VIOLENT PANIC: THE BIG CRASH (1976)

Let's start with a digression: before I sat down to write this review, I watched Burt Kennedy's The Good Guys and the Bad Guys, a reactionary comedy western from 1969. It's one of those films that appeared in reaction to both the Sixties youth movement and the rise of the spaghetti westerns, with the message that the older generation, here represented by Robert Mitchum and George Kennedy, had more integrity than and could still kick the asses of the younger generation. As such it's something more interesting to analyze than entertaining to watch, though if you do watch it you'll probably end up wondering, as I did, if Mel Brooks modeled his performance as Governor LaPetomaine in Blazing Saddles on Martin Balsam's stupid, shifty mayor in the Kennedy picture. Anyway, it's an awkward mix of broad, quasi-adult comedy and elegiac drama, but in the final reel it literally goes off the rails in the course of a chase scene involving a train, a robbery gang on horseback, a fleet of early automobiles, at least one guy on a motorcycle and a bunch of people pumping a handcar like they were all chasing free land in Oklahoma rather than the train. So after watching this overblown climax I was somewhat stunned at the coincidence of seeing two movies in the same day where the directors threw everything away on a big chase scene.
From the perspective of the age of CGI I've developed an appreciation for the oldschool car chase. It's really an appreciation of the reality involved in staging chases back then and the crafts of stunt direction and stunt driving. The best chases have a raw physicality that CGI can't really approximate in its frictionless ease -- but Violent Panic:The Big Crash came as a slap-in-the-face reminder of why many of us came to despise car chases on film, though all it may actually prove is that Kinji Fukasaku, otherwise a master director of violent action, didn't know how to film a car chase.

Until the big chase, Violent Panic was shaping up as a modestly entertaining hard-boiled Toei program picture. It's about Takashi Yamanaki (Tsunehiko Watase), who with a partner has been on a ski-masked robbery rampage across Japan. They want one more score before heading for that promised land of the Japanese underworld, Brazil, but before that Takashi may want to deal with Michi (Miki Sugimoto), the girl who's attached herself to him since he rescued her from a crazy pervert. He's actually planning to blow her off, but that won't be easy after that last job goes wrong. A teller pulls an alarm and the duo have to make a quick exit -- but Takashi's partner ends up getting killed by a car. Our hero makes it to his safe house -- only to find Michi there cooking a pot of beans, the only dish she knows how to prepare properly.

Takashi still tries to blow her off, but she's so adorably abject stumbling by the side of the road that he has the cab he hailed pick her up, too. But the coast is far from clear, as his late partner's brother tries to muscle in for "his" share of the robbery take. Takashi is also targeted by an ambitious but idiotic cop who proves the film's main comedy relief. I often compare 1970s Toei to 1930s Warner Bros., and there's a Pre-Code irreverence to Violent Panic that comes through most strongly in its attitude toward the police. The forces of law and order spend most of the film screwing each other, either in the metaphorical careerist sense or the literal R-rated sense. The cop comedy is so broad that it seems at odds with the serious menace of the brother, the pathos of Michi (whom Takashi still intends to leave behind when he goes to Brazil) and the nastiness of a subplot involving an auto mechanic so obsessed with a client's car that he vandalizes it repeatedly so he can keep repairing it, only to be caught and subjected to homosexual rape, which he answers with murder. Funny stuff, huh? But if the cop stuff threatens to tip the balance, the climactic chase catapaults the whole show over the cliff.

