Tag: 1970s

Silk Hat Boss (シルクハットの大親分, Norifumi Suzuki, 1970)

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A true patriot squares off against a series of duplicitous nationalists in Norifumi Suzuki’s Red Peony Gambler spin-off, Silk Hat Boss (シルクハットの大親分, Silk Hat no Oooyabun) starring Tomisaburo Wakayama as top hat-wearing yakuza Komatora. Set in the world of 1905 in which Japan had just emerged victorious from the Russo-Japanese war, the film on one level attacks the rising militarism of late Meiji in which corrupt and arrogant military officers collude with venal yakuza to further the course of empire while lining their own pockets, but stops short of rejecting it outright.

Kumatora is about to return home in glory after taking his guys to the front to defeat the Russians and is expecting to receive a hero’s welcome when the boat docks in Kobe. Unfortunately, he is met only by his sister and an underling, Hansuke, who he immediately berates for the affront of having grown a magnificent moustache in his absence which is even bigger than his own. It turns out that evil yakuza rival Chindai has stolen all the credit for the work done by those like Kumatora and the ordinary foot soldiers who lost their lives defending Japan’s interests. 

Chindai has teamed up with corrupt military officer Kito who wastes no time throwing his weight around. Having fallen her during a brawl but been rebuffed, Kumatora searches for Osakan geisha Choko only to find her running away after Kito tried to assault her. Running around in his underwear, Kito rudely demands that Kumatora “return” Choko to him, but true to form Kumatora only tells him that he’s being unreasonable and the choice of whether to return or not belongs to Choko herself. Something similar occurs when Kumatora visits the family of a fallen comrade and discovers that his wife has been forced into sex work while the daughter, Satsuki, is seriously ill. Noticing the pock marks on her face which remind him of his own, Kumatora immediately decides to take the girl to a hospital at his own expense and, in fact, throws Kita out of a rickshaw in which he was riding because the girl’s need is greater. 

Kumatora is, perhaps unexpectedly, a great defender of the rights of women. After taking his guys to a brothel, he finds out that the girl assigned to him is only 14 and ends up cleaning her ears and singing a lullaby. Eventually he discovers that Chindai and Kita have been rounding up sex workers and tricking other women into sexual slavery with the intention of trafficking them and resolves to free all of them while looking for Satsuki’s mother to let her know she no longer needs to work in the red light district. Of course, Kumatora is very much in the throes of his unrequited love for Red Peony Gambler Oryu (Junko Fuji), running back to his lodgings mistakenly thinking she’s in town, but partially rejects Choko’s affections after she becomes besotted with him because he thinks it’s unfair to ask a woman to become the wife of a yakuza who might after all die any day.

Kumatora is also a fierce defender of his men, ceremoniously handing each of them a condom at the brothel and reminding them to stay safe before they head off with the women whom he has already rather comically inspected. He is very clear that the victory over the Russians was bought with the lives of ordinary workers who should be fairly rewarded with their share of the glory rather than allowing men like Chindai to exploit their heroism for their own gain. Kumatora finds an ally in good general Matsumoto who hands him a letter he can’t read from a general he admired who calls him the ideal Japanese man for his bravery and fighting spirit, but is as expected targeted by Kito and Chindai who are only interested in lining their own pockets. What it boils down to is that Kumatora is good because his patriotism is genuine while Kito and Chinda are bad because their nationalism is self-serving which does quite uncomfortably suggest that imperialism itself is not an issue only how it’s progressed. 

In any case, the corrupt officers are finally dealt a crushing blow by a resurgent Kumatora along with a little help from Oryu herself who eventually turns up to save the day in the bloody showdown which ends the film. Slightly absurdist in tone, the Silk Hat Boss has its fair share of offbeat humour beginning with Kumatora wearing his top hat in the bath and jokingly comparing various generals’ penis sizes to that of a loofah but is undeniably endearing in its hero’s guileless goodness. 

Wandering Ginza Butterfly (銀蝶渡り鳥, Kazuhiko Yamaguchi, 1972)

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Having made a name for herself at Nikkatsu, Meiko Kaji was one of many who declined to continue working with the studio after it shifted production entirely to its Roman Porno line of softcore erotic cinema. Her exit, however, proved fortuitous for rival studio Toei who were urgently looking for a new female star following the sudden retirement of Junko Fuji who gave up acting after marrying a kabuki actor (she’d return a few years later working in television and subsequently films under the name Sumiko Fuji). With her feisty intensity and zeitgeisty energy Kaji would seem to be exactly what Toei were looking for. Her first vehicle for the studio, Wandering Ginza Butterfly (銀蝶渡り鳥, Gincho Wataridori) finds her attempting to forge a new star identity stepping into the space vacated by Fuji and making it her own in the midst of Toei’s ninkyo eiga decline. 

