mechanical tongue bath, or do robots identify people by taste?

Suffice it to say that Mylene is in for some jarring revelations until nearly everything she thought she knew is proven wrong. Worst of all is the revelation of Chris's true identity and his true agenda. How bad is it? Let me assure you that building an incestuous lesbian robot is only the tip of the iceberg. Dr. Klein is determined not to be outdone, however. She distinguishes herself among modern mad scientists with her theory that cyborgs stacked with superweapons will be surpassed by undead mutants (in Japanese, "undead mutants"). The film distinguishes itself among modern mad movies by theorizing that Mylene, a cyborg, can telepathically read the minds of undead mutants. Their thoughts run along the lines of "please kill me," which would seem to prove Dr. Klein wrong, along with 009-1's ability to beat them all single-handedly. This is a film in which undead mutants are only preliminary adversaries, for there remains an uncomfortable reckoning with Mylene's dismal excuse for a family, with an exploding helicopter thrown in in case that gets dull....

 

On this evidence, the Japanese feel no need to legitimize comic-book stories by throwing money at them. End of the Beginning has the production values of a CW genre show, or slightly less. With most of the film's imagination spent on its icky plot, the action is unimaginatively staged and set mostly in the drab warehouse world of the B picture. CGI blood flows aplenty while a CGI helicopter is added to a background in order to explode on contact with a flying combatant, after which the filmmakers seem to forget that there should still be a burning hulk in some scenes. For all its theoretical transgressiveness, the picture proves strangely reticent about showing 009-1's deadliest weapons from the front.  End of the Beginning really does only two things successfully. It often fills the screen with attractive women, and that lullaby is one hell of an earwig. I watched this film a week ago and it's still looping through my brain. At the very least, this picture is a memorable experience. Whether you'll enjoy the memories is up to you.

Hideo Gosha's VIOLENT STREETS (1974)

The Toei studio promoted Hideo Gosha's picture as an all-star "new style" yakuza picture, which makes you wonder whether Japanese audiences were getting tired of Kenji Fukasaku's style of yakuza picture while his classic "Battles Without Honor or Humanity" series was still in progress. Gosha's movie definitely is different. While Fukasaku aims at chaotic immediacy by filming violence with a handheld camera, Gosha takes a more carefully pictorial approach. His stages many of his violent set pieces in bizarre settings, most notably a junkyard amid a pile of mannequins and twice over in a chicken coop. In contrast with many of Fukasaku's films, Gosha's makes no pretense, as far as I could tell, of recounting actual events. Gone is the narration that opens and closes many Fukasaku flicks, as well as the captions identifying characters and their places in the yakuza hierarchy. In that respect, Gosha achieves a different kind of immediacy, but his real goal seems to be a greater intimacy, albeit in the more salacious sense of the word.

I don't know if poultry's a big part of the menu at Noboru Ando's place, but I wouldn't recommend the special he serves up to the unhappy patron below.

The star is Noboru Ando, who as a former yakuza presumably had the same sort of credibility that gangsta rappers often claim for themselves. Authenticity gave Ando an advantage as an actor; he rarely had to prove he was tough with the sort of bluster other actors employed. With his almost sleepy eyes and laid-back demeanor -- he reminds me just a little of Jet Li -- he's often the calm center of a storm. That's especially true here, where the storm breaks around him without his character knowing it. He plays Egawa, once boss of his own family who's been eased into retirement with the usual consolation prize of a niteclub. His is the Madrid, and the Spanish gimmick, including flamenco music in the floorshow, is another way for Gosha to individualize his film. The Madrid is a hangout for his former gang, many of whom feel like they were kicked to the curb by the reigning yakuza group, which has its tentacles in many areas of business, including the entertainment industry. Without consulting their own boss, despite their constant protestations of loyalty, these guys try to muscle in on the entertainment side, kidnapping a popular young TV singer and demanding 100,000,000 yen ransom. They get the money but leave a corpse behind; one of the gang accidentally strangled the girl while trying to rape her.