Once Michi realizes that Takashi intends to leave her, she attempts suicide. After reviving her, a remorseful Takashi burns his passport, then plans a solo robbery to secure a future for both of them. Complications ensue so that he ends up chased by both the brother and the cop. The chase plows through a motorcycle club being filmed by a TV news crew, and the bikers and the TV van give chase. More cops wreak havoc on local traffic, and angry drivers decide to give chase to the cops. A stream of vehicles detours at a roadblock to spend the next five minutes driving around chaotically in a pointlessly protracted demolition derby, as if Fukasaku were suddenly remaking It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World. More likely, I suspect, he simply said screw it and ordered cars to crash into each other and every possible collapsible structure on the lot. The scene loses all momentum, and its very identity as a chase, as the cars circle around and smack into each other. Fukasaku films it all quite helplessly; his patented careening handheld style lends lifelike spontaneity to gunfights and hand-to-hand combat, but this sort of vehicular slapstick needs pictorial structuring -- it needs gags, but the director comes up empty. It's the most brainlessly vacant action scene I've ever seen from Fukasaku, who only underlines its pointlessness by having Takashi and Michi finally slip aboard a boat and escape without anyone noticing.

 

If the film was made for the sake of the big chase scene, then Fukasaku gave every indication of losing interest exactly when Violent Panic was supposed to fulfill its purpose. It's easily the weakest Fukasaku crime film I've seen -- but when the man was making three to four films a year, with many of them classics of the genre, I can certainly cut him a break.

Kinji Fukasaku's FALL GUY (1982)

Kinji Fukasaku's most honored film in his home country isn't one of his yakuza epics, nor his exuberantly dystopian final testament Battle Royale, but a comedy-drama about the movie business that's also Japan's contribution to the stuntman genre. Kamata kyoshin-kyoku's American title is an obvious invocation of the Lee Majors TV series The Fall Guy, but Fukasaku's movie is something more ambitious that might stand comparison with Richard Rush's The Stunt Man, even if it's not the superior film. But you wouldn't know that from the people who give out Japan's various film awards, who honored Fukasaku, his film and his lead actors in something like a sweep in a year that also boasted Hideo Gosha's formidable Onimasa. Maybe the critics and academy members simply dug a movie-movie, but maybe something more is going on here, too.

"Kamata" is the Tokyo neighborhood that's home to the mighty Toei studio, Fukasaku's base of operations for most of the 1970s and as such Japan's answer to Warner Bros. in the 1930s. Fall Guy isn't a Toei production; the studio is only playing itself and lending technical assistance to a Kodokawa production released by Shochiku. The movie deals with the making of a samurai film that's complicated by the rivalry of two Toei contract players, each with his own posse of cronies and hangers-on who get bit parts and stunt jobs in the picture. We focus on Ginshiro (Morio Kazama), who grows afraid that a younger star is getting more screen time, more close-ups, and more stuntmen to kill. He also faces an imminent scandal now that his mistress Konatsu (Keiko Matsuzaka) is pregnant. "Gin-chan" thinks he can still steal the film if the director actually shoots a scene in the script where he slays an enemy who falls down a flight of 39 steps -- but to the bloodthirsty director's chagrin, the studio is unwilling to take the risk of a stuntman dying from the tumble. "These are bad times to make movies," he complains, "The days of respecting humanity and rejecting violence." The injustice of it all drives Ginshiro to drunken despair.

But we can tell from one lingering gaze that one of Gin-chan's stuntman acolytes, Yasu (Mitsuru Hirata) is thinking about those stairs. Yasu has dreams of stardom himself, though despite his amateur stuntmanship his idol appears to be James Dean. He soon finds that Gin-chan has a big favor to ask of him, though not the one we first expect. The star wants Yasu to marry Konatsu and claim her child as his own to save himself from a scandal that could jeopardize his acting and recording careers. This is just one of the many ways that the flamboyantly dressed and apparently untalented Gin-chan proves himself a boor and an idiot. At an early point I had the suspicion that Fall Guy might prove a one-joke movie: a fit subject for Fukasaku because movie stars and their cliques are not unlike yakuza gangs in their lack of honor and humanity. But as the story of Yasu and Konatsu and their on-off relationship develops, the film acquires a life of its own.