Set in the contemporary era, the film opens with a brief prologue at a woman’s prison in which new girl Tome (Kayako Sono) attempts to claim a space for herself by immediately challenging the boss of her new cell only for Nami (Meiko Kaji) to calmly defuse the situation with a traditional gambler’s introduction very much in keeping with Toei’s gambling films many of which had starred Fuji such as the Red Peony Gambler series which is perhaps referenced in Nami’s nickname of the Red Cherry Blossom. The action then shifts to a year later with Nami returning to Ginza in the hope of locating a woman, Saeko (Mieko Aoyagi), to thank her for writing a petition to get her prison sentence for killing a yakuza boss who had killed two members of her all-female biker gang reduced. On the train, however, she’s accosted by a mysterious man who rudely kisses her in order to hide from gangsters chasing him and is thereafter dragged into local intrigue after realising that a shady new yakuza group, Owada Enterprises, is at the centre of the injustice affecting all her friends new and old. 

As one of her new friends puts it, every girl in Ginza has a wound from the past she’d rather not talk about yet Nami’s particular sense of shame regarding her misspent biker girl youth and desire to atone are singular markers of her ninkyo inspired path to heroism. She’s just come out of prison, and now she’s going to clean up Ginza getting rid of rubbish, post-war yakuza who ignore the code and exploit “honest” people through underhanded methods such as buying up their debts to force them out of business. Discovering that Saeko has lost her business to Owada and thereafter became a regular bar girl but is now suffering with a serious illness and unable to work, Nami takes her spot at Bar Broncho while funnelling money to her through a mutual friend worried she wouldn’t take it if she knew where it came from. As a bar hostess, she is smart and coquettish, playing cute in a side not often seen from Kaji later in her career in order to get the punters to pay up, but unafraid to go all in that doesn’t work even pinching a construction worker’s truck as collateral when he refuses to pay his tab.

Nevertheless, the film subverts expectation by shifting away from the gambling movie model including only one round of cards which Nami easily wins and then immediately leaves explaining that you have to know when to quit in a fight or in gambling. The central conflict is, in fact, played out through an intense game of pool, a few brief moments of onscreen text explaining the rules before Nami squares off against a drug-addled Owada henchman whose face begins to glow in an ominous yellow as the stuff wears off. Nevertheless, when Owada reneges on his promises violence is all that remains. Nami and new friend Ryuji (Tsunehiko Watase) team up to take revenge on the sleazy gangsters in order to set Ginza to rights. 

Nevertheless, there’s a kind of poignancy in the fact the central trio are all war orphans, “wandering birds” trying to find a foothold in the complicated post-war landscape while attempting to hold on to their sense of integrity. When Nami’s past as an ex-con is exposed to the other ladies at the bar they roundly reject her, though one assumes they’ve sad stories of their own, leaving her consumed by shame. Reformed by Saeko’s unexpected generosity of spirit and compassionate forgiveness, she bitterly regrets the moral compromises of her biker girl life and commits herself to fighting injustice, unwavering in her refusal to be complicit in the increasingly amoral venality of the post-war society. Sadly, Wandering Ginza Butterfly did not entirely succeed in stealing Fuji’s crown, the contemporary setting unable to overcome audience fatigue with the ninkyo genre which was shortly to implode in the wake of the jitsuroku revolution. It spawned only one sequel, but did perhaps pave the way for Kaji’s path to Toei stardom as the face of pinky violence. 

Terrifying Girls’ High School: Women’s Violent Classroom (恐怖女子高校　女暴力教室, Norifumi Suzuki, 1972)

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“Society fucking sucks” according to the delinquent teens at the centre of Terrifying Girls’ High School: Women’s Violent Classroom (恐怖女子高校　女暴力教室, Kyofu joshikoko: Onna boryoku kyoshitsu). The first of four in a Toei pinky violence series, the film presents a feminine rebellion against the societal tenets of womanhood, if doing so largely within the realms of male fantasy, but nevertheless kicks back against the corruption and hypocrisy of the older generation otherwise hellbent on controlling them.

Seiko Girls’ High School is, we’re told, both a private institution and a “trash bin” established to handle the “trash” transferred from “normal” schools. Nevertheless, the sign which hangs outside proclaims conservative values playing on the “good wife, wise mother” truism of traditional femininity in insisting the girls must become wise wives and kind mothers. Needless to say, most of the young women are quite uninterested in becoming any such thing. The unruliness of the school is signalled in the opening sequence as an older male teacher gives a boring lesson about curves while the girls all ignore him. Some are putting on makeup, others are eating or talking amongst themselves. After all, what’s the point of their education if the expectation is they’ll all become obedient housewives dependent on their husbands for support and allowed little in the way of free thought or interest?

A teacher later ironically suggests that the school’s reputation will later reflect badly on them when it comes to getting jobs or getting married only for one of the girls to snap back no one here is going to university and their reputations are all ruined anyway. It might be tempting to assume the problem is mostly generational, but the arrival of a young male teacher who has himself been transferred for violent conduct suggests a kind of backlash to the increasing freedoms of the contemporary society. He tells the girls that he won’t be soft on enforcing his three rules for education which are surprisingly gentle, being friendship, companionship, and harmony, but they simply laugh at him. Not only do they pelt the new teacher with pants and condoms but insist that it they who make the rules here and he will have to follow them. 

