Book & Film: The Yakuza by Leonard Schrader (Futura Books, 1975)

A uniquely ambitious U.S./Japanese co-production, heavily promoted by Warner Bros in the apparent belief that the notion of Japanese gangsters could provide them with some kind of post-‘Enter the Dragon’ East-meets-West cultural sensation, Sydney Pollack’s 1974 film ‘The Yakuza’ was, I think it’s safe to say, not an entirely successful venture.

The movie certainly has some strong plus points - a compelling, Casablanca-ish star-crossed romance played out between Robert Mitchum and Kishi Keiko (the casting of an capable actress who was at least vaguely within Mitchum’s own age range is to be commended); excellent production design, photography and fight choreography (most of this can probably be attributed to personnel provided by production partners Toei); and perhaps best of all, a powerful, characteristically stoic performance from ninkyo yakuza icon Takakura Ken, who could easily have transitioned into a crossover Hollywood career on the strength of his work here, had the film proved a hit.

For the most part though, ‘The Yakuza’ proves a let-down - distant, uninvolving and terminally unexciting, it never really manages to crack the surface of the sinister criminal underworld it purports to be laying bare for American viewers. Whereas we really want to camera to plunge us into the alleyways and dive bars of old Tokyo, blades and bullets flying as our heroes find themselves up to their eyeballs in international intrigue and tangled bushido melodrama, instead we get bland, master-shot heavy scenes set in ex-pat apartments or ornamental gardens, in which aspects of Japanese culture are painstakingly explained to the viewer, as if cribbed from a guidebook somebody skimmed on the flight over.

Emotionally speaking, little in the filmed version of the story really lands the way it should, and for viewers with even the slightest familiarity with actual yakuza eiga (which would admittedly have included practically no one in the film’s original U.S. audience), the movie’s crime and action content proves very weak tea indeed.

Discussing what went wrong with the production in subsequent interviews, co-writer Paul Schrader has diagnosed the problem pretty concisely. He and and his brother Leonard had conceived the project as a violent action movie. Eventual director / producer Sydney Pollack however evinced a strong dislike for / disinterest in filming action, instead expressing a wish to make a more cerebral drama about cross-cultural tensions in post-war Japan.

To the chagrin of genre movie fans the world over, Pollack does not seem to have understood that cultural differences could be effectively explored through action, and the fact that the director had no direct experience of life in Japan before jumping on a plane to begin production does not seem to have helped matters. Hence, we end up with hastily roped in Asian-American actors holding forth about honour and giri whilst gazing into ornamental fish ponds, and a film which comprehensively failed to launch a new golden age of trans-Pacific commercial movie-making. Ah well.

For an insight into how great ‘The Yakuza’ could have been under more favourable circumstances however, I highly recommend tracking down Leonard Schrader’s tie-in novelisation, published by Warner Bros’ paperback imprint in the U.S. and Futura Books in the U.K. Presumably offering a purer vision of the Schrader brothers’ initial intentions for the project, it is, to put it plainly, an absolutely fantastic read. In fact, I’d go so far as to say it is one of the best popular/genre novels I’ve read in recent years.

Somewhat at the gnarlier end of ‘70s airport paperback prose, Leonard’s writing here is raw, pulpy and direct, but it gets the job done. In stark contrast to the movie, he draws us in close to the characters, effectively short-circuiting this reader’s jaded critical faculties to ensure that even the more generic of the thriller plot-twists encountered by retired L.A. private eye and former Tokyo resident Harry Kilmer when he returns to a now-much-changed Japan in search of an old friend’s kidnapped daughter, feel urgent and fraught with personal significance.

Presumably Mitchum had already been cast when Schrader banged out this prose extrapolation of his original story, and Kilmer’s retirement, reluctant tee-totalism and habit of crunching down indigestion tablets all signal that we’re dealing here with a protagonist of a certain age, who is perhaps not in the best of physical shape for undertaking such a gruelling adventure. By contrast, his sidekick/companion on the mission, young punk Dusty Newman - a boring and forgettable character when played by Richard Jordan in the film - really comes alive here, fronting like an escapee from an Elmore Leonard book:

“Twenty-six, husky and brash, Dusty was dressed like a citrus salad: lime-green bellbottoms, lemon-lime shirt and burnt orange army jacket. He was unkempt, grubby and septic, and he didn’t care who knew it. He was everything the well-dressed detective shouldn’t be. He was chasing a turd-brown Buick.”