Keiko Matzusaka, Morio Kazama and Misturu Hirata form a triangle

There's a lot of slapstick early as Yasu strives to make an acceptable home for his new charge by taking every lucratively risky stunt he can. He gets to interact with such Toei stalwarts as Sonny Chiba and the now-globally respected character actor Hiroyuki Sanada, who was then Chiba's protege and a pretty-boy action hero. Despite her hatred of the situation Gin-chan has imposed on her, Konatsu can't help admiring Yasu's determination and his sense of commitment. But she remains torn between the stuntman and the father of her unborn child, who doesn't entirely want to leave her behind. Yasu feels strong loyalty to Gin-chan and strong obligation, as well as a genuine growing love, for Konatsu, a starlet he's secretly idolized for years -- a Dean poster long covered one of hers. But the film takes a more serious turn as Yasu's feelings for his mentor and his new wife are complicated by the infuriating feeling that, just as in the movie business, he's no more than a bit player in other people's drama. Fearing that Gin-chan's career is on the brink of ruin, Yasu volunteers to do the stair stunt despite Konatsu's insistence against it. Fukasaku slowly builds the suspense as conflicting feelings seethe in Yasu before the big stunt. If he seems subconsciously willing to sacrifice himself to reconcile Konatsu and Gin-chan, he also seems to increasingly resent both of them while realizing that the now heavily publicized stunt will give him a coveted moment in the spotlight that he'd like to extend and exploit as much as possible. And to add to the melodrama, Konatsu is likely to go into labor just as the cameras roll and Yasu ascends the fateful stairway....

It just occurred to me that one unlikely film Fall Guy resembles in its build-up to a death-defying if not death-inviting stunt is Max Ophuls's Lola Montes, but the resemblance pretty much ends there. There are also moments when Fukasaku's film reminds me more of Martin Scorsese's contemporary King of Comedy, not because of any specific plot points, but because of the almost Scorsesean intensity and ambition Mitsuru Hirata expresses in a star-making role in a film set in the world of entertainment. In more practical terms, Fall Guy does resemble The Stunt Man in the occasionally blatant unreality of scenes that supposedly show the reality of moviemaking. We hear obvious foley sound effects during the filming of fight scenes, for instance, while Sanada gets to make impossible leaps while Fukasaku maintains rather than exposes the illusions that enable him. The director, with writer Kohei Tsuka, arguably goes further than Rush to blur the lines between the illusion of reality and the reality of illusions. An extended sequence flows from Gin-chan's latest farewell to Konatsu on a soundstage where the incomplete stairway looms to what looks like a dream sequence of her wedding to Yasu on the same stairs, which spills into the street as the happy couple and friends dance their way up a fire escape to the bridal apartment -- but once the dream appears to be over the couple are in fact married. Was that the actual wedding? If not, it'll do as a stand-in. And if that doesn't make your head spin, then there's still the fourth wall to be breached before the film is done, and songs to be sung in praise of the fantastic power of cinema.

Mitsuru Hirata really elevates this film to a higher level with his all-out performance, combining slapstick buffoonery and realistic rage in the kind of mix you rarely saw after movies started talking. But I can't follow the apparent Japanese consensus that Fall Guy is Fukasaku's best film. There's too much overblown comic acting for my taste, with Morio Kazama the worst offender, and Fukasaku himself seems to be suppressing his personal style for this project. But while he never tilts the camera in his signature matter, he retains his knack for tightly-focused mayhem, especially during Hata's apartment-wrecking tantrum. He also does things I'm not accustomed to seeing him do, like that quasi-dream sequence. Fall Guy testifies to Fukasaku's range and his effectiveness as a cinematic storyteller, but just as John Ford's best film is most likely a western for most people, Fukasaku is still at his best for me when telling yakuza stories. The director's growing number of American fans should still check this out sometime just to get a better sense of the fullness of his career, and to see him at what his peers deemed the peak of his powers.

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.

