The Drifting Avenger (1968)

Original title: Kôya no toseinin

A gang of stagecoach robbers stumble into the Old American West cabin of an expat samurai (three minutes of Takashi Shimura are better than no Takashi Shimura), shoot the man and his wife and leave their cowboy son Ken (Ken Takakura), also pretty shot, for dead.

Because this is a western, Ken survives with a righteous lust for vengeance only tempered by the samurai code his father taught him, and rides out in search for the killers. He still doesn’t quite have the killer instinct he’d actually need to conclude the whole avenging business successfully, and lacks some of the technical skill of the proper gunman as well, so it comes in useful he soon encounters the experienced Marvin (Ken Goodlet), who is good with guns, paternal advice and being an old west kind of guy. He also happens to be the father of one of the killers, though that conflict isn’t quite resolved as you’d expect, or made as much of as you’d hope for.

Ken does seem to have a thing for fallen in with relatives of his prospective victims. For he also develops paternal feelings for the son of another one of the killers, and also gets close to the same man’s soon to be widow, who takes her husband’s fate philosophically even before he is dead.

Vengeance, it turns out, is a place full of relatives who are rather more okay with having their family killed than Ken is.

Despite being more than just a little fond of classic Japanese genre cinema, I’ve never been able to see any of the westerns some of the major studios at put out, so my only actual contact with this somewhat surprising genre has been Takashi Miike’s Sukiyaki Western Django until now – and that’s of course neither a classic era studio movie nor sane nor normal. On the other hand, there’s been so much back and forth influence between chanbara in Japan and the western in the US and Italy, it’s not as if I’m moving through unknown territory here.

Still, this is my first proper Japanese western (if one shot in Australia with an Australian cast apart from its star and a couple of intro characters). The film was directed by Toei contract man Junya Sato, whose direction tends to the technically competent yet workmanlike, at least in most of his films I’ve seen. This certainly applies to Drifting Avenger. There’s nothing here that’s badly staged or ugly to look at, but there’s also a certain lack of flair and visual energy – as a western director, he’s certainly no Leone, Boetticher, Ford, or Corbucci. Which is a particular shame because the Australian landscape would at the very least offer up some spectacular – if not very American looking – vistas beyond what Sato shows here.

The script is more routine than inspired as well, with some attempts at complicating Ken’s quest for vengeance via entanglements between honour and humanity that equally speak to western, chanbara and yakuza film traditions but that never feel as emotionally or intellectually captivating as they could. The film’s structure is a little too episodic for this to work as well as it should, particularly since it repeats plot beats between Marvin and the other killer’s family that would have been better explored through a single set of characters.

The situation isn’t helped by the fact that Takakura and Goodlet are the only professional screen actors in larger roles – the rest of the Australian cast only has this as their single film credits, and the lack of experience and ability gets in the way of proper emotional and thematic exploration, even though everyone is dubbed into Japanese. An all Japanese cast out of Toei’s stable of character actors, stars and pros would have provided much needed personality to everyone. And while Takakura is great as always, he does need other actors to play off of when emoting, instead of the walking talking cardboard he has to cope with here throughout.

Still, The Drifting Avenger is not a terrible movie by any means, just one that’s never more than very basically entertaining.

A True Story of the Ginza Private Police (1973)

Original title: 実録・私設銀座警察

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Three Films Make A Post: Sometimes, No Tagline’s Forthcoming

Death Occurred Last Night aka La morte risale a ieri sera (1970): The mentally disabled daughter of a single parent father (Raf Vallone), disappears without much of a trace. An increasingly invested cop (Frank Wolff) takes on the case to find some rather nasty business concerning a prostitution racket and personal betrayal.

Even though it is often strikingly shot and edited with as mix of inventiveness and intelligence, and features fine performances by the always great Vallone and Wolff, I never quite managed to connect with this police procedural (whoever pretends this to be a giallo as the genre is typically understood is simply lying). Perhaps the reason is Duccio Tessari’s unwillingness to ever show as much of the sordidness this tale is built upon as would be actually necessary? The overwhelming sense of watching a film that really wants to make it clear that it is socially conscious and rather important?

Never Give Up aka Yasei no shomei (1978): Junya Sato’s often somewhat too slow and vague narrative style – the film is nearly two and a half hours long! – never quite manages to disguise quite how strange of a genre mixture this Ken Takakura vehicle is: it’s a melodrama about a man of violence trying to do penance for past sins, a 70s conspiracy thriller about a female journalist stumbling upon a small town conspiracy that is at the same time apparently nation-wide, a movie about a psychic kid, an action movie that prefigures some beats of the final act of First Blood. There’s just a lot going on here, and for at least the film’s first third, it is not exactly easy to parse how all these disparate elements connect.