The function of the relationship between the two Americans is clear. The melancholic Kilmer, an old-hand at Japan having stayed on there after his war-time service, was forced to abandon his true love and return to the U.S. after the return of her hardline traditionalist ‘brother’ (Tanaka Ken - the Takakura character, of course) made their marriage impossible. The taciturn Kilmer has no reason to open up about all this, or indeed to explain the philosophical underpinnings or behavioural peculiarities of Japanese society in general, but the presence of Dusty - the brash, dumb Ugly American and presumed surrogate for the U.S. reader - gives both him and his thinnly sketched, exposition-spouting ex-pat buddies reason to spill their guts and fill in the blanks, educating us in turn.

As readers familiar with their New Hollywood history will be well aware, Leonard Schrader was uniquely placed to pull off the careful, cross-cultural balancing act required for a project like this, having spent much of his adult life in Japan, enthusiastically embracing the nation’s culture after initially arriving there and mastering the language in order to carry out missionary work (an obligation arising from the Schraders’ strict religious upbringing) - or perhaps just to escape the draft, depending on which source you choose to believe.

Captivated by the ninkyo yakuza films he found playing at local cinemas, and particularly by the intractable moral conflicts underpinning their melodramatic plotlines, Leonard appears to have communicated his enthusiasm to his brother Paul - at the time a budding film critic and protégé of Pauline Kael - who, having apparently managed to watch “around fifty” yakuza flicks at Toei’s Japanese language theatre in L.A., soon became one of the first writers to discuss the genre in the English language, penning an influential essay, ‘Yakuza-Eiga: A Primer’, published in Film Comment magazine in January 1974. [You can read it here.]

According to Wikipedia (so take this as you will), Leonard’s involvement with the yakuza meanwhile wasn’t merely limited to the movies, with the years 1969-73 reportedly finding him teaching American Literature at Kyoto University by day whilst “..slipping by night into the subculture of the Yamaguchi-gumi,” whatever that might imply. At around the same time, he met his future wife (Chieko Schrader), so we can perhaps see more than a touch of autobiography creeping into his work here, irrespective of the book’s hard-boiled pulp/genre approach.

Needless to say, this background allows Schrader to engage with this book’s Japanese setting and characters with far greater authenticity and depth than that achieved by Pollack’s film, in spite of his, shall we say, ‘rough-hewn’ prose style and unapologetically macho authorial voice.

The Dusty character in particular gains a compelling character arc here which never quite comes across in the film. Initially dismissive of what he sees as the absurd, masochistic rituals which govern the conduct of tough guy business in Japan, he eventually gets the point (in more ways than one) once shit gets real and he finds himself forced to defend his friend’s extended family from attack.

His fate, as an uncomprehending, Hawaiian shirt-wearing yahoo who meets his end thousands of miles from home, dying in a manner which the solemn Japanese hard cases around him find to be entirely in keeping with their ideals of nobility and self-sacrifice, proves strangely moving, contributing to the impressive head of emotional steam which Schrader manages to generate through the second half of his novel.

Again, it’s difficult for me to really express the extent to which this novel knocked me sideways. What more can I say - I was captivated, to the extent that, when we reach a passage in which an innocent victim is senselessly gunned down, lending Kilmer and Tanaka the impetus they need to put their differences aside and embark on a combined pursuit of bloody vengeance, I found it difficult to even read.

A singularly grim incident, relayed by Schrader with an unusually explicit, unflinching realism which feels entirely necessary to the occasion, this proved a real “close yr eyes and take ten deep breaths before turning the page” kind of moment, the like of which I’ve only very rarely encountered as an adult reader.

