Sonny Chiba in Kinji Fukasaku's DOBERMAN COP (1977)

Videoasia's Sonny Chiba 4 Film Set is a peculiar little collection. One of the four films hardly counts as a Chiba film, since the great man only contributes a cameo, but that film proved to be a crazy diamond: Machine Gun Dragon, a Japanese re-working of White Heat with Bunta Suguwara in the Cagney role. The film that shares one side of the disc with Dragon is indeed a Sonny Chiba vehicle, but Videoasia neglected to note in its box copy that it is also a film by my second-favorite Japanese director, the relentless Kinji Fukasaku of Yakuza Papers and Battle Royale fame. You'd think that'd be a detail that would guarantee more sales, but Videoasia makes some peculiar calculations sometimes.

Don't let that title fool you, either. It might make you expect a cartoon character or a K9 crimefighter, but it's the title of a popular manga series by a writer who pseudo-named himself after Charles "Buronson" to give readers an idea of what to expect from his pen. I couldn't find out very much about the character more commonly known as Detective Doberman (or Doberman Deka in his native tongue), so I don't know how faithfully Fukasaku represents the comics here. I'll just have to judge the film on its own merits, which emerge only gradually.

The title character's real title is Detective Kano. He's a cop from Okinawa, the sticks of Japan as far as this film is concerned. The vibe is like a McCloud episode or the movie Coogan's Bluff, only imagine Dennis Weaver or Clint Eastwood as a hillbilly instead of a westerner. How hilly is this billy? The opening credits roll over scenes of him wandering through a red-light district of Tokyo with a pig in his arms. It's meant to be an offering to the Tokyo police for their help in resolving a missing person case. Kano has come to the big city to help identify a prostitute who was murdered and burned in her apartment, apparently the latest victim of a serial killer. The Tokyo cops believe the body is Yuna Tamashiro, a girl who ran away from Kano's home village some years ago.

As Kano explains, Yuna is "sort of" his wife, or at least was predicted to become his wife by her mother, the local noro or sorceress. This authority is also convinced that Yuna is not dead. The Tokyo cops may scoff (wouldn't you?) but Kano's own analysis appears to confirm her perception. He casts a bag of seashells on a table and counts those face down and face up in "she loves me, she loves me not" fashion to determine whether Yuna is alive. Don't freak out, though: he's also a quite competent conventional detective and, also being Sonny Chiba, more than capable of handling himself in dangerous situations.

"Knock, Knock!"

Kano suddenly becomes a national hero when he uses unconventional means to rescue an aspiring nightclub singer, Miki Haruno, from a psycho who's taken her hostage in her hotel room. Chiba does most of his own stuntwork in this sequence, rapelling off the hotel roof and traveling at least a dozen stories down to set up his crash dive through a window into Miki's room. This exploit earns him the nickname "Detective Tarzan," just to make things more confusing. It also boosts Miki's profile in advance of her appearance on "A Star is Born," the Japanese Idol of its time. As we learn later, that's just what her ruthless manager Hidemori, a former yakuza, was betting on. But as Kano learns when he watches her sing her signature tune, "My Memory," Miki is almost certainly Yuna Tamashiro.

As Kano gets entangled in the story of Miki and Hidemori, the would-be impresario emerges as a lead suspect in the murder mystery, as the victim seems to be someone who knew something potentially compromising about Miki. Hidemori is a kind of Svengali figure, a manipulator who plies the neurotic Miki with drugs to get her onstage and choreographs her stage movements. But writer Koji Takada and actor Hiroki Matsukata give this villain more depth than we initially expect. Hidemori is a man who has chosen show business as an alternative to yakuza life, only to find that representing your talent can be as hardball a business as whatever unsavory work he did in the past. We also learn that he has genuine feelings for Miki, whom he says he met in New York City and saved from a drug habit. He clearly sees her as a meal ticket, but he also says that she's the first person he's ever felt a desire to help. Their relationship turns out to be something more complex than we thought as it becomes clear that Miki is something more than a helpless Trilby in thrall to her master. Unlike Trilby, she doesn't fall silent when her Svengali is silenced. At the same time, while she flourishes, Kano consults his oracle again, counts the shells, and comes to a dramatically different conclusion than he did the last time. The finale is poignantly downbeat as a devastated Kano packs up his pig and quits Tokyo. Fukasaku and Chiba aren't normally the types to play for pathos, but they earn it here with a perfectly serviceable film noir storyline at the heart of the usual Toei Studio mayhem.

