On the Big Screen: BLIND WOMAN'S CURSE (1970)

Teruo Ishii might be called the Tod Browning of Japanese cinema. He shared with his American precursor an interest in crime and an instinct for the grotesque. These converge in Blind Woman's Curse, an early starring role for 70s death-goddess Meiko Kaji that I got to see at the Proctor's GE Theater thanks to the It Came From Schenectady cult film society. If some of the film's virtually supernatural elements seem incongruous in a yakuza film, bear in mind that its setting is implicitly a fantasy film, one in which a yakuza boss can be described as pure in heart. That boss is our star, playing Akemi Tachibana, who inherited the mantle and the unquestioned loyalty of her henchmen from her father. She's a fighting boss, as demonstrated in a formal showdown with another gang during the opening credits, and almost unconsciously charismatic, as demonstrated when, serving time for her role in the fight, she converts some skeptical fellow convicts in a women's prison into future soldiers. Her clan controls a public market but is regularly challenged by her clownish rivals, the Aozora clan. These challenges aren't to be taken too seriously, since the primary attribute of the Aozora boss (Ryohei Uchida) is the long-unwashed loincloth that adorns his prominently displayed buttocks. But when a retaliatory raid on his gang goes terribly wrong, Akemi comes under increasing pressure to escalate the feud.

As we quickly learn, events are being manipulated by a third gang, led by the ambitious Dobashi (Toru Abe) and abetted by a traitor in Akemi's midst. The provocations grow more extreme as Akemi's followers are stripped of the dragon tattoos that adorn their backs and a dubious feline is seen licking at the flayed remnants. There are, in fact, still more players in the game. One is a soft-spoken swordswoman (Hoki Tokuda -- at the time Mrs. Henry Miller!) who happens to be blind. She happens to have been blinded by Akemi in that opening-credits fight, during which her brother was killed. She actually looks really good for someone who apparently had her eyes slashed, and of course, this being Japan, her handicap confers a compensatory advantage in fighting skill. A cat licking her wounds immediately after the injury probably helped as well. Anyway, you get the idea; she's out for vengeance against Akemi. Meiko Kaji is the object of vengeance for once, that is, but this was still early in her career before she was set in her ways.

What the story is with the blind woman's sidekick, who can say? Ushimatsu is hunchbacked performance artist, played by Tatsumi Hijikata, credited as a creator of the modern dance form of butoh.  We're treated to one of his strange performances, enhanced (if that's the word) by Ishii's (and Osamu Inoue's) frantic editing. We're also treated (if that's the word) to his hobby, which is maintaining a carny house of horrors featuring fake (???) severed heads, limbs, etc. Ushimatsu appears to go above and beyond whatever mandate the blind swordswoman or Dobashi gave him, and his exploits are pretty much the essence of this picture. At one point, after the more conventional thugs have bumped off Akemi's wise old uncle, the rare yakuza who has gone straight, the hunchback shows up to lick and fondle the corpse. Later, the apparently living corpse shows up to spook some people, but when the head promptly rolls off we see that Ushimatsu is just having fun with his new meat puppet. As far as movie hunchbacks go, this guy makes Paul Naschy in Hunchback of the Morgue look like Quasi from the Disney cartoon.

Things can't go on like this forever -- can they? -- so finally Akemi's had all she can stand, til she can't stands no more. Once the traitor in her midst is exposed, she leads the climactic assault on Dobashi's headquarters, except that it's only a warmup for the inevitable showdown between our jingi-licious heroine and the blind swordswoman. Again, in Japan you always bet on the handicapped person in these encounters, even if it's Meiko Kaji on the other side. Only this time, you wouldn't collect, because nobody wins. After the damned cat tries to interfere and gets gutted for its trouble, it looks like Akemi is down for the count. She's waiting for the coup de grace, but it never comes, for the blind swordswoman can tell -- she usually can smell such things -- that our yakuza boss lady is genuinely repentant about killing her brother and the other stuff. She accepts this as an apology, takes her dying cat and goes home. But let's face it: anything after what we've already seen in this picture is going to be an anticlimax, and maybe that's for the best. Otherwise people are bound to leave the theater in a disoriented state dangerous to themselves and others. As it is, the downbeat-yet-upbeat finish gives viewers time to reflect on the fact that, for all its excesses and confusions Blind Woman's Curse is goofy fun, as long as you're in the right -- or fright -- frame of mind.

RED PEONY GAMBLER 3: THE FLOWER CARD GAME (1969)

For all their exotic coolness to the gaijin eye, the Red Peony Gambler series starring Junko Fuji as the heroic yakuza woman Oryu are often as corny as American B-movies. The third film in the series, directed by Tai Kato, reminds us that Oryu is a good guy in the most blatant fashion, by having her rescue a blind child from getting run over by a train, earning the tearful gratitude of the child's mother. Oryu, continuing her dual quest to become a master gambler and restore her father's clan, arrives in Nagoya, and is promptly accused of cheating people. Fortunately, she has a letter of introduction from her comedy-relief mentor (the recurring Tomasaburo Wakiyama) that persuades the local boss, Sugiyama, to trust her. In any event, once one of the accusers fails to recognize Oryu it's obvious to everyone, as it was obvious to the audience, that an impostor was at work. Melodramatically enough, the fake Oryu is the same woman whose daughter the real Oryu rescued from the train. This poor woman works as a crooked gambler, speaking of melodrama, to raise money for the surgery that will restore her child's sight. She and Oryu become embroiled in a local power play complicated by a star-crossed romance. An ambitious boss, Jinbara, hopes to push Sugiyama aside and take charge of the big charity casino night that will benefit a local Buddhist temple. To further advance himself, Jinbara wants to marry his daughter off to a local aristocrat, but the daughter's true love is Jiro, Sugiyama's son. Jiro is willing to gamble for his love's hand and wager his life, but Jinbara uses the pseudo-Oryu to win the hand and gain leverage over Sugiyama. She later redeems herself, and sacrifices herself, helping the lovers elope, while Oryu herself helps them out of town, thanks in part to the benign neglect of the inevitably benevolent interloper, this time played by guest star Ken Takakura.

