Hakuchu no buraikan

Fukasaku's first film. A minor but not insignificant work, strongly influenced by 40s American noir and gangster films.

The story, set in Japan, centers around a group of miscreants and career criminals, among them a spy, prostitute, and three Americans: a GI, a racketeer, and his wife. They are blackmailed into robbing a U.S. Army payroll by a ruthless Yakuza boss. The boss himself is a victim of double-dealing and treachery; virtually everyone involved has a hidden agenda.

The story is fairly compelling, exploring the vast intersection of racism, opportunism and sexual frustration that grew in what essentially amounted to U.S. occupation in the post-war period.

The film is well paced, shot in a crisp, alluring black and white with attention to period detail. The film is not unlike THE KILLING, from director Stanley Kubrick.

But unlike Kubrick's masterful tale of a heist, that despite meticulous planning, unravels through human folly, HIGH NOON FOR GANGSTERS has acting that is often downright miserable.

And the fault may lie with the ambition of the script. Japanese and American actors speak both English and Japanese (the film has Japanese subtitles as well) and while the Asian actors handle both languages with aplomb, the Americans can barely act in their own language.

Perhaps Fukasuku had an imprecise grasp of the English language at the time, or simply didn't envision the film playing to American audiences. Which is unfortunate, as the film's moral center is the complex character of Tom -- a violent, sexually voracious black GI who finds inner peace with a "half-breed" prostitute -- portrayed by an actor who lacks the resources to even play a part with no lines.

The resolution is violent and explosive, but mostly numbing. If Tom had been a little more believeable, the film would have had a sense of tension and pathos that would have elevated it (and the ending) to a much greater status; but Fukasaku's prodigious output that followed more than offered him the chance to improve upon his first effort.

HIGH NOON FOR GANGSTERS (1961, aka GREED IN BROAD DAYLIGHT) is a relatively low-budget Japanese crime thriller that marked the directorial debut of the prolific Kinji Fukasaku who is better known these days for such films as BLACK LIZARD, THE GREEN SLIME, MESSAGE FROM SPACE, LEGEND OF THE EIGHT SAMURAI, VIRUS, and last year's BATTLE ROYALE, a controversial boxoffice hit in Japan about school kids forced to kill each other in a government-ordered survival contest.

Shooting in black-and-white and widescreen for HIGH NOON, Fukasaku seemed a lot less influenced by traditional Japanese films than by the French New Wave and such American auteurs as Stanley Kubrick (THE KILLING) and Sam Fuller (UNDERWORLD USA, CRIMSON KIMONO and his shot-in-Japan caper film, HOUSE OF BAMBOO). There's a lot of handheld camerawork and, in the second half, lots of outdoors location shooting, including an extended shootout/stand-off between two rival gangs in a sprawling abandoned shantytown. It's a real down-and-dirty crime film about lowlifes who are drawn together to execute a caper (the robbery of an armored truck carrying a U. S. army payroll) and then fall apart over the money.

What's unusual about this film, considering when it was shot, is the presence of three American characters, a white man and woman and a black man, all played by Americans. The two men speak both Japanese and English. When they first meet, they immediately trade racial slurs in English: 'I'm not working with any Sambo!' 'You poor white trash!' and they quickly come to blows before the Japanese ringleader (Tetsuro Tanba) breaks it up. The white actor is Robert Dunham, who will be recognized by fans of Japanese monster movies from his appearances in such films as MOTHRA, DAGORA, THE GREEN SLIME (also directed by Fukasaku) and GODZILLA VS. MEGALON. The black actor is Chico Roland, who made many films in Japan over a 20-year period, including Sonny Chiba's THE STREET FIGHTER, Seijun Suzuki's GATE OF FLESH, Kazui Nihonmatsu's GENOCIDE, and two by Koreyoshi Kurahara, THE WARPED ONES and BLACK SUN.

At one point Tanba and his brother, Sabu (the character name, not the Indian actor!), go to a brothel and 'buy' a half-breed girl (half-Japanese and half-black) to keep the black member of their team company. At this point, Tom, the black man, becomes a sympathetic character and becomes very protective of the girl, fighting off Sabu at one point when the latter tries to rape her. Tanba develops a great deal of respect for Tom. I don't believe I've ever seen a Japanese film, especially one this old, that deals with race relations in such an interesting and radical way. It's a fascinating film and it looks forward to Fukasaku's later Yakuza films.