Yakuza Wolf: I Perform Murder (1972)

Original title: Ôkami yakuza: Koroshi wa ore ga yaru

A handful of men from the Yakuza group of Izumi (Koji Nanbara) are murdered in brutal and particularly ruthless fashion. Izumi suspects a rival gang of the killings, but in truth, it is his past coming to roost. A couple of years ago, Izumi’s gang wiped out the Himuro group, and Boss Himuro’s son Gosuke (Sonny Chiba) has now returned to take bloody vengeance on his father’s killer, even though he never wanted anything to do with the yakuza life before. Gosuke’s mood does not improve when he realizes that his enemies also raped his sister and then sold her into a life of drugs, slavery and prostitution.

So it comes as little surprise he’s willing to do absolutely anything to destroy the man responsible for his family’s ruin, be it heating up the cold gang war between Izumi and his enemies, kidnapping his enemy’s teenage daughter, or ramming a knife in the back of whomever he deems more useful that way.

This is pretty early in Sonny Chiba’s transformation from more prospective matinee idol and action comedy role actor to the ruthless yet typically awesome bastards he would go on to play for large parts of his career. His Gosuke comes out fully formed already, committing brutal and sometimes genuinely vile acts out of his lust for revenge and a clearly destructive sense of honour, and only getting away with the audience sympathy for it because he’s Sonny Chiba and because his enemies are even worse. Visually, Gosuke is styled very much as a Spaghetti Western hero, predominantly Django, and Chiba plays him as a brooding, glowering presence who doesn’t communicate in the expected angry, dramatic shouts and grunts but speaks quietly, softly and monotonously, like a guy who holds on to control of his manner tightly and lets his violence shout for itself. It’s an effective approach to the role that makes Gosuke feel even more frightening, suggesting a man who could stop his violence when he actually wanted to, but simply has given up trying -  if he ever wanted to.

Apart from its protagonist’s visual styling, Yakuza Wolf is full of other obvious parallels to Italian Westerns, apparently coming full circle with influences particularly Kurosawa had on cinema in Europe and the United States; and thanks to this visual style, it is pretty clear that its director Ryuichi Takamori does mean Italy and not Yojimbo in the scenes where Gosuke plays one Yakuza gang against the other; let’s not even mention a climax where our hero has two ruined hands and guns his enemies down thanks to a home-made gun track. Morally, this is of a piece with the more extreme of the Italian western, showing the kind of nihilism I find best interpreted as an expression of intense anger at the state of the world.

As a director, Takamori isn’t one of the best doing this kind of material in Japan. It’s not that he’s not technically accomplished – you simply didn’t make studio movies in Japan if you weren’t – he’s just not quite as artful or intense, as good at putting subtext in pictures than the best of his peers at the time were. He’s still quite able to direct a series of scenes of carnage highly effectively and does make much of Chiba’s physical performance; just from time to time, particularly in the scenes that have most to do with less action-heavy yakuza cinema, things decelerate just a little too much, with scenes that suddenly don’t seem quite in rhythm with the rest of what we see. In other moments, particularly in the scenes that bring the traditional exploitation values of really uncomfortable sex into play, Takamori becomes nearly brilliant. Particularly the phantasmagorical scene in which Gosuke finds his psychologically destroyed sister in a sex dungeon is incredible, like something out of a nightmare – even before she, clearly not recognizing him, offers him a breast and asks him to sleep with her.

Obviously, these particular aesthetic pleasures are not meant for everyone.

In short: I, the Executioner (1968)

aka Requiem for a Massacre

Original title: Minagoroshi no reika

A killer, a man going by the name of Kawashima (Makoto Sato) begins raping and murdering women belonging to a small clique of friends, for reasons which will turn out to make a lot of sense, at least to him.

In turns, we follow the exploits of Kawashima in his role as a killer, the police’s efforts at catching him – which means first realizing that the women he kills share a dark secret, and Kawashima’s romance with waitress Haruko (Chieko Baisho). Because this is not a Hollywood movie, that last part of the film will not collide with the first one in the most dramatically obvious way yet carry all the more dramatic heft and meaning for it.

I know that I, the Executioner’s director Tai Kato is well-loved as a filmmaker of various Yakuza and Samurai movie sub-genres; despite my interest in those genres, I haven’t seen many of Kato’s films, for some reason. Going by this film, I’m rather missing out.

At first, the I, the Executioner’s formal structure is somewhat confusing: the giallo-esque scenes of Kawashima as killer, the police procedural and the Japanese melodrama that takes over in the scenes with Haruko feel at the beginning only connected through Kato’s striking and individual-peculiar visual style. Kato nearly completely eschews long shots, prefers close-ups – sometimes of objects instead of people – and usually builds a frame within the frame of the screen by placing characters between or behind objects. He does this so intensely and continuedly, suddenly seeing a character’s whole body, or a shot that leaves space around characters takes on immense emotional weight. It’s a style so uncommon even in the world of brilliant stylists that was Japanese studio cinema of this era, it can’t help but suggest quite different ways our common filmic language might have developed and still be as emotionally affecting.

In the film at hand, this style at first causes a feeling of dislocation and claustrophobia, feelings Kawashima, his victims and the police share to various degrees. The longer the film goes on, the more it becomes clear that Kato also uses his style to connect the apparently disparate parts of the film, showing emotional connections nobody could tell; he’s also making subtle differences between the different strands – the murder scenes are the most claustrophobic whereas the scenes with Haruko suggest a larger, if not brighter world (that will of course eventually be drenched in rain).