Then again there don’t seem to be any rules of any sort other than the absurdity of social hierarchy as they girls square off in various factions vying for dominance of the school, The implication is that gang leader Michiko (Miki Sugimoto) turned rebellious after being raped by strangers on her way home and witnessing her father, a politician, actively cover it up while she continues to feel shamed by her family. Another girl, Yoko (Natsuko Miura), otherwise not involved in the school violence, is working as a hostess to support herself as an orphan living with her grandmother but is lusted after by lecherous teacher who eventually forces her into a sexual relationship and then drops her when she becomes pregnant despite giving the implication he would marry her. Takeo tries to force her to have an abortion though she is determined to have the child despite the scandal causing him to hire another delinquent faction to beat her into a miscarriage. When she takes her own life, the school is most concerned about its reputation despite having done nothing when it was discovered the headmistress’ own daughter, the leader of the other gang, was also engaging in sex work. 

Takeo is also the target of a revenge plot at the hands of mysterious transfer student Yuki who avoids taking any categorical side until pulled into the conflict because of her friendship with Yoko and the growing sense of solidarity between the young women oppressed by a corrupt social system that uses shame to control them. “The rapists win in our society,” one sighs in an oddly contemporary moment. To celebrate their liberation, they burn their sailor suits having stripped and bound their teachers before posing before a sign announcing that they have enacted justice on the “three pigs” who financially exploited them through abusing the educational system. Full of ironic details such as the girls introducing themselves through the classic gambler’s pose, Suzuki films with a punkish irony quite clearly fetishising female violence yet also poking fun at lecherous middle-aged men, youthful hard cases, and matronly older women while in the end handing agency back to the girls even if society continues to suck. 

Delicate Skillful Fingers (白い指の戯れ, Toru Murakawa, 1972)

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Toru Murakawa is most closely associated with his long and fruitful partnership with Yusaku Matsuda which came to define a certain kind of 1970s cinema, but he began his career at Nikkatsu in 1959 in the sales department before resigning and rejoining a year later as an aspiring director. At Nikkatsu he worked with established directors such as Toshio Masuda and Ko Nakahira, as well as with external directors such as Shiro Moritani before making his directorial debut in Nikkatsu Roman Porno, a line of soft core pornography the studio launched amid the collapse of the studio system, with Delicate Skillful Fingers (白い指の戯れ, Shiroi Yubi no Tawamure), in 1972.

Murakawa would actually leave the studio in the same year having completed two more Roman Porno films, returning to his hometown of Yamagata where he had married into the family of well-known metalwork artist Kenten Takahashi both training with him and helping his older brother Chiaki Murakawa set up the Yamagata Symphony Orchestra. In any case, his temporary withdrawal from the film industry had nothing to with a lack of success in his debut feature. Delicate Skillful Fingers was a critical hit and the first of Nikkatsu’s Roman Porno line to feature in Kinema Junpo’s prestigious Best Ten. It was also the debut film for lead actress Hiroko Isayama and, perhaps not entirely coincidentally, the first time the studio put the male star front and centre in their branding campaign. 

Co-scripted by another top Roman Porno name Tatsumi Kumashiro, the film follows the innocent and naive Yuki (Hiroko Isayama), who is so sensitive that the sight of a wrecked car makes her cry in sympathy, as she falls deeper into the world of petty street crime after being chatted up in a cafe by a goofy guy who just happens to have a problem with kleptomania. At least according to his sometime girlfriend Shoko, Jiro (Hajime Tanimoto) came from a wealthy family and attended a fee-paying school, seemingly stealing for the thrill of it rather than financial need. It has to be said that Yuki is rather ditsy, bamboozled into buying food to cook Jiro dinner while entering into a strange dialogue with a robot offering greetings in Chinese as to whether she should give him her virginity which she eventually does, perhaps recklessly, though it ends up not going particularly well, with Jiro having to explain that “the ceremony is now ended” without it seems much fanfare. In any case when he’s picked up by the police and put away for three years because he already had a record, Yuki has to quite her factory job because of persistent police harassment and bizarrely ends up living with Shoko who has predatory lesbian designs on her Yuki responds to but with a degree of internalised shame. 

Shoko’s desire for other women is in someways depicted as an expression of corruption caused by her pickpocket lifestyle as she implies sometime later in suggesting that Yuki will “come to like it” linking the idea of lesbian sex and the act of pickpocketing as implied by “delicate skilful fingers” of the film’s title. Yuki’s bodily submission but mental resistance is intended to suggest her lingering innocence, yet to submit herself to the hedonistic amorality of the pickpocket lifestyle. Rejecting Shoko, she later becomes sexually involved with Jiro’s former cellmate Taku (Ichiro Araki) who is responsible for teaching her how to pickpocket. Taku is otherwise seemingly less interested in sex, but allows Yuki to take the lead while he remains somewhat passive, lying still and still and chewing gum, always with his sunshades remaining firmly on. He even at one point passes her off to an associate in the middle of making love to her, Yuki first resisting on realising what’s going on but eventually giving in to it though clearly not willingly. 