Revenge, Schrader is keen to communicate to us here, may be a rather sordid and unedifying concept in the west, but under the precepts of bushido which (in terms of old school / romantic genre convention at least) govern Japan’s underworld, the stakes are rather higher, extending beyond mere personal satisfaction to encompass an almost spiritual sense of blood-drenched cosmic balance. It is a forced immersion into this uncompromising mind-set which sets us up for the novel’s finale - which proves a real show-stopper, let’s put it that way. (As a side note, it is also remarkably similar in tone to the conclusion of John Flynn’s stone-cold revenge classic ‘Rolling Thunder’ (1977), scripted by… Paul Schrader.)

“Kilmer methodically re-checked the ammunition load in each firearm: the .45 had seven big slugs, the .38 six good slugs, the .32 five weak slugs and the shotgun five huge blasts. Total: Twenty-three shots without reloading, but the .32 wasn’t dependable. True total: eighteen good shots. Not enough. The Tono Clan had a fifty-four blade minimum, plus an unknown number of handguns. Stop thinking about it. Rule: expect the best.

[…]

Ken silently raised his powerfully muscled right arm and pointed straight ahead through the dark maple branches. Kilmer saw that he was pointing at the open doorway and foyer. Then Ken moved his rigid arm to the right until it pointed at the northern veranda, the small five-fingered maple leaves brushing against his hand. He glanced at the small leaves - frail and limp like the hands of dead children - and lowered his arm. He spoke in a low voice, his words terse and clipped.

‘I go in the front door. You stand over there.’

Kilmer glanced at the open northside veranda.

‘You wait for me to reach Tono and look for those who have the guns. Shoot them first.’

‘All right.’”

Whilst Pollack’s film gives us an exciting and well-executed action sequence to round things off, Schrader’s book considerably ups the ante, delivering a frenzied outburst of grand guignol excess which would be nigh on impossible to convey on film… at least without employing several rotating teams of highly skilled special effects artists over a period of several weeks and sending your entire audience running for the nearest bathroom in the process.

Imagine if you will, a scrupulously detailed, anatomically accurate account of what might actually occur were several dozen men to begin slicing each other apart with katana blades (plus a stream of bullets and the occasional shotgun blast from our gaijin protagonist) in a confined space, and… that’s what we’ve got here, pretty much. And it goes on for pages; the essential, tension-releasing ‘money shot’ of the chanbara genre extended to an absurd - though essentially realistic - extreme. Literary gorehounds take note.

Of course, we couldn’t have expected Pollack (or indeed, any filmmaker) to really bring much of that to the table in a mainstream movie, but, after the bloodshed is over and Kilmer has repaid his (considerable) debts to Tanaka in, shall we say, the traditional yakuza manner, I was disappointed to discover that the filmed version of ‘The Yakuza’ also nixes the nigh-on perfect final scene kiss-off which Schrader’s book gifts us with. This bit is more-or-less spoiler-free, so in conclusion I’ll quote it in full for you, because it’s great. Just imagine this up on screen before the credits roll;

“Amid a flurry of sayonara nods, Kilmer entered the ‘Hijack Inspection’ booth. Ten minutes later, having passed through ‘Customs Clearance,’ he stopped at the ‘Immigration’ counter and handed the official his passport.

The middle-aged official was extremely serious and stern. He glanced at Kilmer rather smugly, confident that Kilmer was a tourist before he checked the visa. Opening the passport, he said, ‘Are you the American tourist?’

‘Yeah,’ Kilmer nodded, ‘I’m the American tourist.’

The stern-faced official checked the passport photo and flipped back to the visa page. ‘Do you have the good time in Japan?’

Kilmer said nothing.

‘Everything ok,’ the official said solemnly, returning the passport and nodding for Kilmer to move along.

‘Domo,’ Kilmer nodded, tucking the passport in his pocket.

The official, glancing at Kilmer’s lapel, suddenly spotted the bandaged finger-stump and his eyes popped wide open. Unable to contain his curiosity, he blurted out the word: ‘..yakuza?’