Needless to say, the elopement puts further pressure on Sugiyama as Jinbara escalates his effort to take over the casino night. Oryu becomes Sugiyama's surrogate in a one-hand-settles-all contest against Jinbara's surrogate, a disfigured man Oryu recognizes as the late pseudo-Oryu's husband. Meanwhile, the Takakura character, Shogo Hanaoka, takes such an interest in the blind girl that I assumed that the film was implying that he was her real father. Good guy Shogo may be, but as a guest and vassal of Jinbara he's ordered to assassinate Sugiyama to get the old man out of the way once and for all. He goes about his mission as I suppose a good guy would, formally challenging Sugiyama to a duel. The old man accepts the challenge like the man of honor he is, telling his astonished retainers that Shogo is only fulfilling an obligation and criticizing Shogo only for not necessarily striking a mortal blow. As might be expected, the younger man and more prominent star gets the better of the contest, but doesn't kill Sugiyama outright. This allows the mortally wounded oyabun to surprise Jinbara by showing up for the ceremonial opening of the casino night, though he doesn't make it long past that. His clan is hamstrung by his dying order not to take revenge until after the casino night is officially over. Taking advantage of the fact that the casino night isn't officially over until the proceeds are delivered to the temple, Jinbara has his men steal the proceeds. While Sugiyama's men can't do much about that, there are people who are not technically his men -- Oryu, Shogo and fake-Oryu's husband, for instance, who can....

While the Red Peony series' romanticization of yakuza is always going to look lame to a Kinji Fukasaku fan, on their own terms they're dynamic, colorful B pictures of the sort the Toei studio cranked out effortlessly in the Sixties and Seventies. Junko Fuji is by no means the ultimate Japanese action heroine, but her relatively understated ass-kicking with sword and gun has a charm of its own. These films aren't great, but they are fun, and I expect to have more fun with the rest of the series.

RED PEONY GAMBLER: GAMBLER'S OBLIGATION (1968)

Junko Fuji starred as Oryu, the Red Peony, in a series of eight films from the Toei Studio from 1967 to 1971. These are romanticized yakuza films of the sort that might have made Kinji Fukasaku vomit in his mouth. At the least, they make a distinction between good yakuza, the sort who run honest gambling parlors, and the less savory sort who, as in this second installment, prey on ordinary people through loan sharking and running sweatshops. The setting is the "Middle Meiji period," approximately the turn of the 20th century, so that characters use pistols, telephones and other nearly modern devices and a contrast can be drawn between people who go too modern, like this film's big-bad who goes back and forth between Japanese and western dress, and characters like Oryu who, despite her pistol, embody traditional values in their dress and demeanor.Oryu is a yakuza and, in theory at least, the oyabun of a clan inherited from her father, but unlike some women of the milieu, she doesn't flaunt her outlaw identity but dresses and behaves modestly, until forced into violent action. She can shoot, stab, slash and do judo throws like a champion, but while she travels around learning the gambler's trade and the ways of honorable yakuza, she remains somewhat ashamed of her vocation. She doesn't show off her yakuza tattoos, and only displays them to a female friend in this picture in order to warn her, in effect, "Don't end up like me." Badass Oryu may be, but like many wandering heroes of Japanese cinema, her life often seems like a curse, or at least an unhappy destiny.

Gambler's Obligation is helmed by cult director Norifumi Suzuki, who gives the proceedings plenty of widescreen panache. Oryu's having a good time as the film starts, working for the benign oyabun Togazaki and merrily banging a festival drum as the opening credits roll. A skilled gambler, she's able to shut down the winning streak of Oren (Mari Shiraki), a tattoo-flaunting women who recurs through the picture as a road-not-taken version of Oryu herself. Togazaki sends Oryu away for her own good when he decides to deal with his wicked rival Kasamatsu, which allows this sequel to reintroduce the comedy-relief yakuza clan from the first film, headed by Tomisaburo Wakayama. When Togazaki the elder is killed in the battle, Oryu returns to help the old man's son and daughter-in-law hold on to their businesses as Kasamatsu, backed by the quietly menacing Shiraishi (Bunta Sugawara), muscles in. Acquiring her own little band of followers along the way, Oryu travels to Tokyo to plead the Togazaki cause with a yakuza conclave, but the tide seems to be flowing inexorably against them.

This film does a good job establishing Kasamatsu as a real scumbag villain. He invites Oryu to decide the Togazakis' future in a dice game, with Oren as his proxy, whom he forces to cheat. Naturally, Oryu catches her at it, and Kasamatsu has the hapless woman beaten viciously for it. Then he does some additional cheating, convincing Togazaki's wife that her husband, whose liberation from prison has already been arranged by Oryu, can only be freed by her signing away the family carriage business -- and submitting to rape. She ends up disgraced, and poor Togazaki ends up getting killed after everything everyone's done for him. That only means it's time for Oryu to settle accounts with all the bad guys.