The contrast between the two men, Jiro and Taku, is stark with Jiro clearly asking for consent at each step and waiting for Yuki to confirm it even if in the end he fails to perform whereas Taku seems to be merely using sex which doesn’t interest him to earn her trust and convince her to help him out in his various criminal operations. Yuki is seduced into a world of crime, but remains romantically naive, foolishly sacrificing herself for Taku and insisting she alone was responsible when cornered by the police while he simply walks away and then jokes with a policeman that he’ll look after her when she’s out. Even so, her loyalty to Taku, in contrast with Shoko’s continuing cynicism, proves that she is not fully corrupted by the pickpocket life, even if she foolishly damns herself by needlessly protecting him at the cost of her own future and wellbeing. On the other hand, to so is entirely her own choice just as it was her own choice to sleep with Jiro in the full embrace of her agency. Murakawa’s Nikkatsu debut is a gritty, grimy urban tale of amoral post-war youth but, even in its tragic conclusion, signals the hero’s spineless indifference and hands victory to the heroine who remains uncorrupted but only to her eternal cost. 

Woods Are Wet (女地獄　森は濡れた, Tatsumi Kumashiro, 1973)

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As long as people live honest lives, eventually good things will happen to them, according to the sinister mistress at the centre of Takumi Kumashiro’s Roman Porno Woods Are Wet (女地獄　森は濡れた, Onna Jigoku: Mori wa Nureta). Perversely, she may actually believe this to be true but only in the most ironic of senses as she and her “cruel” husband enjoy incredibly happy lives together having decided to “honestly” embrace their true desires, which include things like rape, murder, and eating grapes off the corpses of their victims.

Inspired by the Marquis de Sade’s Justine and set in the Taisho era, the film begins in true gothic style as Sachiko (Hiroko Isayama), a runaway maid in flight from an accusation of having murdered her mistress, encounters Yoko (Rie Nakagawa), an upper-class lady who unexpectedly comes to her rescue in a small town. Yoko takes her back to the Western-style mansion she shares with her husband Ryunosuke (Hatsuo Yamaya) whom she describes as being incredibly cruel. Explaining that she’s been desperately lonely since her marriage at 19, Yoko begs Sachiko to stay but as her companion rather than a servant, which is another act of class transgression for which there will presumably be a price. 

In any case, the atmosphere changes when Ryunosuke arrives and reveals he knows all about Sachiko’s predicament and blackmails her into helping with his schemes to rape and murder guests at the hotel he runs. He explains that he’s very wealthy and does this for kicks not out of financial necessity but nevertheless uses her to spice up his game by directly telling her to warn the guests that their lives are in danger. If she manages to get them to escape, he’ll let her go too, but of course it’s not as easy as she’d assumed it would be, especially as the first two guests she’s sent to brutally rape her. Even so, she vows to escape with them, only they are not quite clever enough to beat Ryunosuke’s game.

Out in the middle of nowhere, the mansion is a true gothic fantasy lit by candle light due to an absence of electricity because of the Depression. Ryunosuke has adapted it so that it contains a series of prison-like doors with iron bars and locks that allow him to trap Sachiko and others exactly where he wants them. He is vile and depraved, as is Yoko, though they later brand themselves as simply liberated and living “honestly” having embraced their true desires. Ryunosuke paints himself as a quiet revolutionary, asking why he should conform with rules and laws dictated by a distant authority to which he himself does not subscribe. He describes commonly held visions of morality as nothing more than a tool of social coercion designed to control the common man (which he is not), in which he may have a valid point despite the depravity of his apparently honest nature. 

This aspect of Ryunosuke as an anti-social force was apparently something very much intended by Kumashiro, who was himself rebelling against a moral panic which had seen Nikkatsu’s Roman Porno line condemned under public obscenity laws. To make a point, he inserts large black blocks and lines throughout the film to mimic those sometimes demanded by the censors, though enlarged to an absurd degree and often not actually covering what they would presumably be intended to or actually drawing attention to it. In any case, what the censors objected to in this case was not apparently the sex itself but the violence which accompanies it, notably in the scenes in which blood-soaked sex continues after Yoko has shot one of the male victims she effectively raped at gunpoint. 

The central part of the film is a lengthy orgy scene in which Ryunosuke has his maids whip the victims while he anally rapes them while they are forced to have sex with Yoko and Sachiko on the pretext of saving their lives. It only gets grimmer from there, though there’s a censoriousness about Sachiko’s insistence that happiness should come from correctness to counter the “happiness” that Yoko and Ryunosuke exude in their embrace of their baser desires that undercuts her role as the innocent heroine standing up to their depraved inhumanity amid the absurd interruption of a radio taiso broadcast signalling the arrival of the next unhappy guests to rock up for a less than pleasant stay at this decidedly unluxurious hotel.