However, once they do – or if you enjoy figuring out vague narratives – Never Give Up becomes more than just a little compelling. Needless to say, the acting is pretty wonderful, and there’s a very 70s fearlessness on display when it comes to the death of central characters and downer endings.

Mars Express (2023): I don’t understand the high praise this French piece of science fiction animation is getting all around the net. To these eyes, Jérémie Périn’s film is about as generic as science fiction action gets, and neither its animation nor its design is much to write home about – unless you’re deeply into things looking as if they were done with strict professional competence. The narrative is as been there, done that as it gets, and the worldbuilding nothing that hasn’t been done in science fiction again and again to better effect.

It doesn’t improve my appreciation that the film shunts its only compelling ideas into its final fifteen minutes.

The Bullet Train (1975)

Original title: Shinkansen daubakuha

This write-up concerns the full 152 minute version of the film. The various international cuts of 90 to 100 minutes length leave out so much that’s important for the film it’s not even funny.

A small group of desperate and despondent men under the leadership of Tetsuo Okita (Ken Takakura) hide a bomb on a Japanese bullet train. It’s an interesting construction that certainly would not be borrowed by a later US movie about a speeding bus at all, oh no, for it activates when the train goes over the speed of 80 km/h and will blow up once it falls under that limit again. Okita and his men attempt to blackmail a considerable amount of money from the train company, seeing the operation as a crime where nobody will get hurt.

Unfortunately, the police do their best to get as many people hurt as possible, or so it seems, first killing the youngest of Okita’s men during a fake money handover, later heavily wounding but letting escape Okita’s other partner in the next one, and not really getting anywhere with their other inquiries.

While the cops are mishandling the situation, the chief of operations for the shinkansen trains, Kuramochi (Ken Utsui), and an increasingly sweaty and desperate train driver (Shinichi “Sonny” Chiba) try to find the bomb, keep increasingly crazed passengers sane, and resolve the whole situation before the higher political echelons decide that 1,500 people dying on an exploding train an hour earlier than they otherwise would is a perfectly reasonable exchange for the infrastructural costs of having it explode at a station.

Junya Sato’s highly melodramatic crime thriller shouldn’t work at all. It seems, on first look, overly long, with two and a half hours of train stuff, flashbacks to the past of Okita and his people, a birth on board the train that ends badly, and many, many scenes of actors looking dramatically at switchboards and such. However, Sato and his cast treat nearly every single moment of the film with immense intensity, with everyone’s emotions permanently dialled up to eleven and staying there throughout. This larger than life quality to all emotions is perhaps straddling the line to self-parody, but for my taste, it never stumbles over it, and instead uses bigness as a way to grab its audience emotionally in any way it can.

Plus, if you have Sonny Chiba and not decide to let him beat anyone up, you’ll at least need to have him sweat a lot and lose his emotional cool in ways huge enough for him (side note: he’s actually playing a bit less over the top than he usually does, just ends up still taking up the space of two normal actors, or five Tom Cruises); if you hire Ken Takakura, you of course need to have a lot of close-ups on his sad eyes and provide him with a tragic backstory for his new life of crime that even manages to sell his death in the end (as always with these cops, by shots in the back probably fired because they were too lazy to run after an unarmed man) as something bad, despite him having risked the lives of 1,500 people and indirectly killed a baby.

The true moral centre and hero of the film though is Kuramochi, portrayed by Utsui as a man who mixes professionalism with deep emotional involvement and a huge sense of integrity. He is, therefor, the character who most obviously makes various of the film’s ethical arguments. For yes, it turns out this big, loud, melodramatic film also has some remarks to make about the way destiny always seems to kick the little guy when he’s already down, and the unpreparedness of then contemporary Japanese (and not only there and then) society to pick up the universe’s slack. Also under angry scrutiny is the concept of the lesser evil (the movie’s not a fan).


If all this still sounds like a bit much for one film – it isn’t. Sato manages to hold the necessary tension for it all to work throughout, with nary a boring minute. Best of all, he seems in full control of his small army of plot threads and characters, knowing when he can shuffle between them regularly and when it’s time to keep us longer in a sequence. While the director generally doesn’t show the more eccentric, psychedelic and avant-garde tendencies of Japanese 70s genre cinema, this is still a technically very convincing film, with action sequences choreographed to the point, and demonstrating the often nearly uncanny way even the lesser directors of this era in Japanese cinema had with the blocking of scenes.