This goes down just as the local yakuza, who control Tokyo's Ginza district, face a growing challenge from the Western Japan Association, which dominates most of the rest of the country. The locals initially assume that the outside interlopers are behind the kidnapping and the escalating gang war brings in some exotic players, including a cross-dressing hit-person with a razor fetish who performs in live sex shows on the side. As the major parties jostle for position, the Madrid club looks more and more like a useful pawn. The people who gave it to Egawa want it back, claiming that they retain the original lease. With his position under siege and his old cronies getting slaughtered, Egawa finally has to take the fight to the enemy.

Violent Streets' cross-dressing killer is a kind of mannequin him/herself.
Is Gosha making a point about disposable humanity?

Toei also promoted Violent Streets as a "Big 4" film featuring many of the studio's top yakuza stars. Along with Ando, the film features Akira Kobayashi as a friend of Egawa's who grows steadily disillusioned with the business, Tetsuro Tanba as the boss of the Western Alliance, and Fukasaku's main star Bunta Sugawara in a cameo role. Sugawara is hilarious as a gun smuggler who supplies Egawa with ordinance and insists on accompanying him on a raid on a rival niteclub. I've never seen Bunta as mellow, or practically stoned, as he is in his brief turn here. He has headphones on throughout and spends most of the attack lounging in the back seat of Egawa's car drinking, chewing on a sandwich and listening to whatever, stirring occasionally to shoot someone. In mid-getaway he asks to be let out on some nondescript street and makes his exit with boombox in tow, living in his own world. It's a wonderful comedy-relief bit that doesn't compromise the grim edge of the main story.

Ando goes on the attack while Bunta looks on.

Gosha's Ginza is full of eccentrics and dysfunctional people. Egawa has to deal with an alcoholic hostess and sometime lover while pining for another woman, which only provokes the hostess's jealousy. Our hero seems like the nearest thing to a well-adjusted person in his semi-retirement, but any vision of stability he has is certainly doomed. He remains a man of violence, as Gosha establishes in the very first scene when he roughs up some rowdy customers. Had he been different, he might have sold out early and escaped the fate he ends up choosing for himself. Yakuza films are often bleak affairs, especially after Fukasaku replaced a myth of underworld chivalry with a more cynical vision. Violent Streets isn't very different in that respect. In the long run, what distinguishes it isn't Gosha's grotesque set pieces as much as the convincing performances from Ando and the rest of the cast. They're not necessarily better for Gosha than they were for Fukasaku -- Sugawara in particular is definitely at his best with the latter director -- but they're somehow liberated here by not having to pretend that they're re-enacting history. Fukasaku's yakuza films are great movies, but Violent Streets arguably comes closer to pure cinema and is definitely a more self-conscious work of violent art.

WANDERING GINZA BUTTERFLY (1971)

During the trailer for Kazuhiko Yamaguchi's film, Meiko Kaji addresses herself directly to Toei Studio fans, greeting them for the first time and asking for their approval as stars sometimes did in these previews. It's hard to remind oneself that Kaji got her start elsewhere; you'd think that had she never existed, Toei would have to invent her. The studio that specialized in tough yet stylish crime movies during the 1970s seems like the natural home for Japan's greatest female crime-action star of the decade, yet Wandering Ginza Butterfly was her Toei debut. I often describe Toei as Japan's equivalent of Warner Bros. in the 1930s in the production of fast-moving, zeitgeist-grasping crime pictures, and this is a Toei production that often feels like an actual Warner Bros. movie in its mix of violence and sentimentality.

Kaji plays Nami, an ex-con who had to get tough (though not Scorpion-tough!) with her cellmates every so often but now wants a fresh start back in the hood -- the Ginza district of Tokyo. She befriends a low-level yakuza, Ryuji (Tsunehiko Watase), who specializes in recruiting "hostesses" for the Ginza's hundreds of dance halls and other places of ill repute. Ryuji dresses like a character out of Guys and Dolls most of the time, lending a kind of mythic veneer to the usual Toei grit, this time colorfully shot against the Ginza's neon skyline for added production value. But it's Nami who's going to wear the pants -- except when she chooses more traditional garb -- in this partnership. She's the one with the will to make construction workers pay their debts. No money? She'll just take your truck away. Debt collection is one of her many skills; another is pool hustling, which comes in handy later in the picture. For now, as she earns a living, she takes a strange interest in a small family: a single mother and her son. We learn gradually that the mother had appealed with the prison authorities for Nami's early release. This benevolent gesture stuns and shames Nami since, as we learn later, she'd been jailed, back when she rode with a female biker gang, for killing the woman's husband. Making a (sort of) honest living and helping provide for the dead man's family is her stab (to foreshadow a bit) at redemption.