The 7 Grandmasters (虎豹龍蛇鷹, Joseph Kuo, 1977)

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“The way of kung fu, no one is invincible. A fighter shouldn’t be arrogant and bully others,” according to one of the mini lessons given by the ageing champion at the centre of Joseph Kuo’s 7 Grandmasters (虎豹龍蛇鷹), though it has to be said there is a fair amount of cockiness in play while bullying does seem to be a part of his training programme. Arrogance is in fact what he has himself been accused of at the ceremony at which he has been honoured by the emperor and after which he planned to retire if he had not received a rude note telling him he is not a real champion and shouldn’t lay claim to the title until he’s defeated all of the other regional champions in each of their signature fighting styles. 

A 30-year veteran of the local martial arts scene, Zhang Shenguang (Jack Long) is tired and ready to pass his school on to the next generation but feels he cannot retire until he’s proved once and for all that he is the greatest kung fu master. Setting out with his daughter and three pupils, he roams around the land easily defeating his rivals and teaching them a lesson to boot. Unfortunately, however, his first target, Sha (Wong Fei-lung), ends up dying while he’s also being followed around by an over-earnest boy, Shao Ying (Li Yi Min), who insists on becoming his pupil, though Zhang is unwilling to take him on because his own master was betrayed by a bad faith student who stole the final three pages of the book he’d been given to safeguard outlining the 12 Bai Mei strikes.

Zhang is definitely all about righteousness, constantly reminding everyone about the responsibilities that come with kung fu but his own students are fairly merciless to Shao Ying firstly mocking him as he trails along behind them like a stray puppy and then continuing to bully him until he finally surpasses their own abilities. They are all also supremely confident and often resort to cocky banter during fights which it has to be admitted they usually win. The film is structured around Zhang’s quest abruptly shifting from one expertly choreographed fight sequence to another, each showing off a different style and the ways in which Zhang can overcome it while some of his opponents accept defeat gracefully and others not. In one town they are ambushed by goons working for the local master who wanted to avoid potentially losing his title by underhandedly taking Zhang out first but as Zhang puts it losing his good name instead. The final challenger meanwhile refuses to Zhang directly because he can see Zhang is already ill and it wouldn’t be fair so has their students square off instead. 

Nevertheless, Zhang is not permitted to exit the world of kung fu until dealing with the left over baggage of the three missing strikes of Bai Mei, Shao Ying eventually becoming its inheritor after a twist of fate connects him with Zhang’s past while causing him a paradoxical dilemma in temporarily becoming Zhang’s enemy in order to avenge the death of his father as his code dictates. Like Zhang however he is perhaps only trying to make a point, never intending to harm his former mentor, at least physically, but only to close the cycle through symbolic revenge, later returning to Zhang’s side on realising he’s been used and deceived. 

Featuring top choreography from Hong Kong’s Yuen Kwai and Yuen Cheung Yan, Kuo’s low budget indie kung fu drama is pure fight fest less interested in the emotional conflicts between the men than the physical which might explain its incredibly abrupt conclusion which largely implodes the moment of catharsis achieved in the villain’s defeat. Even so, it succeeds in showcasing a series of fighting styles as Zhang continues with his quest to prove himself the ultimate grandmaster so he can finally retire while throwing in some comic relief thanks to Shao Ying’s dogged determination to become one of the gang before finally proving himself the most talented of all the students, not least because of his perseverance and willingness to learn. Shooting mainly in the open air to avoid the expense of sets, Kuo’s approach is unfussy but to the point of removing all distractions in order to showcase the immense abilities of his performers in an otherwise generic tale of rivalry and revenge. 

The System (行規, Peter Yung Wai-Chuen, 1979)

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“How else can people like me survive?” a unwilling informant ironically asks in Peter Yung Wai-Chuen’s New Wave cops and robbers thriller The System (行規), while Inspector Chan (Pai Ying) is already far too aware of the ironic symbiosis of law enforcement and crime. He’s dependent on informants to be able to do his job and catch the kingpins, but that means the informants continue to perpetuate crime. Even when they manage to make an arrest, they have to let the suspect go because it turns out that they’re already cooperating with another officer. The police aren’t so much solving crimes as, at best, managing, if not actually enabling them.

Director Peter Yung drew on research he’d done for a documentary to depict police work and the realities of drugs in late British Colonial Hong Kong in a more authentic way, often using held camera and shooting on location out in the streets. Chan is seen as something of a zealot, an idealistic cop too pure-hearted to understand his colleagues’ dirty jokes and with a penchant for retreating to Lantau Island to go bird-watching, even if his address to his officers is a little on the crude side. Nevertheless, even if he hates police corruption, he’s not above playing this game and is keen to recruit exclusive informants of his own, essentially by blackmailing them, finding evidence of crimes they’ve committed and promising to overlook it if they agree to feed him information. 