While the Japanese clearly liked badass fighting heroines before they really became a thing in the U.S., Gambler's Obligation doesn't quite go as far as fans might expect or hope. Everything seemed to point toward a battle between Oryu and the Bunta Sugawara character, but the way things actually play out makes you suspect that someone at Toei didn't think audiences would buy Junko Fuji beating Bunta in a fight. Instead, they bring in Koji Tsuruta in a glorified cameo as a good-guy interloper with his own reasons for fighting Kasamtasu. He gets to kill Bunta, while he and Fuji share in finishing off Kasamatsu before a random enemy blows him away, since Oryu does need to be the last person standing when the smoke clears. Despite this disappointment, Fuji certainly more than holds up her end of the action while lending her character the swan-necked dignity and superficial stoicism Oryu requires.

This first sequel ends on a sad note as Oryu returns to the site of the opening-credits festival. Many of her fellow celebrants are dead now, and it's a lonely climb to the tower where she beat the drum so happily before. Now she beats it again in mourning for all the friends she's lost, if not also for the hope for a normal life that seems just a little more lost now. Earlier, the Tsuruta character had explained to her the history of her rival Oren and her lover. They seem to lead a miserable life, but Tsuruta observes, almost with a note of envy, that they'll never leave each other. If in some ways Oren seems like an Oryu gone wrong, the film suggests that, despite all Oren suffers, she has something Oryu doesn't and may never have. There are many films to go in this series, but I doubt that this will change.

Takeshi Kitano's OUTRAGE BEYOND (2012)

Maybe I was wrong all along, but before I watched the sequel to Takeshi Kitano's Outrage, my impression was that the original film had shown us Kitano's character, the yakuza "Champ" Otomo, getting fatally shanked in prison by a rival he had wronged earlier in the picture. But Outrage was just too popular, I guess, and its popularity demanded a sequel. There were other characters you could follow from the first film, but it wouldn't make sense to have Kitano return as writer and director and not have his on-camera alter ego Beat Takeshi return as Otomo. So sure, he got stabbed, but he got better. We didn't see him actually die. We didn't see him autopsied or cremated. So sure, it could have happened exactly this way. But keeping Otomo alive is just the beginning of Kitano's betrayal of his earlier work.

The virtue of Outrage, at least as I saw it, was in its uncompromising pessimism. It gave you a rooting interest in the ever-manipulated, ever-exploited Champ and kept you hoping that he'd turn the tables on everyone. In 2010, however, Kitano refused the audience that satisfaction. Otomo was caught in an inexorable trap that illustrated the hopelessness of life for most yakuza. In 2012, Outrage Beyond -- look it up on Netflix as Beyond Outrage, but it's the other way around on screen --was the Rocky II of yakuza films. It's a Stallonian sequel that asks the question, "Do we get to win this time?" and answers, "Hell, yeah!"

 

Fumiyo Kohinata (right in both pictures) plays dangerous games with yakuza in Outrage Beyond.

 

Kitano keeps himself hidden for the first half-hour or so while reintroducing the other survivors from Outrage. The treacherous winners from the first film are getting a little too arrogant for the police, who put pressure on corrupt detective Kataoka (Fumiyo Kohinata) to keep them in line. The wily manipulator is burdened with a gung-ho, straight-arrow partner (Yutaka Matsushige) who hates yakuza and questions Kataoka's loyalties. Kataoka, whom we know to be on the take, insists that he thinks of crushing the yakuza all the time, and the scary thing about him is that we don't really doubt this. While not a man of brutal violence like his yakuza interlocutors, Kataoka is arguably the most evil character in either film. He cold-bloodedly plays different families and firms against each other -- actually, he may take pleasure in the way he eggs yakuza into destroying each other. We learn that he's kept Otomo's survival a secret, saving his old pal to unleash when he can do the most damage.

Actually, however, Champ has counted his blessings and, once paroled, simply wants out of the old life. He seems exhausted, or not yet fully recovered from his injury, not even interested in sex after all his time in stir. He considers taking a conventional job or moving to South Korea, but just when he thinks he's out, Kataoka drags him back in. Meanwhile, in perhaps the most unlikely twist of the sequel, Otomo ends up befriending Kimura (Hideo Nakano), the man he disfigured in the first film, who then stabbed him in prison. Kimura got out some time ago and runs a batting cage with two young punks as his so-called soldiers. He's the one person in the picture that Otomo is willing to forgive. Champ figures he had it coming for slashing Kimura's face when he had tried to apologize for an offense, and by now Kimura is willing to let bygones be bygones. Meanwhile, Kataoka struggles to stir up a gang war, inviting malcontent yakuza to get help from out of town and raising fears of Otomo to force a series of provocations that finally draws Champ into the fray. It takes a bullet in his side and the murder of Kimura's proteges -- shown as bullying jerks in their first appearance, we're meant to pity them eventually -- to revert Otomo into the killing machine Kataoka had hoped to see. Wounded in an elevator, Champ seems to mock the implausibility of his endurance, asking: "Why do they always aim at my belly?" He is a resilient cuss, and once he's up and running again Outrage Beyond becomes a relentless killfest.