Past and Present

Ironically, while the woman with the most cause to hate her doesn't, Nami's fellow hostesses turn their noses up at her when they learn that she's an ex-con. It seems like they won't let Nami play any hostess games, but when the local bad guy tries to muscle in on her employer, it's up to Nami to defend the place. Her weapon of choice is a pool cue in a game of three-cushion billiards against the bad guy's resident hustler, a drug addict who luridly loses his composure in mid-match, but recovers to force Nami to make a big comeback in order to win and save the brothel. A poster of Paul Newman as Fast Eddie Felson presides over the contest, but Yamaguchi is no Robert Rossen. Instead, apart from the opponent's withdrawal episode, the director films this showdown like Billiards for Morons, with voiceovers from Kaji recording such subtle insights as "I need one more point to win." At the risk of spoiling things, I'll inform you that our heroine does win, but it's not much of a spoiler since the bad guy decides that he's going to take over the brothel anyway, so there.

We've got trouble, right here in Ginza City, with a capital T that rhymes with B,

and that stands for Butterfly!

The local good-guy yakuza steps in at this point, trumping the bad guy by announcing his marriage to the madam and his protection of her business. But the bad guy yakuza still won't play fair and has the good-guy yakuza killed in the street. All right, then; that's all Nami can stands, and she can't stands no more. It's time for a different kind of game, the kind you play with swords with a kimono for a uniform and your own song for entrance music. Kaji takes a stroll through the rain like Cagney in The Public Enemy as her song plays on the soundtrack. Only in Public Enemy William Wellman left Cagney's wrath to the imagination, with some help from shots and groans of agony. At Toei we follow the avenger inside -- and it turns out that Ryuji's there already to introduce her to her victims. They practically part the curtain for the moment we've all been waiting for....

She's singing in the rain, but her lips don't move.

Nami's sword does all the talking.

But despite the last-reel effort to live up to Toei standards, Ginza Butterfly is relatively lighthearted affair, despite a mildly downbeat finish, while the sequel, in which Sonny Chiba co-stars, is more blatantly comic from the evidence of the trailer on the Synapse DVD. Maybe "lightheated" doesn't make my point as well as "corny" would. The movie isn't without a bare minimum of Seventies sleaze, but it isn't hardcore Toei by any stretch of the imagination. As a Kaji vehicle it doesn't compare to the Scorpion or Lady Snowblood movies, but the actress is quite likable in a role pitched on a more human or humane level than her most iconic parts, and on this first outing the humor isn't obnoxiously over the top. It's mild for a Toei picture, but unless you must have a bloodbath every ten minutes, not just the last ten, its overall amiable attitude may just win you over.

Here's that trailer I mentioned; dijedil uploaded it to YouTube.

NEW BATTLES WITHOUT HONOR AND HUMANITY (1974)

The typical yakuza story deals with someone just out of prison. He went up the river for his boss and his clan but usually finds things changed for the worse once he's free again. Disillusionment is the order of the day, and the protagonist's dilemma is whether to continue living up to the old code or to change with the times and survive. He usually ends up changing because the old code is meaningless without someone worthy of your loyalty -- or else he upholds the code through a redemptive slaughter of his gang's or his own enemies.

Bunta Sugawara seems like the ideal actor for this sort of role, just as Kinji Fukasaku is the ideal director. I often equate the 1970s yakuza films of Japan's Toei studio with the work of Warner Bros. in the 1930s and 1940s, and in that context Sugawara is Toei's Humphrey Bogart (their Cagney being Sonny Chiba) for the brooding, world-weary quality he brings to so many films while remaining capable of fearsome violence. Sugawara was the star of Fukasaku's five-film Battles Without Honor and Humanity series (1973-4), packaged in the U.S. for the DVD market as The Yakuza Papers. Fukasaku plowed straight ahead with more yakuza films, including the classics released here as Cops vs. Thugs and Yakuza Graveyard. But Toei wanted literal sequels to the Battles epic, and Fukasaku obliged with a "New" series of three films in which many of the original cast took on new roles in the same general time period. For some reason, despite the obvious exploitation angle, the "New" trilogy is less widely known in the U.S. A small company called Kurotokagi Gumi has released the first two films, along with many other Toei items, with decent English subtitles, while the larger companies who've released other Fukasakus steered clear. I presume that's because the "New" films are considered inferior work, but the first New Battles film finds Fukasaku and Sugawara near their top form.

