DANGER PAYS (1962)

In recent years American audiences were made acquainted with "Nikkatsu noir," the Japanese studio's sometimes gritty, sometimes stylish crime films of the 1950s and 1960s. Nikkatsu made other kinds of crime film as well, including this Ko Nakahira film that might best be described as Runyonesque in the manner, if without the music, of Guys and Dolls. It showcases a colorful crowd of cartoonish crooks, led by Nikkatsu noir standout Jo Shishido as Glass-Heart Joe, a petty purple peacock of a hood who putters around town in his tiny two-seater looking for the main chance. When gangsters on a larger scale hijack a truck carrying paper used to print currency, Joe figures out that there's counterfeiting to be done. The thing to do in such circumstances is to nab the top counterfeiter, an old man known as The Expert (Bokuzen Hidari), and ask a high price of the hijackers for his services. Unsurprisingly, Joe isn't the only guy to get that idea. He has to deal with two semi-friendly rivals: Slide Rule (Hiroyuki Nagato), so named because of his Mad Thinker-like habit of calculating the probabilities in any situation, and Dump Truck Ken (Kojiro Kusanagi), so named because that's what he drives. They have Joe's number because they know his weakness. Rub two pieces of glass together and the squeaky sound drives Joe bananas and renders him helpless.

These three cancel each other out initially, letting the hijack gang get away with The Expert, who proves a bit of a prima donna. He demands ideal work conditions, i.e., working in the basement of the Cabaret Acapulco  with a glass ceiling giving him a private angle on the showgirls performing on stage. His new employers prove quite accommodating, being desperate for a big payday when they exchange their counterfeit yen for authentic U.S. dollars from unsuspecting Hong Kong crooks.

The rest of the film follows the three small-timers' attempts to snatch The Expert until they're forced to join forces for their own protection. Along the way, Joe picks up a feisty sidekick when his machinations get Tomoko, an innocent secretary (Ruriko Asaoka) fired from her office job. She proves to be a judo and akido expert who gets to throw Joe across a room in one scene and gets into an extended brawl with a randy trucker in another. Pound for pound she's probably the toughest of our protagonists, as long as firearms aren't involved. She otherwise makes a helpful accomplice when Joe's trying to convince the hijackers, for his life's sake, that he's wearing a wire and the cops are listening in.

Since everyone's hoping for a big payday, the danger has to match the prize. However goofy the main characters seen, this is still a take-no-prisoners crime film. It opens with the original truck drivers getting murdered, and reaches its climax when our fighting foursome, after escaping a gassy deathtrap, somehow shoot their way out of an elevator shaft, slaughtering the entire hijack gang. The joke here is that two-fisted Tomoko gets ill at the sight of blood. The irony is that those gangsters gave their lives for nothing. On a whim, the Expert had tricked them, putting a subtle flaw in the engraving that renders the fake bills even more worthless -- but our heroes hope to put one over on the Hong Kong crew before those fools have a chance to figure things out....

It's a fun change of pace to see Jo Shishido in something like Rat Pack mode, and the probability that he'll bungle everything keeps him sympathetic throughout. The comedy is broad though not embarrassingly so, and the vivid cinematography of Shinsaku Himeda, a frequent collaborator with Shohei Imamura, makes the whole thing lovely to look at. International audiences don't get comedies like these as often as they get any country's more violent and cool genre pictures, but something like Danger Pays probably brings us closer to popular taste in Japan than the more arty or outrageous films. We need more comedies like this to round out our picture of one of the most prolific film industries of the golden age of international cinema.