Otomo and Kimura hook up with a big outside outfit to fight their old antagonists -- they see an opportunity to expand and deplore the current boss's treacherous route to power -- and the rout is on. Suddenly the bad guys are beset by seemingly limitless resources, while Champ rediscovers his knack for creative torture. The highlight death scene this time is the comeuppance dealt to one of Otomo's treacherous underlings from the first film. After pissing himself (it's always a demerit for a director to show this), the man is tied securely to a sofa chair and set up in Kimura's batting cage as the pitching machine is loaded with baseballs. Nothing else is quite as flamboyant, and the killing actually becomes monotonous after a while.

Once he's started, however reluctantly, Otomo never seems to know when to quit. Almost inevitably, he and Kimura are marked for elimination, and after Kimura is eliminated, it looks like Kitano is setting up a Wild Bunch style climax as Champ arrives at a funeral full of his enemies and an almost gleeful Kataoka puts a gun in his hand. It doesn't quite turn out that way, as Kitano instead closes with a scene that may well have made audiences applaud. If so, that would only reaffirm the extent to which Outrage Beyond is a kind of sell-out for the sake of audience gratification -- and it can't be a good sign that Kitano reportedly has been negotiating to make a third Outrage movie. That is outrageous in its own right. To be fair, Outrage Beyond is an entertaining movie on its own terms. But it entertains in a way that cheapens its predecessor, in my view at least, and that's a shame.

Takeshi Kitano's OUTRAGE (2010)

Takeshi Kitano is the former game-show host and comedian -- some Americans may still know him best as "Vic Romano" from Most Extreme Elimination Challenge, the freely dubbed U.S. version of the 1980s Takeshi's Castle program -- who literally became the heir to Kinji Fukasaku when the great director fell ill and was unable to finish the film Violent Cop. Already changing his image to star in the picture, Kitano (who performs as "Beat Takeshi") took over the direction and rewrote much of the script, and a star was reborn. By the end of the century Kitano was recognized as Fukasaku's heir as Japan's top director of crime films, but he also gained an arthouse following that had eluded the prior master until the end of his career, thanks to the personal aesthetic touches Kitano added to his pictures, most notably in 1997's Hana-bi ("Fireworks"). He broadened his scope in the new millennium with mixed results. His Zatoichi remake disappointed me -- he dared claim that the blind swordsman wasn't really blind! -- and subsequent films received less attention in the U.S. For a new decade Kitano returned to familiar turf with what seemed a less artistically ambitious yakuza picture, but Outrage (the Japanese title is a transliteration of the English word) is perhaps his closest work in tone to Fukasaku's heritage of yakuza cynicism. It's the sort of picture that more effectively conveys that "crime does not play" than any amount of bourgeois moralizing.

Outrage follows the now-classic yakuza formula of a more-or-less honorable man -- honorable at least according to the supposed yakuza code -- serving an unworthy boss. Beat Takeshi plays "Champ" Otomo -- with his potato face you can believe he took his lumps in the ring -- an underboss to the weasely Ikemoto (Jun Kunimura), the head of his crime family. Ikemoto is in trouble with "Mr. Chairman" (Soichiro Kitamura) because he's consorting with a boss from a rival syndicate whom Ikemoto had befriended in prison. To satisfy Mr. Chairman without violating his sworn brotherhood with Murase (Renji Ishibashi) orders Otomo to pick a fight with Murase's men, particularly Kimura (Hideo Nakano). While Ikemoto may have meant to put on a show of antagonism, things quickly spiral out of his control and the Murase family is destroyed.

 

Outrages: above, misuse of dental tools; below, the wrong tool for yakuza self-discipline.

Ikemoto is still skating on thin ice as enemies within the Sanno syndicate seek to exploit his weakness (of character, that is) while underlings like Ishihara (Ryo Kase) exploit opportunities created by the fall of Murase. Otomo is little more than a pawn for both the yakuza and Detective Kataoka (Fumiyo Kohinata), an arch-manipulator who seems to enjoy egging yakuza into killing each other, as long as someone survives to keep paying him off. As Ikemoto lives large off his minion's labors, racking up a hefty tab at the African consulate his men have turned into a casino, you can tell he's not long for this world, and while Otomo is finally just as eager as anyone to be rid of this jerk, you can also tell that he's being set up to follow not far behind his loser of a boss.

If the title means anything to Kitano, it may refer to the anger the audience is meant to feel on Otomo's behalf as everyone plays him for a goon and a sucker. The man's a brutal thug but you can't help feeling that he's doing the hard work everyone else benefits from, and you feel more certain as the film goes on that "Champ" is going to get the short end of everything. The movie's ultimate outrage is its refusal to gratify any hopes that Otomo might turn things around. You wait for him to turn the tables on all those manipulating or betraying him, but Kitano forces you to see how implausible your hopes are. Finally his best option is to turn himself in to the cops, on Kataoka's advice that "it's better to take a TKO than get knocked out." Otomo doesn't seem to have what it takes to rise to power and hold it in 21st century Japan, and as it turns out not even prison is a safe harbor for him.

Kitano was reportedly more interested in filming the violent set pieces than in any other aspect of the picture, but Outrage has the same laconic style of his early crime and cop pictures. While the violence is often spectacular, albeit on a small scale -- Otomo's attack on Murase's mouth with a dental drill is a jolting highlight -- the acting really carries the film. From Beat Takeshi's own punchy lead to Kunimura's cravenness, Kase's sinister smoothness and Kohinata's Machiavellian smugness, the director has assembled a forceful ensemble to tell his story. Outrage effectively re-establishes Kitano's mastery of the yakuza genre -- but unfortunately Kitano wasn't done. Later this week, we'll look at his sequel, a film that self-indulgently trashes most of Outrage's grim virtues. The sequel inevitably diminishes the memory of the original once you've seen it, but for now let's leave Outrage to stand alone as a superior crime film.