That’s how he recruits Tam (Sek Kin), a drug user with a gambling problem working for a syndicate run by Hung (Nick Lam Wai-Kei), the kingpin Chan has been trying to catch for a decade. But at the same time, Tam appears to keep his life of crime separate from that as a family man with two children and an ailing mother. He doesn’t really want to help Chan because he fears retribution from Hung, but he doesn’t want to go to prison for 36 years and leave his family destitute, either. Tam may be carrying on with underworld figure Third Auntie (Lisa Chiao Chiao) who runs the domino parlour which acts as a hub for the gang, but he’s not necessarily bad or dangerous, just someone trying to live under this oppressive system.

For those reasons, the relationship between the two men is tense and fraught with danger and resentment. The first operation ends up going wrong when Customs interferes, arresting Third Auntie which is a huge problem for Tam as is the fact they seized the drugs, which is a problem for Hung. But even Hung knows how this game works. He knows Tam betrayed him by working with the police, but he doesn’t necessarily blame him. He just asks for the money he assumes the police paid him in exchange for the lost drugs, and also has Tam beaten up for good measure. The beating in particular causes Tam to resent Chan and plot revenge by framing him as corrupt. That doesn’t go to plan either, but even though Tam constantly betrays him, Chan remains loyal and defends Tam to his increasingly irate bosses in the hope he’ll finally lead them to Hung.

It’s this aspect of police corruption that really hangs over the film. Even Customs take a position of the drugs they seize for themselves, which is how Chan is able to convince them to release Third Auntie. The operation is nearly derailed by a corrupt cop who frequents Third Auntie’s domino parlour, trying to bet with his gun when he runs out of money and then following her to demand a payoff for not reporting the drugs. Chan makes reference to the fact that the drug dealers think nothing of paying off police because the profits they can make selling drugs in Hong Kong are so vast, but, thankfully, it doesn’t happen so much any more because of the institution of ICAC. ICAC is held up as a kind of threat even if Chan suggests that it’s already cleaned up the police force and ushered in a new culture of earnest policing, though even he says that it’s caused a drop in morale that might be improved if they can catch a big fish like Hung.

Chan’s bosses are British, while he later ends up working with an American DEA officer who gives them even more new technology like radio mics, though Chan was already keen to show off their modern policing methods, which include things like hidden cameras, secret recordings, and a massive telephoto lens. “We’re just using each other,” the corrupt cop says when his partner asks him if he’s not pushing his luck by going back to ask Third Auntie for more money after noticing how big her haul is knowing that she can’t really do anything about it without exposing herself. In the end, they are all trapped by this ridiculous system of symbiotic crime that leads only to destruction.

The System screens as part of this year’s San Diego Asian Film Festival.

Sister Street Fighter: Fifth Level Fist (女必殺五段拳, Shigehiro Ozawa, 1976)

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Though it’s tacked on to the Sister Street Fighter series, Level Five Fist (女必殺五段拳, Onna hissatsu godan ken) actually has nothing to do with it save borrowing a part of the title which is intended to signal the presence of its star. Thus, this is not really a martial arts movie but a much more conventional Toei action film in which the leading role is technically split between Etsuko Shihomi’s posh girl karate champ and Tsunehiko Watase’s sexist cop. It does however continue the smuggling theme with the drugs this time first being packed inside fish and then encased in Buddha statues to be exported to America.

Like many Toei films of the time, there is an underlying theme of anti-Americanism as the “Far East” big boss, posing as a Hollywood movie exec, is supposedly from there but has a strong accent suggesting otherwise. Meanwhile, the brother and sister at the film’s centre are a pair of children who were fathered by American servicemen at the bases in Okinawa who presumably took no responsibility for their upbringing. The brother’s father was black, while the sister’s was white, and though they have both suffered prejudice and discrimination because of their mixed ethnicity, it’s clear that Jim (Ken Wallace) has had it worse. Michi (Mitchi Love) makes good use of her native-level English abilities and martial arts skills to work as a bodyguard / interpreter for visiting dignitaries, but Jim seems to struggle to find employment and subsequently ends up working for a Korean gang run out of a local nightclub. 

The pair have a dream of saving up enough money to return to Okinawa, which was returned to Japan in 1971 after an extended period of US occupation, and opening a restaurant which the film positions as a desire to escape from the racism they experience on the mainland. When Jim says that Kiku (Etsuko Shihomi) is their only friend, he half implies that the discrimination they face is down to being Okinawan rather than their mixed ethnicity which would continue to be an issue even on the islands as it was in their childhood even if there may be more understanding given the continuing presence of the American military and larger numbers of mixed-ethnicity people. In any case, it’s true enough that even those from Okinawa do also experience discrimination on the mainland and are not always accepted as “Japanese” while their Okinawan identity is not respected either. 