Janet Hatta as Miki and Hiroki Matsukata practically steal Doberman Cop from Chiba, who admirably doesn't overdue the yokel act, despite his costume. Below, Miki's apotheosis at the moment of her mentor's destruction.

Never forgetting that this is a Sonny Chiba movie, Fukasaku stocks the story with plenty of fight scenes filmed in his patented frenetic, topsy-turvy fashion. Our hero is as handy with a Magnum as he is with his fists and feet, blowing one man's head clean off in the film's most violent scene. He has to deal with Hidemori's thugs as well as with the masked serial killer, not to mention the stupidity of most of the Tokyo cops. He gathers up a motley array of allies along the way, including a motorcycle gang and a stripper and her irascible manager.

In the movie's strangest sequence, the stripper Kosode is smitten by Kano and his pig as they watch her prepare to fellate a dildo. The pig goes out of control and runs on stage, and while the whiny manager wrangles it offstage, Kosode drags Kano onstage and strips him with the aid of other spectators. The yokel's protests fade away as Kosode gives him a free ride in front of everybody. Later, Kano tells her that she and her boss are the "most normal" people he's met in Tokyo. Draw whatever conclusion you like from that.

If this is "normal" treatment by Kano's standards, his Okinawan village must be a more happening kind of place than most Tokyo snobs assume.

Doberuman Deka is obviously not in the same league as Fukasaku's yakuza epics or the late-career apocalypse of Battle Royale, but it has a visceral vitality and a surprising emotional range from bumpkin bawdiness to torch song tragedy. Some of that may come from the source material, and some of it is the director's distinctive touch. Perhaps more so than Chiba's martial-arts films that traveled around the world, this film is a piece of authentic Japanese pop culture, and one that may never have been meant for foreign eyes. While the widescreen transfer on the Videoasia disc is far from optimum, the film's mere presence alongside Machine Gun Dragon make the company's Chiba set a must-have until better, more official editions come along.

There's better picture quality in this Japanese trailer, uploaded to YouTube by ssape21. You never see that dog in the movie itself, by the way.

YOKOHAMA UNDERWORLD: MACHINE GUN DRAGON (1978)

It shouldn't have surprised me to find out that one of the four films in VideoAsia's Sonny Chiba collection isn't really a Sonny Chiba movie. VideoAsia isn't exactly the most scrupulous purveyor of obscure movies. But in this particular case I perked up quickly as I realized that Akihisa Okamoto's film was, in fact, a Bunta Sugawara movie, with Chiba in a cameo role. Sugawara became one of my favorite Japanese actors when I saw Kinji Fukasaku's five-part Battles Without Honor and Humanity series (aka Yakuza Papers, 1973-4). If the Toei Studio in the 1970s is Japan's answer to Warner Bros. in the 1930s, and if Chiba, as I've suggested before, is Toei's James Cagney, then Sugawara is more like Toei's Bogart -- a stoic survivor in the Battles films or a tragic figure in Fukasaku's Cops vs. Thugs (1975), in which his cop protagonist makes a doomed bid to become a yakuza kingmaker. I was instantly glad for the chance to see another Sugawara film. This time, however, he has more of a Cagney role -- a very specific one.

A stylized opening shows Sugawara off in retro duds as he blasts away with his titular weapon, making me think I was going to see a period piece set in the 1920s or 1930s. Instead, the story starts in the modern day in subdued, suspenseful fashion as three monster-masked figures in a car await a rendezvous with gangsters at a dock on a rainy night. It's an ambush: the monsters kill the gangsters and grab their suitcase, but one of them is wounded. As he whines in pain, the driver unmasks, revealing a middle-aged woman berating the victim, telling him to be a man and shut the fuck up. Bunta Sugawara is the third person in this trinity, and the old lady is his mother. Together, leaving their partner to writhe in the car, they stash their loot -- an estimated one billion yen worth of drugs -- in a hollowed out section of a sewer wall. When they return to the car, Sugawara kills the wounded man.