You can always depend on Fukasaku for a unique angle on yakuza action

Sugawara plays Makio Miyoshi, who we first see carrying out a bungled hit while disguised as a crippled war veteran. Right away, we're immersed in the familiar maelstrom of Fukasaku's yakuza films as the director films violent action with a handheld camera that seems to be buffeted by the mayhem like a leaf in a storm. He consistently creates the illusion of cinema verite, and the key to that is that he stages chaotic action. His street battles may be elaborately planned, but they lack any glamorizing choreography. Things never seem to happen quite as planned, leaving attackers, victims and bystanders alike confused and panicked. Fukasaku quite deliberately takes the opposite approach from the lethal elegance of the samurai film, but the effect is just as much the product of master craftsmanship as the most stylized sword duels.

Makio belongs to the Yamamori crime family, and his boss is a coward and a crybaby. It occurred to me while watching this how often that seems to be the case in crime films around the world. From the original Scarface forward rising young thugs are up against weak, cowardly or complacent kingpins who leave you wondering how men like that ever rose to the top. From the beginning here, Makio is shown being loyal to unworthy people, and Sugawara plays him just dumb enough not to know better. Needless to say, a hungry challenger arises within the clan while Makio sits in stir. This is Aoki (Tomasaburo Wakiyama), against whom Boss Yamamori hopes to use Makio as a weapon when our hapless hero gets free. Even before he's out, the boss and his wife are offering him money and other favors if he'll take care of Aoki for them. In turn, Aoki will seek his support in his own bid for power. But the story of the film is Makio's reluctance to take sides, his forlorn hope that the clan won't fall apart and impose a choice on him. Why can't everyone just get along the way they used to? Inexorably, a choice is forced upon him; as long as each side sees him as a pawn in play, there are only more reasons to try and take him off the board. Ultimately, Makio has to choose to save himself, whether that means taking a side or playing the sides against each other while he gets out of the way.

Sugawara and Wakiyama give strong performances here, but what impressed me most about New Battles 1 is the attention Fukasaku pays to the sociability of yakuza life, the lifestyle Makio enjoys and the feud within the clan endangers. Our hero drifts from dinner with the boss to nights on the town with Aoki, skating on the thin ice of camaraderie with violence just below the surface. Festivity can turn into frightening conflict at any moment, and subside just as suddenly. To make that point, Fukasaku focuses on the fringe details, letting an actress steal a scene from the stars. A suddenly enraged Aoki has just flung a drink at Makio, and for the rest of the scene, while the two men affect reconciliation, Aoki's shaken girlfriend tries to wipe up the mess he's made, barely restraining sobs in the process. She expresses openly the anxiety the men also feel. You see their fear in a tense scene after Makio escapes from a hit Aoki had set up on him. Vowing to kill Aoki himself, he pays a call and finds his antagonist on a futon sweating under a blanket, a humidifier and several bodyguards nearby. They subtly maneuver props around their boss as an abruptly less bold Makio proposes that Aoki pay him to leave town. Aoki orders a man to give Makio a wad of cash, then agrees to add to it. When Makio leaves, Aoki pulls a gun out from under the blanket with a sigh of relief.

Fukasaku doesn't stint on the gunplay and bloodshed this time -- Aoki's last stand is a broad-daylight deathmarch capped by a thunderous reprise of Toshiaki Tsushima's famous Battles fanfare -- but New Battles 1 is in a lower key than its five predecessors overall, more memorable for its subtler details that for its obligatory battles. Fukasaku is quoted on the box cover saying that he meant to take a "deeper look" at his gangsters in the new series. While this opener isn't necessarily superior to the original Battles, I think that he succeeded in his purpose nevertheless.