STREET MOBSTER (1972)

Director Kinji Fukasaku and actor Bunta Sugawara will go down in film history for their collaboration on the incredible five-film Battles Without Honor and Humanity series (aka Yakuza Papers) released in 1973 and 1974. In those stories Sugawara played a stoic survivor, but here, a year before the major project, Fukasaku directs him in mad-dog mode as a gangster rising from the gutter but never knowing when to quit or when to compromise. Isamu Okita is a product of poverty, orphaned at an early age by an indifferent mother as illustrated by flashbacks that open in black&white but bleed gracefully into full color -- a device Fukasaku used earlier in Blackmail is My Life. He joins a gang that preys on young women just arriving in the big city, kidnapping and raping them, then selling them to pimps. In the natural course of events he ends up in stir for a time, and his release in when the story proper starts.

Organized crime has gotten more organized and sophisticated. Okita's old Tokyo neighborhood is contested turf for two yakuza gangs whom he hopes to play off each other. He also figures that he can press the more respectable of the two gangs, presuming that they'll be reluctant to take high-profile reprisals. His street-thug tactics are oldschool but effective, and he soon has his own little enclave of vice to reign over. Conflict escalates, however, when the respectable gang calls on a powerful regional clan for aid, offering them a lucrative foothold in the big city. These dudes are tougher than either gang, and when Okita offends their boss, even Boss Yato (real-life yakuza turned actor Noburo Ando), the gang leader who has a grudging nostalgic affection for our hero, demands that he apologize. Apologies aren't in Okita's nature, however. He does what he wants and takes what he wants and damns the consequences.

Simmering through the story is a subplot involving Okita's love-hate relationship with a prostitute (Mayumi Nagisa) who's hired to entertain him after his release from prison. She finds him strangely familiar, and once she recognizes him as one of the gang that had raped her and whored her out the day she arrived in Tokyo she tries to slice him up. Despite this awkward start, they strike up a sporadic relationship. Okita hooks up with other women, but they risk getting their faces slashed by the Nagisa character in one of her fits of jealous rage. Despite the constant hostility and frequent violence, Okita is constantly drawn back to her. It may have something to do with his conflicted feelings for his own mother, a whore in her own right and the first person he ever recalls hitting. Maybe he recognizes a kindred spirit in her fury, too.

Mayumi Nagisa gives a powerful performance as a raging, ruined woman whose only real relationship is with the man who ruined her.

The two storylines -- Okita's frenetic maneuvering among the yakuza factions and his fraught romance with Nagisa -- finally merge at the moment when, for the sake of his few surviving men, Okita decides to compromise and apologize to the big boss. Having already chopped off his pinky in required fashion, he's due for a major beatdown as well, but when Nagisa stumbles on the scene she fears the worst and comes to her man's defense, blade flashing. And when the thugs turn on her, all bets are off for Okita and everyone else....

I don't think mad-dog is Sugawara's ideal mode. That may be because my first impression of him comes from the Battles films, but there's a world-weariness and brooding intelligence to him -- a quality that also emerges in Fukasaku's Cops vs. Thugs -- that makes it seem wasteful for him to play crazy idiots. He can take the type to outlandish yet entertaining extremes bordering on self-parody, as in the White Heat-inspired Yokohama Underworld:Machine Gun Dragon, but I like him better the less hysterical he gets. He's good in Street Mobster just the same, in part because he can convey that he doesn't really fully understand why he does what he does, especially when it comes to his quasi-girlfriend. On some level he just refuses to question himself, just as he refuses to compromise until it's really too late. While Sugawara is fine for the role, Nagisa threatens to steal the film every time she appears. Her rage and her enigmatic passion for Okita make a potent impression, and the fact that Nagisa had a brief career, including only one film after 1974, was instantly disappointing to me.