A gangster and his mother. As soon as Aiko Mimasu took her mask off I started asking myself, "They're not going to go there, are they?" But when Sugawara and Mimasu celebrate their score by sharing a bath I was pretty sure they were going there. Later events bore out my suspicion in stunning fashion: Machine Gun Dragon is a Japanese do-over of White Heat, one of James Cagney's most legendary gangster films -- the one where he plays a borderline psycho with a heavy mother fixation.

James Cagney and Margaret Wycherly in White Heat. Below, their Japanese counterparts.

Nearly thirty years later, Okamoto and writer Hiro Matsuda elaborate on the main points of Raoul Walsh's classic. There's more tension in the mother-son relationship this time. She's possessively jealous of any female attention to her boy, and he still resents her driving off a former girlfriend years ago, before he did a stretch in jail, even though he picks up a new one early in the picture. All women are whores, mom says. You should know, Bunta ripostes angrily; you were one yourself. But she only did it for his sake, she says, to keep him from growing up into a shiftless yakuza like his dad. Just like that she guilt-trips him into submission.

Nice work, mom! Instead of a shiftless yakuza, your boy is a reckless misfit who robs from the yakuza. While other characters affect the same retro fashions Bunta likes (we're probably seeing a Godfather influence) his preference for an anachronistic costume and a distinctive weapon (we're told that he's a prime suspect in the drugnabbing because not many Japanese use machine guns) suggests an arrested development, stunted by his suffocating mother. It's left him a big, crazy kid who spends his life role-playing with lethal consequences for others, as when he stages a St. Valentine's massacre of gangsters who tried to blackmail him.

This is all too much for the yakuza, who (perhaps having seen Fernando di Leo's Manhunt) send a distress call to America and get a black-and-white team of hitman to hunt down Bunta and his ragtag gang. The yaks run down Bunta's biker pals with garbage trucks, while the Americans take to throwing them off tall buildings, but none of these losers know where the drugs are stashed. There's nothing to do but storm Bunta's hideout, but he sees them coming, sees he's outnumbered, and quickly thinks up a way out. He has his new girlfriend slash her own hand and call the cops. Bunta saves his neck by getting himself arrested for domestic battery right in front of his enemies.

Americans have no manners. Look at the mess they leave behind when they go out.

That's not going to stop the yakuza. They have a man in the department, and they have men in jail. While their goons work over Bunta, the corrupt detective brings in Bunta's Mom and gives her the third degree. She's a tough old bird, but you can only go without food, drink and sleep for so long. Since I've already told you this is a remake of White Heat, you should know what's coming, but give Okamoto credit for a creative buildup.

In the original, Raoul Walsh sets us up by having Cagney pass a request for info on his mom across a row of cons in a prison dining hall. We see the query relayed one way, and the answer sent back the other way until the news hits Cagney, who takes a moment to absorb it before (as a full-of-it George C. Scott says from the grave on TCM) he becomes an animal and runs amok.
The do-over in Machine Gun Dragon is less elaborate but arguably more devastating in the set-up. It's visiting hour for our protagonist, who rushes from cell to visiting chamber anticipating Mom. Instead, it's his girlfriend with some sort of package under her jacket. Bunta immediately realizes something's wrong. He's having a "what's in the box?" moment already before the girlfriend unveils the package: a box of Mom's ashes.

The sight sends Bunta reeling back the way he came, quoting Cagney explicitly in the way he neatly slugs guards on the jaw during his animalistic tantrum of bereavement. He gets to howl and cry and throw things as cons cheer him on and his girlfriend watches in horror. The scene has a topper unavailable for White Heat when she lets loose a cry of agony when Bunta is finally carried away. This team of filmmakers gave themselves an awesome challenge here, and I think they acquitted themselves admirably.