SYMPATHY FOR THE UNDERDOG (1971)

No two Kinji Fukasaku yakuza movies that I've seen are alike. To say that any one of them is just another yakuza movie, or that he wasted his time making yakuza movies -- before he stopped making them, that is -- is to miss the point. Fukasaku could work the genre for a wide range of moods and nuances. For this effort, early in his tremendous run of Seventies crime sagas, his subject is a different kind of disillusionment than we identify with his myth-debunking tales of criminal cynicism, inhumanity and dishonor. Sympathy for the Underdog (the Japanese title has something to do with gamblers and foreigners) is about man's inability to recapture or recreate the past -- and it throws in a little of The Wild Bunch in for good measure.

Koji Tsuruta (right) as Gunji

As is often the case, we open with a con getting out of prison. Gunji (Koji Tsuruta) has served ten years for his role in the gang wars on the docks of Yokahama. While he was gone, a corporatized yakuza clan, the Daitokai, moved in, played the smaller local gangs against each other, and eventually took over. He gathers his old cronies together -- each of them is introduced with a vignette showing their miserable civilian lives -- to make a run on the Daitokai, but the war is over almost before it began. Gunji's gang is hopelessly outnumbered and outgunned, and survives to make an honorable withdrawal only because the Daitokai bosses respect Gunji's guts. To avoid bloodshed, they agree to contribute the ridiculously large amount of 5,000,000 yen toward a memorial for Gunji's former gang boss. That money will finance Gunji's next venture, elsewhere.

The way Gunji sees it, there's only one place that's as wide open now as all Japan used to be back in the early postwar days. That's the island of Okinawa. As the original Toei trailer informs us, the U.S. was just about to turn the island back over to Japanese administration, creating the opportunity Gunji sees. His gang will muscle their way onto the island and take over from some of the small timers there.

For the "mainlanders," Okinawa is a doubly alien land. For starters, the natives don't seem to care that much for mainlanders. Secondly, the island is practically the 51st State, supporting a huge American base and servicing its soldiers and their dependence. Most of the signage Fukasaku shows us is in English, and there are lots of American faces, male and female, white and black, on the streets. Ironically, such an Americanized setting serves the same role for Fukasaku that Mexico serves for the makers of American and Italian westerns: a last frontier of outlawry, where a dying generation of outlaws can make a last stand.

The Okinawan opposition: GI gangstas (above) and Tomasaburo Wakayama (the Shogun Assassin himself, below)

Gunji scores some victories over karate-fighting Okinawans and gun-happy Americans while his men suffer casualties along the way. His biggest obstacles are Yonatal (Tomasaburo Wakayama), the "one-armed giant," and his stupidly reckless cousin Jiro (Kenji Imai). They outnumber the mainlanders, but here as in Yokahama, Gunji's grit convinces them that wiping him out isn't worth the blood. In this case, thanks in part to their capture of Jiro and their honorably unconditional release of him, Gunji's crew ends up with a territory of their own, including a lucrative operation selling whiskey smuggled off the American base. They set up headquarters in a luxurious compound. But they don't seem to enjoy it. They seem like penned-in animals sometimes, and sometimes they just seem bored. They don't know the local lingo and can't understand the songs. Gunji himself strikes up a tepidly obsessive relationship with a local prostitute (Akiko Kudo) who looks a lot like the moll who left him while he served his time. He wants the whore to be his girl so badly that we find ourselves waiting for a big revelation from her -- but it never comes. She's sympathetic, but she can't be what he wants.

The fruits of victory, from swimming pools (above) to women (like Akiko Kudo, below), somehow aren't as sweet as Gunji hoped.

The gang is already demoralized by the time Daitokai makes its move on Okinawa. The big clan arrives with bells and whistles and banners flying, like an invading army or the circus come to town. While some of the locals quickly accommodate themselves to the impending new order, Yonatal prepares to fight. He expects Gunji to take Daitokai's side as a fellow mainlander, but is impressed to learn that Gunji hates them, too. Each side thinks about an alliance, but before the thoughts can find expression Daitokai strikes swiftly and wipes out Yonatal's gang. There's nothing to do, it seems, but negotiate another peaceful exit, and Daitokai still respects Gunji enough to fork over another five million. That's still good traveling money, but where's the gang going to go? If they've learned anything in their adventure, it's that there's no place they can go to recreate their Yokahama of ten years ago. Okinawa really is the end of their trail. So after a pensive night, once again it's "Let's go," and "Why not?" in some rough Japanese translation. Daitokai's holding another one of their silly ceremonies to welcome the oyabun to Okinawa. Dozens of them will be there, along with their Okinawan quislings. There is one last place to go, after all....