Saying nothing, Kilmer turned and stepped through the plate-glass doors into the bright sunshine. Without limping he strode across the runway toward the waiting JAL jumbo jet.”

---- 

 

Losey at the BFI, Part # 3: Secret Ceremony (1968)

As the innovations of the early ‘60s began to give way to the cultural upheavals of The Sixties as we know and love them, the kind of unconventional, psychologically/politically engaged, quasi-artistic filmmaking that Joesph Losey had pioneered in preceding years increasingly began to seem like ‘the in thing’, with the British film industry reeling in turn from the impact of Antonioni’s ‘Blow-Up’, Polanski’s ‘Repulsion’ and ‘Cul de Sac’ and Lindsay Anderson’s ‘If..’, ending the decade with the colossal bad trip of Donald Cammel’s ‘Performance’, a film that in many ways owes its very existence to the themes Losey explored in ‘The Servant’.

During these boom years for his brand of film-making, Losey seems to have immersed himself in a series of more high profile projects than he had previously attempted, moving into colour and toward more stable studio backing as he turned out the uncharacteristically light-hearted spy caper ‘Modesty Blaise’ (1966), followed in quick succession by a more consciously avant garde, but by most accounts less successful, reworking of the themes explored in ‘The Servant’ in 1967’s ‘Accident’, and ‘Boom!’ (1968), an absurd sounding vehicle for Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton that relocated a Tennessee Williams play to a Mediterranean Island.

Sadly I didn’t get the opportunity to see any of those films at the BFI, but I was lucky enough to catch screenings of Losey’s two subsequent films, ‘Secret Ceremony’ (1968) and ‘Figures in a Landscape’ (1970). And, boy, do they ever make for a strange double bill. Both are utterly unique films to the extent that they are almost without precedent in modern cinema, but at the same time they are so different from each other it’s almost impossible to believe they were made concurrently by the same man.

To start with ‘Secret Ceremony’, well…. christ, I don’t know where to start. I’ve never seen anything like it.

Let’s begin at the beginning.

Leonora, played by Elizabeth Taylor and made up like a stern Roman Catholic housewife who’s gone slightly wrong, with weird zig-zaggy stockings and a black mourning veil, boards a London bus.

(The whole film is photographed in totally maxed-out Technicolor, but simultaneously with a very drab colour palette, as if Mario Bava relocated to Kilburn on an overcast day and only brought his brown and green filters.)

On the bus, she is silently hassled by Cenci (Mia Farrow), a witchy, wild-eyed young girl, who follows her when she gets off. It seems Leonora is going to the cemetery. On the way there, both women pass through the church, and pause to stare in desperate fascination at a christening service. In the graveyard, Leonora puts flowers on the grave of her daughter, who drowned aged eleven, as is recounted in detail on her tombstone. Turning around, she bumps into Cenci, and, in highly confusing moment, appears to recognize her as her dead daughter. Cenci, for her part, identifies Liz as her own dead mother, and precedes to drag ‘mother’ back to the opulent gothic mansion where it seems she has lived alone for many years, and there feeds her a yummy silver service breakfast. And my god, the house in this film is simply incredible – the vast main entrance hall is done out in beautiful neo-classical art nouveau frescos, whilst the inner rooms look like Elizabethan palace chambers stuffed with a mad range of antiques from all ages.


So, personally, I’d love to be accosted on buses by witchy girls who want to take me back to their gothic pads for breakfast, but Ms. Taylor seems quite unhappy about the whole situation. Not that it stops her from gratuitously stuffing her face and immediately declaring that she needs a nap and falling asleep on a kingsize bed.

Now at this point, one would be forgiven for thinking, what the hell is going on? Is Cenci really Leonora’s dead daughter, or is she really Cenci’s dead mother, or neither, or both, or what? None of the possible combinations really makes much sense, and the only thing that IS made clear to us is that both of these women are completely mad. And with no more reliable narrative voice to inform us of what’s actually going on, we spend the next… well, god, it seems like hours… simply watching them stumble around the decadent chaos of the mansion, acting crazy with each other.