Bunta is extremely vulnerable emotionally now, and it's the perfect moment for this film's counterpart to Edmond O'Brien to make another move to win Bunta's confidence. This guy had turned up already to save Bunta from a beating by yakuza goons (Bunta got his back by causing an "accident" that saws a goon's arm off and drowning another in a group bath). He's a police plant, presumably a good guy, hoping to track down the stolen drugs. Toward that end, he and Bunta are allowed to escape. Sure enough, after Bunta deals with the corrupt cop who interrogated his mom to death, he, his girlfriend and the plant recover the plunder.

Edmond O'Brien (right) and his Machine Gun Dragon analogue (below)

Now imagine if, three-quarters of the way through White Heat, Humphrey Bogart suddenly pulls up outside Cagney's hideout and says "Hey Cody! That guy's a copper!" before drilling Edmond O'Brien. That's basically what happens here when the fixer who counterfeits passports for our trio recognizes the plant, karates the hell out of him and shoots him. Yes, Sonny Chiba has made his belated appearance with revenge on his mind, but Bunta basically says, "Step aside, Butch," and finishes the rat himself. Now the filmmakers have nicely cut themselves loose from White Heat and are free to go their own way, whether it leads to a refinery or not.

The way leads north to a snowy coastal town where Bunta hopes to buy passage on a boat out of the country. He picks the town in part because he knows that's where he'll find his old girlfriend, the one Mom had driven off. That's a little rude of him, since his current girlfriend is along for the trip, but you can tell that Mom's death has liberated him a little. He's feeling nostalgic and eager to undo past mistakes, but that leaves him crassly indifferent to his current squeeze. When she falls in the snow, he doesn't help her up.

When he looks up his old flame in the inn where she tends bar, he leaves the other one outside until the old flame goes out to invite her in. You get the sense that it's too late for him either way, that he doesn't deserve either of them. But I guess there's a momma's-boy quality to him that inspires fanatic loyalty in women. After affecting to blow him off (she waves "bye" to him in English), the old flame ends up killing herself with an icepick rather than rat Bunta out to the closing yakuza and Americans.

We can tell, however, that Bunta isn't the hardcase he pretends to be. He took his mom's death too hard for that to be true. He faces one more test when his pursuers capture his new girlfriend. He's got his boat and his drugs, but they have a straight razor to the girl's throat. They propose an exchange: her for the drugs. In an appalling moment, he tells them they can have her and leave him alone. You can almost believe that he didn't expect them to do what they do.

There's no refinery for Bunta Sugawara to romp in, and no explosive finish, but the finale of Machine Gun Dragon is in its way as apocalyptic as the end of White Heat. Confronted with the horror his enemies have perpetrated, Bunta throws everything away but his machine gun. There's nothing left for him to do but kill, kill and kill in a fireworks festival of bloody squibs.

And with that accomplished, there nothing more to do than gather up his last beloved for what looks like a long walk off a short pier as Sugawara the actor (this being a certain period in Japanese cinema) croaks the film's end theme. There's a real note of despair in his singing, whether it expresses his character or his despair at having to sing, and it actually fits the mood of the moment.

I was floored by the audacity of Okamoto's Warners-Toei synthesis and the panache with which he pulled it off. If I keep seeing performances like this, Bunta Sugawara is going to end up as my favorite Japanese actor. It's a shame that his incredible work here goes out to the public in Sonny Chiba camoflauge, but now that you know the truth, VideoAsia's Chiba set may be the most economical way for people to discover Sugawara for the first time. Machine Gun Dragon is an amazing genre film and a must-see for fans of global crime cinema.

THE POWER OF AIKIDO (1975)

If the Toei studio in the 1970s was Japan's answer to Hollywood's Warner Bros. studio in the 1930s, as I believe, then Sonny Chiba was Toei's answer to James Cagney. He was the Japanese studio's embodiment of charismatic thuggishness, and as a martial arts specialist, he was a kind of amalgam of Cagney's gangster brutality and his dancer's grace. And if Toei was the Warner Bros. of 1970s Japan, it's no surprise to see them doing biopics. Chiba was the Toei biopic specialist, at least when it came to portraying famous martial artists of the recent past, but in The Power of Aikido he yields the starring role to his younger brother, Jiro -- though you wouldn't know that from the way the film is sold in the U.S.