Hideo Gosha's VIOLENT STREETS (1974)

The Toei studio promoted Hideo Gosha's picture as an all-star "new style" yakuza picture, which makes you wonder whether Japanese audiences were getting tired of Kenji Fukasaku's style of yakuza picture while his classic "Battles Without Honor or Humanity" series was still in progress. Gosha's movie definitely is different. While Fukasaku aims at chaotic immediacy by filming violence with a handheld camera, Gosha takes a more carefully pictorial approach. His stages many of his violent set pieces in bizarre settings, most notably a junkyard amid a pile of mannequins and twice over in a chicken coop. In contrast with many of Fukasaku's films, Gosha's makes no pretense, as far as I could tell, of recounting actual events. Gone is the narration that opens and closes many Fukasaku flicks, as well as the captions identifying characters and their places in the yakuza hierarchy. In that respect, Gosha achieves a different kind of immediacy, but his real goal seems to be a greater intimacy, albeit in the more salacious sense of the word.

I don't know if poultry's a big part of the menu at Noboru Ando's place, but I wouldn't recommend the special he serves up to the unhappy patron below.

The star is Noboru Ando, who as a former yakuza presumably had the same sort of credibility that gangsta rappers often claim for themselves. Authenticity gave Ando an advantage as an actor; he rarely had to prove he was tough with the sort of bluster other actors employed. With his almost sleepy eyes and laid-back demeanor -- he reminds me just a little of Jet Li -- he's often the calm center of a storm. That's especially true here, where the storm breaks around him without his character knowing it. He plays Egawa, once boss of his own family who's been eased into retirement with the usual consolation prize of a niteclub. His is the Madrid, and the Spanish gimmick, including flamenco music in the floorshow, is another way for Gosha to individualize his film. The Madrid is a hangout for his former gang, many of whom feel like they were kicked to the curb by the reigning yakuza group, which has its tentacles in many areas of business, including the entertainment industry. Without consulting their own boss, despite their constant protestations of loyalty, these guys try to muscle in on the entertainment side, kidnapping a popular young TV singer and demanding 100,000,000 yen ransom. They get the money but leave a corpse behind; one of the gang accidentally strangled the girl while trying to rape her.

This goes down just as the local yakuza, who control Tokyo's Ginza district, face a growing challenge from the Western Japan Association, which dominates most of the rest of the country. The locals initially assume that the outside interlopers are behind the kidnapping and the escalating gang war brings in some exotic players, including a cross-dressing hit-person with a razor fetish who performs in live sex shows on the side. As the major parties jostle for position, the Madrid club looks more and more like a useful pawn. The people who gave it to Egawa want it back, claiming that they retain the original lease. With his position under siege and his old cronies getting slaughtered, Egawa finally has to take the fight to the enemy.

Violent Streets' cross-dressing killer is a kind of mannequin him/herself.
Is Gosha making a point about disposable humanity?

Toei also promoted Violent Streets as a "Big 4" film featuring many of the studio's top yakuza stars. Along with Ando, the film features Akira Kobayashi as a friend of Egawa's who grows steadily disillusioned with the business, Tetsuro Tanba as the boss of the Western Alliance, and Fukasaku's main star Bunta Sugawara in a cameo role. Sugawara is hilarious as a gun smuggler who supplies Egawa with ordinance and insists on accompanying him on a raid on a rival niteclub. I've never seen Bunta as mellow, or practically stoned, as he is in his brief turn here. He has headphones on throughout and spends most of the attack lounging in the back seat of Egawa's car drinking, chewing on a sandwich and listening to whatever, stirring occasionally to shoot someone. In mid-getaway he asks to be let out on some nondescript street and makes his exit with boombox in tow, living in his own world. It's a wonderful comedy-relief bit that doesn't compromise the grim edge of the main story.

Ando goes on the attack while Bunta looks on.

Gosha's Ginza is full of eccentrics and dysfunctional people. Egawa has to deal with an alcoholic hostess and sometime lover while pining for another woman, which only provokes the hostess's jealousy. Our hero seems like the nearest thing to a well-adjusted person in his semi-retirement, but any vision of stability he has is certainly doomed. He remains a man of violence, as Gosha establishes in the very first scene when he roughs up some rowdy customers. Had he been different, he might have sold out early and escaped the fate he ends up choosing for himself. Yakuza films are often bleak affairs, especially after Fukasaku replaced a myth of underworld chivalry with a more cynical vision. Violent Streets isn't very different in that respect. In the long run, what distinguishes it isn't Gosha's grotesque set pieces as much as the convincing performances from Ando and the rest of the cast. They're not necessarily better for Gosha than they were for Fukasaku -- Sugawara in particular is definitely at his best with the latter director -- but they're somehow liberated here by not having to pretend that they're re-enacting history. Fukasaku's yakuza films are great movies, but Violent Streets arguably comes closer to pure cinema and is definitely a more self-conscious work of violent art.

WANDERING GINZA BUTTERFLY (1971)

During the trailer for Kazuhiko Yamaguchi's film, Meiko Kaji addresses herself directly to Toei Studio fans, greeting them for the first time and asking for their approval as stars sometimes did in these previews. It's hard to remind oneself that Kaji got her start elsewhere; you'd think that had she never existed, Toei would have to invent her. The studio that specialized in tough yet stylish crime movies during the 1970s seems like the natural home for Japan's greatest female crime-action star of the decade, yet Wandering Ginza Butterfly was her Toei debut. I often describe Toei as Japan's equivalent of Warner Bros. in the 1930s in the production of fast-moving, zeitgeist-grasping crime pictures, and this is a Toei production that often feels like an actual Warner Bros. movie in its mix of violence and sentimentality.