Kiku is trying to protect her friends, but finds herself hamstrung by rigid cop Takagi (Tsunehiko Watase) who also happens to be the son of a friend of her father’s. Kiku’s father is apparently a self-made man and successful kimono merchant married to a more conservative woman with higher social ambitions. As the film opens, Kiku is dressed in a kimono and being subject to a formal omiai meeting for an arranged marriage with an admittedly promising candidate who graduated from an elite university and works for a prominent bank. But Kiku looks bored throughout and defiantly flouts social convention by suddenly claiming to have an appointment and walking out, much to her mother’s embarrassment. Her father lets her go and is apparently less bothered about this sort of propriety though later trying to put his foot down when she leaves the house dressed like a hippy rather than in a fine kimono which is not, after all, a very good advert for the family business. 

Her father also tries to set Kiku up with Takagi, but like her mother, Takagi also tells her to keep her nose out of the case and “try trusting a man for once”. He criticises her for saying that she doesn’t want to lose to a man and explains that men are attracted to women because of their “gentleness.” He adds that cooking and raising children are what make women happy, with the clear implication that Kiku is in the wrong for flouting conventional gender roles and should quickly conform by getting married and becoming a wife. Kiku appears to give him the benefit of the doubt and this confusion over gender roles is compounded when she poses as a boy and takes a job as a extra on the jidaigeki film set at the studio which turns out to be a front for drug runners. A queer-coded actor who is later told off for “stalking people again” tries to hit on her in a clear allusion to her masculinity. But unlike in the Sister Street Fighter films, she is ultimately defeated and tied to a log with a buzz saw coming at her only to be saved by the intervention of Takagi while the final scenes see her supporting him after he is (possibly fatally) injured defeating the bad guys.

All in all, it’s some rather confusing messaging but seems to come out on the side of male authority as represented by the police rather than Kiku’s father who is depicted as a weakened figure of masculinity owing to being henpecked by his wife and hoodwinked by his feisty daughter. Even the grinning sap from the gym who tried to put Chanel No. 5 on Kiku’s karate outfit, much to her annoyance, is later revealed to be an undercover cop. Which is all to say, that Kiku’s martial arts ability is almost a kind of joke and something that places her outside of conventional gender norms which should otherwise be “corrected” rather than praised, as it was in the Sister Streetfighter series which placed more emphasis on martial arts philosophy. Then again, the original trilogy ended on a similarly sour note in reaffirming Koyu’s maternity. It seems it’s less sisters doing it for themselves, than sisters doing as they’re told, which aside from anything else is a disappointing conclusion to one of the few female–led action franchises of the 1970s.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

The Return of Sister Street Fighter (帰って来た女必殺拳, Kazuhiko Yamaguchi, 1975)

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First it was drugs, then diamonds. This time, it’s gold. Even by this third and final, in the official trilogy at least, instalment in the Sister Street Fighter series, Return of the Sister Street Fighter (帰って来た女必殺拳, Kaette kita onna hissatsu ken) the gangsters still haven’t come up with a good way of smuggling. These ones have hit on the bright idea of dissolving gold in acid and importing it as if it were Chinese liquor. 

In any case, following the same pattern as the other two films, Return begins in Hong Kong with a friend of Koryu’s (Etsuko Shihomi) being murdered by thugs right after asking her to go to Japan and look for her cousin Shurei (Akane Kawasaki) who has gone missing leaving her little girl Rika (Chieko Onuki) behind. Hoping to track down her sister Reika in Yokohama, Koryu once again heads to Japan with Rika in tow only to discover that Shurei has been forced to become the mistress of the shadow boss of the Yokohama China Town, Oh Ryumei (Rinichi Yamamoto). 

Though the film maybe following a pattern, it’s also, in a sense, diverging in that it, perhaps uncomfortably, attempts shift Koryu into a more maternal space in essentially leaving her responsible for Rika because of all of her other relatives are for one reason or another unavailable. This is, after all, the implication of the closing scenes, that Koryu will be giving up her life of martial arts and fighting crime to look Rika. Even so, as we’ve seen throughout the trilogy, Koryu is not much good at protecting those around her. All of her friends and relatives generally end up dead, leaving the screenwriters having to make up more for the next instalment. Family is a liability for the sisters too, as Shuri and Reika try to save each other from the clutches of Oh, who once again tries to control them with drugs and familial bonds, but ultimately fail.

But then Oh is on a different level even to the admittedly eccentric villains of the first two films. He appears to use a wheelchair and dresses in a stereotypically Chinese outfit (as does Koryu, to be fair). Even his name is obviously Chinese even if uses the Japanese readings of the kanji which literally mean “King Dragon Bright”. Yet when he’s eventually unmasked, it seems that he was actually a member of the Kempeitai, or military police, in Manchuria during the war, where he committed atrocities against the Chinese people and finally stole bunch of gold bullion which has fuelled his post-war Chinatown empire. It’s likely also what sparked his obsession with all things gold. Even his prosthetic hand turns out to be made of it, ironically moulded into a grasping motion. 