A mood of melancholy gradually descends over the picture in its second half that sets Sympathy apart from the other Fukasakus I've seen. The movie seems to build toward complete anticlimax before the story takes its final Peckinpavian turn, but it gains gravitas as things slow down. Fukasaku is best known for his almost calligraphic approach to violence, his ability to send bodies flying and blood flowing like brushstrokes of pure mayhem. But he's just as capable of more quiet, moodier moments. A sequence here in which the prostitute explains the meaning of an Okinawan "migrant worker" song to a brooding Gunji while one of his cronies rages at the performer, urging her to play a Japanese song, is one of the director's finest moments. The music itself is worthy of note. Takeo Yamashita isn't Fukasaku's usual composer, and he gives Sympathy a richer, more diverse musical palate than most of the director's or the Toei studio's films of this period, combining jazzy sounds and Euro-style vocalese with austere Okinawan elements like the folk song. The cast is uniformly good; few of the characters are merely caricatures, and Koji Tsuruta is especially good at suggesting hidden depths beneath a no-bullshit exterior. It's not true that Fukasaku could do no wrong during the Seventies, but the more I see of his work, the more I regard him as one of the decade's most consistently superior directors. Sympathy for the Underdog is only further proof of that point.

This English-subtitled trailer, featuring plenty of Yamashita's great music, was uploaded to YouTube by pvehling.

GRAVEYARD OF HONOR (1975)

Toei Studio boasted that Kinji Fukasaku's biopic of legendary mad-dog yakuza Rikio Ishikawa was three years in the making. Given the director's productivity, including the explosive five-films-in-two-years burst that resulted in the Battles Without Honor or Humanity series, a three-year production process suggests to me only that Fukasaku had the Ishikawa story on the back burner for a while, and that it wasn't a high priority with him. The finished product shows that; it's the weakest Fukasaku film I've seen to date.

Graveyard of Honor starts promisingly in semi-documentary style. A narrator presents recordings supposedly made from interviews who knew Ishikawa when he grew up in the 1930s. This segues into a scenario very familiar to fans of the Battles series; Ichikawa (Tetsuya Watari) was another one of those thugs who rose out of the refugee camps to be recruited by yakuzas. Unlike the other yakuza protagonists of Fukasaku's films, Ishikawa has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. He is a total mad dog, distinctive only for his drug addiction and his virtually complete lack of deference to his criminal elders. He is pure reckless aggression, but in no way interesting to anyone who isn't a hardcore yakuza buff or a historian of Japanese crime.

Fukasaku uses his familiar gimmick of filming Ishikawa's origin in black and white, but if the entire story's a thing of the past, why convert to color? Below, money is no object to Rikkio (Tetsuya Watari)

Neither Fukasaku nor Watari invest the main character with the tragic depth they found for the fictional protagonist of their later collaboration, Yakuza Graveyard. The best they can hope for is to make Ishikawa an object of morbid fascination, and they nearly do that by showing him chomping on his cremated girlfriend's bone fragments in a crucial scene. They may not have wanted to do more. For all I know Ishikawa is presented as he was, and it may be the lack of dramatic nuance that disappoints me about this film. We're apparently supposed to take it literally when an acquaintance recounts Ishikawa describing himself as a balloon that must expand until it explodes. Fukasaku even inflicts a literal reminder of the metaphor when Ishikawa appears to be mortally wounded. He sees a balloon floating over the city and reaches toward it like the Frankenstein Monster reaching for the sun. That would have been a bathetic way to end the picture, but history gave the director a more gruesome finish. Ishikawa somehow survived the shooting, only to kill himself by jumping from a prison rooftop some years later. Fukasaku films this unflinchingly, arranging the effect so Watari himself can appear to land and burst with a great splash of blood. It's a startling finale but neither fully convincing nor satisfying.

Fukasaku's global reputation benefited from the flourishing of the DVD market in the last decade and the interest generated by his controversial swan song, Battle Royale. Many of his key films are available, though many others remain largely unseen in America and may now only appear in the greymarket. There's a lot to choose from, but my advice is to leave Graveyard of Honor somewhere near the bottom of your list.