Blood of Revenge (1965)

Original title: 明治侠客伝 三代目襲名

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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).