Oh behaves like some kind of Roman Emperor, sitting on his Dias and holding gladiatorial contests to find new henchmen. He declares he that neither capitalism nor communism can beat gold and he’s hedging his bets on both in an ultimate bid for behind-the-scenes power. Embodying the toxic legacy of militarism, he mistakenly underestimates Koryu declaring that that’s what happens to people who depend too much on their physical abilities, thinking her to be dead. His weird henchmen include a man with a lewd-looking and infinitely symbolic snaking sword, but, of course, they’re no match for Koryu who once again discovers an unexpected ally at a critical moment. 

Even so, the film’s approach to it’s Chinese themes is very much of its time. Once again, it uses some offensively stereotypical music to introduce the Hong Kong setting, and the friend who went to Japan with Shurei is actually called “Suzie Wong”, as in “The World of”. The world surrounding Oh ought to be quite dark what with the constant presence of acid, the people trafficking, and the weird henchmen but somehow the film maintains its cheerful tone, no doubt bolstered by Koryu’s ability to take the gangsters down, even if her way of doing it isn’t all that efficient and more often than not gets all her friends killed. Nevertheless, this time around it seems she’s fighting for the sisterhood against the evil gangsters who control and abuse women, but even so, her final transition to mother-in-waiting feels a little like a rebuke, as if even little dragons have to cool their fire one day just as her brother in the first instalment had wanted her to settle down and live a “normal life” doing typically feminine things rather than mastering martial arts and shutting down the warped and amoral gangsters currently smuggling their greed and weirdness into a changing Japan.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Sister Street Fighter: Hanging by a Thread (女必殺拳　危機一, Kazuhiko Yamaguchi, 1974)

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Li Koryu (Etsuko Shihomi) returns to fight crime in Japan in the second in the Sister Street Fighter series, Hanging by a Thread (女必殺拳　危機一, Onna hissatsu ken: Kiki ippatsu). The first film apparently tested so well so that studio execs ordered a second one right away to fill a big New Year slot. That might in one sense explain why the film is pretty much the same in terms of narrative, yet this one does go a little further while swapping the drugs subplot for diamonds.

Koryu comes to the aid of a man being attacked by thugs in a Hong Kong marketplace and is somehow completely unfazed when he plucks out his false eye with instructions to give it to Professor Enmei (Hideaki Nagai) who is also known to Koryu because he’s the father of her old school friend, Birei (Hisako Tanaka). Unfortunately, the false eye contains microfilm that suggests Birei has been kidnapped by vicious Japanese gangsters. The professor therefore sends her to Tokyo on a rescue mission and we discover that she also has an older sister, Byakuren (Kanya Tsukasa), who was never mentioned in the earlier film, who is living in Japan having chased her dream of becoming a jewellery designer.

This time around, it’s diamonds not drugs, but the gangsters still haven’t cracked this smuggling business and have come up with the very weird idea of hiding them in the bum cheeks of attractive young women. Meanwhile, they also force the women into sex work. Osone’s (Hideo Murota) female business partner Mayumi, played by Madam Joy, a drag queen who starred in several Toei films in the mid-70s, films them from a distant window to get material for blackmail. Nevertheless, she only cares about the diamonds, unlike the boss and several of the gang which once again includes a rival martial arts outfit who have in it for the Shorinji temple. 

Shinichi Chiba does not appear in the film, but Koryu does gain a kind of sidekick in the form of Tsubaki (Yasuaki Kurata), a sleazy-looking guy whose intentions are permanently unclear. The film goes a little bit further with its awkward orientalism opening in a Hong Kong marketplace with some offensively stereotypical music and a bunch of fire crackers, even if once again in trends in the opposite direction from most films of the time in that the crooks are all Japanese and it’s a half-Chinese woman who’s coming to sort them all out. The gangsters have apparently been trafficking the women abroad for sex work, then bringing them back with the diamonds in their bums which seems like a plan with a lot of potential problems even if they hadn’t made the huge mistake of kidnapping a friend of Koryu and then later her sister. 

But then again, Koryu’s cases seem to be fairly isolated. Once she takes out these bad guys, that’s it. There’s no wider conspiracy save a general sense that the world itself is corrupt and indifferent to human suffering. Osone has a strange love of taking people’s eyes, which might be a way to stop them seeing who he really is. He has, after all, already taken the stars from Byakuren’s along with her dreams of a new life in Japan finally becoming the jewellery designer she always dreamed of being. Despite her determination to save her sister, Byakuren soon realises that Osone is most definitely not a man of his word. His curiously old-fashioned outfits and demeanour suggest he’s seeking a place with the elites of an earlier time while indulging in some fairly odd behaviour. 

Once again, Koryu squares off against his equally weird henchmen who start attacking her the moment she lands in Japan, and eventually ends up stabbing someone with the severed arm of another enemy still holding his knife. Still, the tone is generally cheerful and upbeat despite the strangeness of the tale and series of losses Koryu experiences including a challenge to her pride when she’s bested by one of the martial arts goons. In this continually uncertain and increasingly surreal world, Koryu’s fists, it seems, are one of the few things that can absolutely be relied upon along with evil smugglers and their bizarre new plans for circumventing the law of the land out of nothing other than lust and greed.

Original trailer (English subtitles)