Spot the star: is it obvious choice Sonny Chiba or brother Jiro in the lead role?

Gekitotsu! Aikido (the first word echoes the original Japanese title for The Street Fighter) purports to tell the story of Morihei Ueshiba, the founder of the title discipline. It opens in the late 1920s (the beginning of the Showa era, i.e. Emperor Hirohito's reign) with Ueshiba ("leader" to his pupils) running a "reclamation farm" in Hokkaido. He has something of a mistress, Ms. Mine, while his wife stays in the big city. He tries to toughen up his men by putting them through rigorous training, consisting of him beating them up. But as it turns out, his fighting skills are rather weak. He learns this when he shelters a runaway boy from the Hokkai Group's massage parlor. He handles the gangsters easily enough when they come to reclaim the boy, but when their enforcer Natori Shinbei (Sonny Chiba) intervenes Ueshiba gets a major beatdown. During the battle Mine suffers some collateral damage that will have repercussions later.

When Ueshiba's wife finally comes to the farm, Mine makes a hasty exit, but this proves to be for health reasons. When Shinbei hitches a ride on the same wagon she's on, he learns of her chest pains and feels guilty for causing them. He falls in love with her and disappears from the film for time to tend to her. Meanwhile, the humiliated Ueshiba is determined to learn as many martial arts as he can until he can avenge himself by beating Shinbei's karate. One of his would-be mentors is a disgruntled master named Kenzo Okita, who warns him that cronyism too often determines the top positions in the martial arts world. But in time we learn that Okita really protests too much, blaming others for his faults. He's a vicious drunk who cuts a naval officer's arm off in a fit of pique after announcing, "Everything is under my control, even though I'm drunk!"

Okita disarms an offending official -- literally.

Later, after learning to swallow an enemy's attack with his own, Ueshiba tests himself by challenging Shinbei's older brother, who runs a prestigious dojo. Ueshiba beats this overrated fighter so badly that the sensei kills himself. When the news reaches Shinbei he feels obliged to seek revenge, but the dying Mine dissuades him. Instead, Shinbei challenges Ueshiba to a friendly match, but their plans are interrupted by the elder brother's former students, who have hired Okita to kill Ueshiba by any means necessary -- by hand, sword or gun.

I liked how this movie, directed by Street Fighter helmer Shigehiro Ozawa, set up characters who prove more complex than first impressions suggest. Natori Shinbei at first looks like the villain of the piece, but ends up a sympathetic character, while Okita at first looks like a sympathetic victim of the system, but proves a real villain. Giving the hero two major antagonists also helps solve a stardom problem. This is the sort of film where Sonny Chiba shouldn't really win the final fight, but in 1975 do you really want him to lose a fight? Answer: have the fight interrupted by the bad guy and give Sonny a chance to go out a hero without beating the hero.

Somebody's about to get a serious beating as a warmup for Sonny's final showdown with the hero.

While Aikido is part of a Toei martial-biopic genre that includes Sonny Chiba's Mas Oyama trilogy and his Killing Machine one-shot, his supporting presence in this film gives it an air of exploitation, as if the studio knew it needed him to put the project over even if someone else was the ostensible star. Also exploitative is the late appearance of Chiba protege Etsuko "Sister Street Fighter" Shihomi as an admiral's daughter who becomes one of Ueshiba's first students. The last half hour gives her opportunities to humilate a trio of Japanese marines and at least half a dozen would-be avengers of Shinbei's mother in fight scenes that are utterly irrelevant to the main story. But this sort of gratuitous mayhem isn't really unwelcome in a martial arts film, even one as relatively well-concerned with character development as this one.

Who am I kidding? You can probably come up with a funnier caption for this one than I can.

The mayhem here isn't as grotesque as Chiba and Co. usually get, though. While Sonny himself gets one of his patented grimacing kills, he displays no internal organs as trophies, and Okita's arm-chopping exploit is the goriest bit in the picture. The typical Toei gore may not have been deemed appropriate for a film dedicated to the comparatively pacific "defensive power" of aikido, but there's still plenty of action to keep this interesting for martial-arts fans.