Kaji plays Nami, an ex-con who had to get tough (though not Scorpion-tough!) with her cellmates every so often but now wants a fresh start back in the hood -- the Ginza district of Tokyo. She befriends a low-level yakuza, Ryuji (Tsunehiko Watase), who specializes in recruiting "hostesses" for the Ginza's hundreds of dance halls and other places of ill repute. Ryuji dresses like a character out of Guys and Dolls most of the time, lending a kind of mythic veneer to the usual Toei grit, this time colorfully shot against the Ginza's neon skyline for added production value. But it's Nami who's going to wear the pants -- except when she chooses more traditional garb -- in this partnership. She's the one with the will to make construction workers pay their debts. No money? She'll just take your truck away. Debt collection is one of her many skills; another is pool hustling, which comes in handy later in the picture. For now, as she earns a living, she takes a strange interest in a small family: a single mother and her son. We learn gradually that the mother had appealed with the prison authorities for Nami's early release. This benevolent gesture stuns and shames Nami since, as we learn later, she'd been jailed, back when she rode with a female biker gang, for killing the woman's husband. Making a (sort of) honest living and helping provide for the dead man's family is her stab (to foreshadow a bit) at redemption.

Past and Present

Ironically, while the woman with the most cause to hate her doesn't, Nami's fellow hostesses turn their noses up at her when they learn that she's an ex-con. It seems like they won't let Nami play any hostess games, but when the local bad guy tries to muscle in on her employer, it's up to Nami to defend the place. Her weapon of choice is a pool cue in a game of three-cushion billiards against the bad guy's resident hustler, a drug addict who luridly loses his composure in mid-match, but recovers to force Nami to make a big comeback in order to win and save the brothel. A poster of Paul Newman as Fast Eddie Felson presides over the contest, but Yamaguchi is no Robert Rossen. Instead, apart from the opponent's withdrawal episode, the director films this showdown like Billiards for Morons, with voiceovers from Kaji recording such subtle insights as "I need one more point to win." At the risk of spoiling things, I'll inform you that our heroine does win, but it's not much of a spoiler since the bad guy decides that he's going to take over the brothel anyway, so there.

We've got trouble, right here in Ginza City, with a capital T that rhymes with B,

and that stands for Butterfly!

The local good-guy yakuza steps in at this point, trumping the bad guy by announcing his marriage to the madam and his protection of her business. But the bad guy yakuza still won't play fair and has the good-guy yakuza killed in the street. All right, then; that's all Nami can stands, and she can't stands no more. It's time for a different kind of game, the kind you play with swords with a kimono for a uniform and your own song for entrance music. Kaji takes a stroll through the rain like Cagney in The Public Enemy as her song plays on the soundtrack. Only in Public Enemy William Wellman left Cagney's wrath to the imagination, with some help from shots and groans of agony. At Toei we follow the avenger inside -- and it turns out that Ryuji's there already to introduce her to her victims. They practically part the curtain for the moment we've all been waiting for....

She's singing in the rain, but her lips don't move.

Nami's sword does all the talking.

But despite the last-reel effort to live up to Toei standards, Ginza Butterfly is relatively lighthearted affair, despite a mildly downbeat finish, while the sequel, in which Sonny Chiba co-stars, is more blatantly comic from the evidence of the trailer on the Synapse DVD. Maybe "lightheated" doesn't make my point as well as "corny" would. The movie isn't without a bare minimum of Seventies sleaze, but it isn't hardcore Toei by any stretch of the imagination. As a Kaji vehicle it doesn't compare to the Scorpion or Lady Snowblood movies, but the actress is quite likable in a role pitched on a more human or humane level than her most iconic parts, and on this first outing the humor isn't obnoxiously over the top. It's mild for a Toei picture, but unless you must have a bloodbath every ten minutes, not just the last ten, its overall amiable attitude may just win you over.

Here's that trailer I mentioned; dijedil uploaded it to YouTube.

AFRAID TO DIE (1960)

Imagine Ernest Hemingway becoming a movie star, but not by adapting one of his innovative short stories into a film, but by appearing in a Warner Bros. gangster picture. That seems roughly equivalent to seeing Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima playing a yakuza in Yasuzo Masumura's colorful crime film for the Daiei studio. Mishima is a rough equivalent for Hemingway in his volatile and ultimately suicidal mixture of sensitivity and machismo -- which is all well and good if you've heard of Ernest Hemingway. Otherwise, let's talk about a Japanese crime film.

Mishima plays a typical yakuza protagonist, a man just out of prison. Takeo Asahina has done time for trying to kill a rival boss, whose gang has tried to kill him in prison but took out the wrong man. Living up to the English-language title, Takeo is reluctant to leave prison at first and determined to lay low once free. But family pride goads him into making a stand -- after he dumps his showgirl paramour for her own protection. He strikes up a new relationship, which for him encompasses rape and pressuring the girl to have an abortion. Meanwhile, the gang war goes on, though it ends for Takeo in tellingly absurd fashion.