Fukasaku's directoral style never gets tired for me. It may seem repetitive, but he somehow manages to invest every brawl with uncanny dynamism. His handheld cockeyed framing always makes his stuntmen's antics look painfully authentic. His fight scenes aren't about the choreography of martial arts, but are more like a cinematic ideogram of violence. In Street Mobster Fukasaku is also a master of cityscape, using his locations' towers of architecture and advertising as epic backdrops for Sugawara's strutting and barnstorming. I've seen enough of his movies to say that Street Mobster is a relatively minor Fukasaku film, but it's still thrilling to look at and a sample of more ambitious work yet to come.

YAKUZA GRAVEYARD (1976)

This late film in Kinji Fukasaku's cycle of yakuza films for Toei is regarded as a companion piece to the 1975 film Graveyard of Honor, which also stars Tetsuya Watari. I haven't seen that film yet, but Yakuza Graveyard stands out from the Fukasakus I've seen for a more romantic (or Romantic) sensibility befitting its doggedly doomed hero. Unlike Graveyard of Honor, this one's written by frequent Fukasaku collaborator Kazuo Kasahara, the scripter for the Yakuza Papers/Battles Without Honor or Humanity series and the police tragedy Cops Vs. Thugs. Watari, the star, is less known in America than the female lead, the formidable Meiko Kaji of Scorpion and Lady Snowblood fame. This isn't the sort of film where she can set things right by grabbing a sword or gun. Given a more fragile character to play, Kaji still invests it with authority -- her character, the wife of a jailed yakuza boss, is said to control the gang's purse strings -- and she does get to at least carry a gun at one point. But Fukasaku is as far away here from fantasies of invincible vengeance as he could probably get.

Watari plays Detective Kuroiwa, a cop who isn't above planting evidence on people, though the thug we see so treated probably deserved it. He starts out undercover in a pachinko parlor, contested territory for the established local gang and a larger, richer organization that's starting to muscle in. The local cops have an arrangement with the local gang, but the higher-ups seem to feel how the wind's blowing and urge the local yaks to come to terms -- except for Kuroiwa, who dares them to settle things the traditional, violent way. He has a conflicted relationship with the gang, feuding violently with an underboss while falling for Kaji's quasi-regent. In Keiko he recognizes another damaged soul. He hasn't shaken off the effects of killing a man in the line of duty years ago. He's shacked up with the victim's girl and has been scraping together money in order to buy her her own business, a bar; the girl alternates between open contempt for him and suicidal demands on his attention. He seems happiest alone in his desolate high-rise apartment listening to loud music. Keiko is half Korean and her imprisoned husband, her onetime pimp, despises her for it. "Why aren't you dead already?" he demands when Kuroiwa takes her for a visit to his prison. Afterward, Keiko wants to throw herself into the ocean. A drunken Kuroiwa stops her and then goes From Here to Eternity on her on the moonlit beach.

Meanwhile, Kuroiwa bonds with his erstwhile enemy the underboss, going from a brawl with him at a yakuza ceremony to a night on the town with two American hookers. When the gangster points a gun at his face in the morning, Kuroiwa's indifference cements their new friendship, which results in a sworn brotherhood that threatens our hero's position in the force. With Kuroiwa's encouragement, he goes to war with the rival gang, but by now the cops are openly on the other group's side. They convince a gang subordinate to capitulate once Kuroiwa's friend is out of the way, and when that happens everyone, including Keiko, assumes that Kuroiwa is a rat. Can our hero turn the tide in his favor? Don't bet on it....

I'm still a long way from seeing even a majority of Fukasaku's work, so I don't know how exceptional Yakuza Graveyard is stylistically, but there did seem to be more moments designed for pure pictorial effect than in his other films. There's a breathtaking long shot of a drab, geometric apartment complex that zooms in slowly to catch the insect-like Kuroiwa walking a path alone. When he takes Keiko to his apartment, he opens a window and lets in the wind. It blows a wintry note through the curtains and his open shirt as if he were a gothic antihero living in a tower. The scene with Keiko on the beach is another unusually romantic moment, though its the romanticism of desperation and pure need on display here.