They take a bath together in a big Victorian tub, and Cenci torments Leonora by repeatedly pushing a rubber duck under the water in mockery of the drowning of… herself?, her sister?, Leonora’s completely unrelated kid? – who knows. They choose outfits to wear for the day – hideous, hilarious outfits the like of which no sensible lady of any era would be seen dead in. Liz declares that she wants to find the perfect dress for a happy, bright sort of day, and rejects Cenci’s first suggestion (some sort of giant, woolen monstrosity) because “no dear, that’s the sort of thing you’d wear if it was bloody pissing it down”. Then she apologies for her language, declares it time for another nap and falls asleep.


The whole thing is highly reminiscent of the Maysles Brothers’ classic documentary Grey Gardens, and, like that film, ‘Secret Ceremony’ is a definitive example of pre-ironic camp, a movie that’s capable of reducing a modern audience to near constant fits of laughter and disbelief, despite being a very real and serious endeavor to its creators and participants.

At some point, two spiteful maiden aunts turn up to visit, and rudely taunt Cenci as they go about stealing some of the valuables laying about the house. It seems they run an antique shop solely off the back of all the stuff they’re ripping off from the house. Later in the film, Leonora goes to visit them there, memorably dressed in what seems to be a purple airline stewardess outfit and matching fez, and gives them hell about it, symbolically tearing a doll apart in the process.

Things take a(n even more) sinister turn as it becomes clear through their rambling, inconsequential exchanges that both women have suffered abuse at the hands of a man called Albert – second husband and step-father respectively, we gather – a circumstance they recall by giggling as they compare imitations of the sex noises he made them make.

Whilst Leonora is asleep, Cenci wonders down to the kitchen where she declares that “my virginity is the only thing I possess”, before she starts a conversation with an imaginary Albert, feeds him his dinner, and throws herself across the table, simulating being raped by an invisible assailant, in a violent transformation that seems to prefigure post-Exorcist possession movies. Watching from behind a paneled door, her ‘mother’ bursts into tears, and the camera shifts upward, across the surface of an out of focus grandfather clock….


And it is at this point readers that, for the good of us all, I must cease this scene by scene synopsis, because, well…. my god – it’s only the laughter that stops me from waking up at night screaming. I’ve maybe described about a quarter of what happens in the film, and from hereon in it just goes further and further off the deep end.

For one thing, Albert returns! He may be clad in a dirty mac, a truly ridiculous leprechaun beard and floppy hat, but yes, I’d recognize those drooping lids and inquisitive eyebrows anywhere…. it’s only motherfucking Robert Mitchum! He doesn’t seem too perturbed to see his dead wife peeking through the curtains, and returns later when she’s gone out to continue his affair with his step-daughter, who, despite clearly being massively traumatized by his previous interference, returns his advances in her own weird way, agreeing to shave his beard off for him (christ, SOMEONE had to), as he holds forth about his recent sexual history. Albert, it seems, is some sort of suave, irascible sex fiend who’s been off working in academia in America, enjoying the company of students, colleagues’ wives, daughters and anyone else unlucky enough to enter his orbit, but, like a comic book villain version of Humbert Humbert, he just can’t get the image of a young Cenci sliding down the banisters off his mind. “Do you realize”, says the droll, measured voice that once told us the story of left-hand right-hand, “that all over the Australian bush, fathers are banging their daughters like there's no tomorrow? What makes me any different?”


By and by, this whole merry crew end up relocating to the seaside, where the film reaches a level of high camp so sadistically feverish it could only really be put into its true context by a panel consisting of John Waters, Alejandro Jodorowsky and Herman Goering’s floating, disembodied brain.

I think I finally reached my breaking point during the sequence in which Mitchum confronts Taylor on the dunes. She is overseeing a lavish picnic, clad in a purple floral dress, push-up bra and a huge, girdle-style leather belt. “You look more like a cow than my late wife”, Albert observes, “no offense, I'm very fond of cows”. “Mooooo!”, he proceeds to taunt her, as she stabs at him in fury with a butter knife, in continuation of the surreal, nightmarish life and death struggle that seems to comprise this film’s final forty minutes.