Afraid to Die puts style above substance, but don't get the wrong idea. Masumura isn't interested in set-piece action scenes or epic murders in the Kinji Fukasaku manner. What made it unusual for me was the milieu in which the director stages his yakuza plot. His movie has a dense, cluttered look to it that sometimes seems artificial in a Guys and Dolls way and at other times seems almost oppressively mundane. The feeling I got was that the movie was playing out in someplace more like the real world than like the generic yakuza-movie milieu. This is one of many movies that was debunking yakuza mythos before Fukasaku came along, but the way Masumura does it is to place his criminals in ordinary settings that diminish their mythic attitude. I can't immediately recall another yakuza movie I've seen that shows the gangsters in one of their most important roles, as strikebreakers. It doesn't get more unromantic than that, but having the clans compete to blackmail a pharmaceutical company that had botched a product test comes close. The overall effect is anti-epic, emphasizing how small-time Takeo, his allies and his enemies are.

I won't judge Mishima as an actor on one film in a language I don't understand, but he's convincing enough as a loser, which is what Takeo is. His final scene is clearly intended as an indelible directorial statement demonstrating how much of a loser Takeo or any yakuza really is. Continuing his strategy of embedding the gangsters in mundane settings, Masumura stages the final hit in a department store, in a maternity department. In an image worthy of silent comedy, Takeo meets his fate on an escalator, trying to stagger down while it carries him inexorably upward. He becomes a man on a treadmill, an icon of futility, and anything but the sort of man apart a yakuza man (or a yakuza fan) imagines himself to be. The scene is a stylistic exclamation point that reinforces the diminution of the yakuza by turning him into a kind of clown and a plaything of forces beyond his ken. Nothing else in the film really comes close to its visual inspiration, though I owe props to a bizarre nightclub scene featuring a surreally suggestive song -- in translation, at least -- about bananas. That number, the escalator scene, and Mishima's experiment in acting make Afraid to Die a curiosity at the very least. As an auteurial exercise in blending the lurid and the low-key, it's somewhat better than that.

Oh, what the hell. Here's a song about bananas -- you'll be able to tell that much even without English subtitles. Use your imagination and translate it yourself. Thanks to noutnoutnoutnout for uploading it to YouTube.

NEW BATTLES WITHOUT HONOR AND HUMANITY (1974)

The typical yakuza story deals with someone just out of prison. He went up the river for his boss and his clan but usually finds things changed for the worse once he's free again. Disillusionment is the order of the day, and the protagonist's dilemma is whether to continue living up to the old code or to change with the times and survive. He usually ends up changing because the old code is meaningless without someone worthy of your loyalty -- or else he upholds the code through a redemptive slaughter of his gang's or his own enemies.

Bunta Sugawara seems like the ideal actor for this sort of role, just as Kinji Fukasaku is the ideal director. I often equate the 1970s yakuza films of Japan's Toei studio with the work of Warner Bros. in the 1930s and 1940s, and in that context Sugawara is Toei's Humphrey Bogart (their Cagney being Sonny Chiba) for the brooding, world-weary quality he brings to so many films while remaining capable of fearsome violence. Sugawara was the star of Fukasaku's five-film Battles Without Honor and Humanity series (1973-4), packaged in the U.S. for the DVD market as The Yakuza Papers. Fukasaku plowed straight ahead with more yakuza films, including the classics released here as Cops vs. Thugs and Yakuza Graveyard. But Toei wanted literal sequels to the Battles epic, and Fukasaku obliged with a "New" series of three films in which many of the original cast took on new roles in the same general time period. For some reason, despite the obvious exploitation angle, the "New" trilogy is less widely known in the U.S. A small company called Kurotokagi Gumi has released the first two films, along with many other Toei items, with decent English subtitles, while the larger companies who've released other Fukasakus steered clear. I presume that's because the "New" films are considered inferior work, but the first New Battles film finds Fukasaku and Sugawara near their top form.

You can always depend on Fukasaku for a unique angle on yakuza action

Sugawara plays Makio Miyoshi, who we first see carrying out a bungled hit while disguised as a crippled war veteran. Right away, we're immersed in the familiar maelstrom of Fukasaku's yakuza films as the director films violent action with a handheld camera that seems to be buffeted by the mayhem like a leaf in a storm. He consistently creates the illusion of cinema verite, and the key to that is that he stages chaotic action. His street battles may be elaborately planned, but they lack any glamorizing choreography. Things never seem to happen quite as planned, leaving attackers, victims and bystanders alike confused and panicked. Fukasaku quite deliberately takes the opposite approach from the lethal elegance of the samurai film, but the effect is just as much the product of master craftsmanship as the most stylized sword duels.

Makio belongs to the Yamamori crime family, and his boss is a coward and a crybaby. It occurred to me while watching this how often that seems to be the case in crime films around the world. From the original Scarface forward rising young thugs are up against weak, cowardly or complacent kingpins who leave you wondering how men like that ever rose to the top. From the beginning here, Makio is shown being loyal to unworthy people, and Sugawara plays him just dumb enough not to know better. Needless to say, a hungry challenger arises within the clan while Makio sits in stir. This is Aoki (Tomasaburo Wakiyama), against whom Boss Yamamori hopes to use Makio as a weapon when our hapless hero gets free. Even before he's out, the boss and his wife are offering him money and other favors if he'll take care of Aoki for them. In turn, Aoki will seek his support in his own bid for power. But the story of the film is Makio's reluctance to take sides, his forlorn hope that the clan won't fall apart and impose a choice on him. Why can't everyone just get along the way they used to? Inexorably, a choice is forced upon him; as long as each side sees him as a pawn in play, there are only more reasons to try and take him off the board. Ultimately, Makio has to choose to save himself, whether that means taking a side or playing the sides against each other while he gets out of the way.