Welcome to Kuroiwa's world

At the same time there are more typical Fukasaku effects all over the place. The fight scenes are done in his incomparable hand-held camera style, the violence of the camera's spasmodic movement accentuating the brawling, beating and shooting in each shot. Stills or screen captures can't really do justice to these scenes, which have the realistic effect of obscuring the action rather than choreographing them for maximum clarity. This particular film gets a little psychedelic, too, in illustrating the effects of truth serum on an already disoriented Kuroiwa.

Graveyard of Honor inevitably lacks the sweep of the five-film Battles series, and it doesn't pack the full punch of Cops vs. Thugs, but it has enough distinctive virtues, including the urgent performances of Watari and Kaji, to earn its own recommendation. The filmography of Kinji Fukasaku is an ongoing revelation of bitter little treasures, from the antiwar invective of Under the Flag of the Rising Sun to the cynical samurai epic Yagyu Clan Conspiracy to the apocalyptic misanthropy of Battle Royale. Not everything is a masterpiece, but Fukasaku hasn't disappointed me yet.

The Japanese-language unsubtitled trailer is three minutes of mayhem and Meiko Kaji on smack, uploaded to YouTube by asianwack.

Sonny Chiba in Kinji Fukasaku's DOBERMAN COP (1977)

Videoasia's Sonny Chiba 4 Film Set is a peculiar little collection. One of the four films hardly counts as a Chiba film, since the great man only contributes a cameo, but that film proved to be a crazy diamond: Machine Gun Dragon, a Japanese re-working of White Heat with Bunta Suguwara in the Cagney role. The film that shares one side of the disc with Dragon is indeed a Sonny Chiba vehicle, but Videoasia neglected to note in its box copy that it is also a film by my second-favorite Japanese director, the relentless Kinji Fukasaku of Yakuza Papers and Battle Royale fame. You'd think that'd be a detail that would guarantee more sales, but Videoasia makes some peculiar calculations sometimes.

Don't let that title fool you, either. It might make you expect a cartoon character or a K9 crimefighter, but it's the title of a popular manga series by a writer who pseudo-named himself after Charles "Buronson" to give readers an idea of what to expect from his pen. I couldn't find out very much about the character more commonly known as Detective Doberman (or Doberman Deka in his native tongue), so I don't know how faithfully Fukasaku represents the comics here. I'll just have to judge the film on its own merits, which emerge only gradually.

The title character's real title is Detective Kano. He's a cop from Okinawa, the sticks of Japan as far as this film is concerned. The vibe is like a McCloud episode or the movie Coogan's Bluff, only imagine Dennis Weaver or Clint Eastwood as a hillbilly instead of a westerner. How hilly is this billy? The opening credits roll over scenes of him wandering through a red-light district of Tokyo with a pig in his arms. It's meant to be an offering to the Tokyo police for their help in resolving a missing person case. Kano has come to the big city to help identify a prostitute who was murdered and burned in her apartment, apparently the latest victim of a serial killer. The Tokyo cops believe the body is Yuna Tamashiro, a girl who ran away from Kano's home village some years ago.

As Kano explains, Yuna is "sort of" his wife, or at least was predicted to become his wife by her mother, the local noro or sorceress. This authority is also convinced that Yuna is not dead. The Tokyo cops may scoff (wouldn't you?) but Kano's own analysis appears to confirm her perception. He casts a bag of seashells on a table and counts those face down and face up in "she loves me, she loves me not" fashion to determine whether Yuna is alive. Don't freak out, though: he's also a quite competent conventional detective and, also being Sonny Chiba, more than capable of handling himself in dangerous situations.

"Knock, Knock!"