In another scene that’s liable to be etched on my mind for longer than I’d like it to be, Leonora, goaded even further into hysterics, performs a symbolic abortion on Cenci, pulling the fluffy crab toy she’s been using as an ersatz baby out from under her dress and tearing it apart in a hideous, sledgehammer montage of screaming faces, tearing fabric and mad woman wrestling.


Needless to say, things stumble on toward a morbid, overblown gothic finale in which the fate of each member of our deranged love triangle is played out to the accompaniment of orchestral bombast and ridiculously overbearing religious imagery, as our weird protagonists’ faces are cross-faded into images of the crucifixion and…. shit, that’s it, I’m outta here.

I don’t know *what* to make of this film. Given its colossal strangeness, icky subject matter and complete lack of commercial potential, it is ironic that this is first of the Losey films I’ve seen that was made for a major American studio. Picture if you will, some poor commissioning editor at Universal, sitting in a dark room some time in 1968 watching a rough cut of ‘Secret Ceremony’, head in hands, muttering: “oh shit, I am in so much trouble”.

But then, hey, what do I know? Ok, so I’m someone who’ll happily put on a Female Prisoner: Scorpion movie to unwind with after tea, and ‘The Secret Ceremony’ reduced me to a gibbering wreck. But head over to the film’s page at IMDB, and you’ll find plenty of positive reviews from people – Liz Taylor fans mostly it seems – who are happy to regard it as a serious and successful melodrama about family breakdown.

Maybe that illustrates some kind of profound point about perceptions and expectations of mainstream vs. underground cinema, or maybe these people are all just fucking mad, who knows. I mean, maybe there are hundreds of sanity-shaking, borderline offensive films such as this one lurking in the hinterlands of ‘70s family melodrama, unseen by the likes of us cos they don’t have a name director attached? I don’t know.


But whatever – on some level, I suppose the IMDBers have a point. Buried somewhere within ‘Secret Ceremony’ is an effective gothic tragedy. Someone – was it Roger Corman maybe? – once said that the essence of any gothic horror story could be reduced to “a pretty girl goes into a big house, gets the shit scared out of her”, and, whilst ‘Secret Ceremony’ isn’t horror (well, not intentionally anyway), it is on that level that the film could have succeeded. In and of itself, Mia Farrow’s performance is startlingly good, and if the film had concentrated more on investigating her world – that of a damaged, deeply confused teenager living in fear amid the opulent ruins of her ancestors – well… it could have been beautiful.

But it isn’t. Joseph Losey’s capacity for visual and emotional excess we have already noted in some of his earlier films – for better or worse, it’s one of the things that marks him out as a director of such great interest. But combined here with his lack of interest in maintaining a clear-cut narrative, with a script (courtesy of George Tabori) that make the Andy Warhol Frankenstein and Dracula movies look like models of quiet good taste, and with Elizabeth Taylor cleaving into view like the dread revenant of a thousand ham-fisted melodramas, and…. well it’s a wonderful, awful, dignity pulverizing, nigh-on hallucinogenic nightmare of a motion picture, conceived and executed on an unself-conscious level that most of the subsequent filmmakers who have SET OUT to freak people out with this sort of thing could never hope to equal.

It’s as if in trying to take his established set of favourite themes – psycho-sexual power games, shifting identities and unconventional, destructive love triangles played out within the enclosed environment of a single building – and applying them to a group of characters who are dangerously mentally ill, Losey has somehow forgotten to examine that illness from an outside perspective, and instead has let it take over and command every aspect of the film. From the lighting and the costumes through the dialogue, the over-acting, the fragmented narrative, the seemingly endless, pointless emotional climaxes, ‘Secret Ceremony’ isn’t so much a film about people who are insane, it is more a film that has GONE insane.

Naturally I commend it to you in the highest possible terms. ‘Secret Ceremony’, ladies and gents. As the poster blurb for that other misunderstood cinematic gem ‘Wayne’s World II’ put it: you’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll hurl.