Sugawara and Wakiyama give strong performances here, but what impressed me most about New Battles 1 is the attention Fukasaku pays to the sociability of yakuza life, the lifestyle Makio enjoys and the feud within the clan endangers. Our hero drifts from dinner with the boss to nights on the town with Aoki, skating on the thin ice of camaraderie with violence just below the surface. Festivity can turn into frightening conflict at any moment, and subside just as suddenly. To make that point, Fukasaku focuses on the fringe details, letting an actress steal a scene from the stars. A suddenly enraged Aoki has just flung a drink at Makio, and for the rest of the scene, while the two men affect reconciliation, Aoki's shaken girlfriend tries to wipe up the mess he's made, barely restraining sobs in the process. She expresses openly the anxiety the men also feel. You see their fear in a tense scene after Makio escapes from a hit Aoki had set up on him. Vowing to kill Aoki himself, he pays a call and finds his antagonist on a futon sweating under a blanket, a humidifier and several bodyguards nearby. They subtly maneuver props around their boss as an abruptly less bold Makio proposes that Aoki pay him to leave town. Aoki orders a man to give Makio a wad of cash, then agrees to add to it. When Makio leaves, Aoki pulls a gun out from under the blanket with a sigh of relief.

Fukasaku doesn't stint on the gunplay and bloodshed this time -- Aoki's last stand is a broad-daylight deathmarch capped by a thunderous reprise of Toshiaki Tsushima's famous Battles fanfare -- but New Battles 1 is in a lower key than its five predecessors overall, more memorable for its subtler details that for its obligatory battles. Fukasaku is quoted on the box cover saying that he meant to take a "deeper look" at his gangsters in the new series. While this opener isn't necessarily superior to the original Battles, I think that he succeeded in his purpose nevertheless.

THE WOLVES (1971)

Hideo Gosha's 1971 film is the second yakuza film in a row that I've seen set during the early Showa period, i.e. the late 1920s, early in the reign of Emperor Hirohito. I don't know if that's an especially popular period to set these films in, or whether it reflected a nostalgia for the Twenties equivalent to what Americans have often felt. Like many Japanese period pieces, the sense of period isn't really that strong. The music score is noirish rather than simply jazzy, more appropriate for a movie set in the Forties or later. It may simply be that Japanese writers and audiences find these years important, since the nation was on the brink of the adventurism that led to Nanking and Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima. In both The Wolves and Seijun Suzuki's Tattooed Life Manchuria is described as a land of opportunity where businessmen or ordinary people out for a fresh start -- not to mention the army -- can make a killing. The period atmosphere, such as it is, may be that of dread, such as Americans might feel when a movie evokes any of the many moments when their nation supposedly lost its assumed innocence. For the Japanese, The Wolves adds the irony of yakuza thugs being manipulated by malignant forces beyond their control, with destiny against them.

The Japanese government celebrated the ascension of Hirohito (i.e. the Showa emperor) by declaring an amnesty for many convicts, including members of two rival families who'd feuded over railroad labor contracts. A representative battle of this war is fought in a movie theater, the mayhem interrupting the narrator's presentation of a silent movie. While Iwahashi (Tatsuya Nakadai) and Ozeki (Noboru Ando), representing the rival gangs, cool off in stir, a powerful politician brokers a truce between the clans, ushering in changing times and visions of a national yakuza network in league with Japan's expansionist militarists. Released by the amnesty, Iwahashi and Ozeki both feel that they were let out too early, before their clans' rivalry could resolve itself naturally without their complicating presence. But events are evolving rapidly and not according to nature or tradition. Iwahashi's brother was in love with the daughter of their boss, but she's now being pushed into an arranged marriage with the new boss of Ozeki's gang -- yet the brother can't keep away from her. Meanwhile, a mysterious sister-act of parasol-toting assassins are attacking people in a manner that looks like a cleanup of loose ends.

Something more has gone on while Iwahashi was away than he initially noticed, including an unthinkable betrayal of the yakuza code of honor and loyalty. Once enemies, he and Ozeki become allies, upholding a fragment of the honor code that both clans seem to have abandoned....

A visual highlight of The Wolves is Gosha's staging of the climactic action during a wildly colorful night-time festival

The Wolves has the kind of intrigue that fascinates many fans of gangster films. Gosha's effort is more like a Godfather movie than the grittier, more cynical yakuza films of Kinji Fukasaku, and Gosha aspires to more picturesque compositions than Fukasaku's handheld hurlyburly. Wolves ends up often seeming overproduced whenever Gosha tries too hard for the beautiful moments on the beach. His complex narrative lacks the suspenseful energy of his earlier samurai film, Goyokin, and the final fight between Iwahashi and his treacherous boss is protracted beyond all reason. He gets good menace from the parasol girls, but they're eliminated from the story too early after it seemed that they were being built up for the hero's final battle. But if Wolves lacks Goyokin's near-perfect pacing, it gets by on the reliably strong performances of Nakadai (who must have been to Gosha what Mifune was to Kurosawa) and Ando (a real-life ex yakuza who became a star by playing himself), along with a solid supporting cast. As a yakuza filmmaker Gosha may not measure up to Fukasaku or Suzuki -- on the evidence I've seen he was better at samurai stuff -- but he still put together a solid story that'll resonate with global crime film fans despite its flaws.