Kano suddenly becomes a national hero when he uses unconventional means to rescue an aspiring nightclub singer, Miki Haruno, from a psycho who's taken her hostage in her hotel room. Chiba does most of his own stuntwork in this sequence, rapelling off the hotel roof and traveling at least a dozen stories down to set up his crash dive through a window into Miki's room. This exploit earns him the nickname "Detective Tarzan," just to make things more confusing. It also boosts Miki's profile in advance of her appearance on "A Star is Born," the Japanese Idol of its time. As we learn later, that's just what her ruthless manager Hidemori, a former yakuza, was betting on. But as Kano learns when he watches her sing her signature tune, "My Memory," Miki is almost certainly Yuna Tamashiro.

As Kano gets entangled in the story of Miki and Hidemori, the would-be impresario emerges as a lead suspect in the murder mystery, as the victim seems to be someone who knew something potentially compromising about Miki. Hidemori is a kind of Svengali figure, a manipulator who plies the neurotic Miki with drugs to get her onstage and choreographs her stage movements. But writer Koji Takada and actor Hiroki Matsukata give this villain more depth than we initially expect. Hidemori is a man who has chosen show business as an alternative to yakuza life, only to find that representing your talent can be as hardball a business as whatever unsavory work he did in the past. We also learn that he has genuine feelings for Miki, whom he says he met in New York City and saved from a drug habit. He clearly sees her as a meal ticket, but he also says that she's the first person he's ever felt a desire to help. Their relationship turns out to be something more complex than we thought as it becomes clear that Miki is something more than a helpless Trilby in thrall to her master. Unlike Trilby, she doesn't fall silent when her Svengali is silenced. At the same time, while she flourishes, Kano consults his oracle again, counts the shells, and comes to a dramatically different conclusion than he did the last time. The finale is poignantly downbeat as a devastated Kano packs up his pig and quits Tokyo. Fukasaku and Chiba aren't normally the types to play for pathos, but they earn it here with a perfectly serviceable film noir storyline at the heart of the usual Toei Studio mayhem.

Janet Hatta as Miki and Hiroki Matsukata practically steal Doberman Cop from Chiba, who admirably doesn't overdue the yokel act, despite his costume. Below, Miki's apotheosis at the moment of her mentor's destruction.

Never forgetting that this is a Sonny Chiba movie, Fukasaku stocks the story with plenty of fight scenes filmed in his patented frenetic, topsy-turvy fashion. Our hero is as handy with a Magnum as he is with his fists and feet, blowing one man's head clean off in the film's most violent scene. He has to deal with Hidemori's thugs as well as with the masked serial killer, not to mention the stupidity of most of the Tokyo cops. He gathers up a motley array of allies along the way, including a motorcycle gang and a stripper and her irascible manager.

In the movie's strangest sequence, the stripper Kosode is smitten by Kano and his pig as they watch her prepare to fellate a dildo. The pig goes out of control and runs on stage, and while the whiny manager wrangles it offstage, Kosode drags Kano onstage and strips him with the aid of other spectators. The yokel's protests fade away as Kosode gives him a free ride in front of everybody. Later, Kano tells her that she and her boss are the "most normal" people he's met in Tokyo. Draw whatever conclusion you like from that.

If this is "normal" treatment by Kano's standards, his Okinawan village must be a more happening kind of place than most Tokyo snobs assume.

Doberuman Deka is obviously not in the same league as Fukasaku's yakuza epics or the late-career apocalypse of Battle Royale, but it has a visceral vitality and a surprising emotional range from bumpkin bawdiness to torch song tragedy. Some of that may come from the source material, and some of it is the director's distinctive touch. Perhaps more so than Chiba's martial-arts films that traveled around the world, this film is a piece of authentic Japanese pop culture, and one that may never have been meant for foreign eyes. While the widescreen transfer on the Videoasia disc is far from optimum, the film's mere presence alongside Machine Gun Dragon make the company's Chiba set a must-have until better, more official editions come along.

There's better picture quality in this Japanese trailer, uploaded to YouTube by ssape21. You never see that dog in the movie itself, by the way.