Tag: Naoyuki Sugano

The Great Chase (華麗なる追跡, Norifumi Suzuki, 1975)

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What about if you rebooted the Bannai Tarao series, but the hero was a female spy who is also a champion race driver and martial artist? Norifumi Suzuki did actually make a Bannai Tarao move in 1978 starring Akira Kobayashi, but the heroine of The Great Chase (華麗なる追跡, Karei-naru Tsuiseki) certainly loves a disguise or two and like the famous man of a thousand faces seems to have no trouble pulling them off as she infiltrates a gang of evil traffickers led by a furry which has come up with an ace new plan of packing heroin into coffins and having them shipped to nuns!

Oh, and the gang were also behind the death of her father who “committed suicide” in prison after being framed for drug smuggling. The Great Chase takes place in a world of pure pulp which somehow maintains its sense of cartoonish innocence even after Shinobu (Etsuko Shihomi) has infiltrated the heart of darkness and seen most of her associates killed by sadistic gang boss Inomata (Bin Amatsu). But at the same time, it delves into a deep sense of ‘70s paranoia as it becomes clear that the authority figures are all corrupt. Inomata has become a politician, while Shinobu’s father’s murder was orchestrated by the prison warden who was working with him in return for financial gain. The man who framed her father was a friend of his, implying that no one can really be trusted when there’s money to be made.

In a roundabout way,as this sense of anxiety is only reinforced by Shinobu’s role as some sort of secret agent working for the spy ring run by her uncle which is currently hot on the trail of the drug dealers even if they haven’t yet figured out who their boss is. Conversely, her home life is as wholesome as it could be with her two adopted siblings who run a florist’s along with Shinobu’s fan club. Her status as a kind of race car idol lends Shinobu a particular kind of ‘70s cool and turns her into some sort of superhuman figure capable of triumphing over any kind of adversity like a superhero worthy of any kid’s lunchbox. The siblings, Nagi (Fujika Omori) and Shinpei (Naoyuki Sugano), were taken in as orphans by her father which once again signals his goodness in contrast to the greed and selfishness of the gang that had him killed to cover up their crimes. 

That they peddle in drugs marks them out as a force of social disruption, but they’re also actively heretical in hiding behind the shield of the church. Suzuki frequently uses religious imagery in his films and here again echoes the romanticism of School of the Holy Beast with the use of red roses to decorate the coffin of the unfortunate young woman who has been turned into a vessel for smuggling drugs and has for some reason been laid out otherwise entirely naked. When it comes to retrieving the merchandise, we can see that many of the habits are being worn by men while Inomata himself masquerades as a priest. Then again, perhaps he is merely indulging his love of costume play seeing as he also has a hobby of wearing a furry bear suit to attack and rape women in his living room. 

Inomata’s claws then seem to represent something else, a rapacious, grasping sense of patriarchy in which he also uses drugs to bind women to him. Shinobu’s childhood friend Yukiko (Hisako Tanaka) has apparently fallen victim and laments that she is possessed by him body and soul to the point that the old Yukiko is dead which is why she hasn’t been able to step in and help Shinobu and is doing so now fearing that it may cost her her life. Suddenly, it’s all quite grim with the basement sex cult, whipping and torture, but Shinobu maintains her plucky spirit and is somehow able to lure Inomata towards a cable-car-based showdown. With a cameo from real life wrestler / singer Mach Fumiake, the film enters a kind of meta commentary on a real-life Shinobu (though she was not, as far as anyone knows, one of Japan’s top spies), but otherwise remains within the realms of pulp in which the heroine is able to pull off her difficult mission with the help of her talent for disguises before dramatically unmasking herself as the woman who’s going to take them all down. Camp to the max and incredibly surreal, the film never drops its sense of silliness even as the grim events enveloping Shinobu lead to tragic consequences that she barely has time to deal with before barrelling straight into the next duel with the forces of corruption.

*Norifumi Suzuki’s name is actually “Noribumi” but he has become known as “Norifumi” to English-speaking audiences.

Criminal Woman: Killing Melody (前科おんな殺し節, Atsushi Mihori, 1973)

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“Five women like us could take on the whole world!” a woman exclaims after a very successful mission of revenge in which they didn’t have to do very much at all except play on male pride and yakuza honour. Criminal Woman: Killing Melody (前科おんな殺し節, Zenka onna: Koroshi-bushi) stars the two main players of Toei’s pinky violence line, Reiko Ike and Miki Sugimoto, and plays with their star rivalry by casting them as a pair of women eventually divided by the conflicting loyalties presented by the heroine’s desire for revenge. 

Ike stars as Maki, an intense young woman first seen hiding behind a door in the classic club scene that opens the film. Eventually she darts inside and slashes some yakuza with a knife, but her assassination attempt is very unsuccessful landing her in prison for a number of years where she largely spends her time glaring at the bars and plotting her revenge. Nevertheless, it’s the solidarity she finds with her cellmates that eventually allows her to carry out her plan. On her arrival, she first clashes with cell boss Masayo (Miki Sugimoto), a former yakuza moll inside for slashing some guys with a razor after they caught her cheating at hanafuda, but eventually wins her respect after a prison test of strength in which each woman is armed with a glass shard and grips a rope between their teeth until the loser gives in and lets go. Maki is not a skilled fighter and easily wounded by Masayo but refuses to surrender, getting right back up again every time Masayo knocks her down until Masayo finally concedes defeat.

The early prison fight is repeated at the end of the film only without the rope and with real knives, drugs replacing the white chalk that clouded around them as they fought in the prison yard. This time they are more evenly matched. Maki is no good with a knife, but more than able to hold her own and the fight is more about settling a score than it is about revenge so neither really wants to harm the other anyway. Though they found themselves temporarily on opposing sides, inevitably it turns out that Masayo is the woman of the yakuza Maki is trying to bring down, the sense of solidarity between them as women eventually wins out and though Masayo is unable to betray Oba (Ryoji Hayama) she cannot betray Maki either and ends up helping in her in quest for revenge if in a round about way.

It’s this sense of solidarity that brings the other cell mates back to the prison when Maki is released already having decided to help her get her revenge on the yakuza who forced her father to traffic drugs and then had him killed. Maki first refuses their help, as she had the opportunity of getting legal justice by telling the police everything that had happened including her own gang rape at the hands of the same yakuza, because it’s important that she’s the one who takes down Oba but later accepts their gesture and forms a tightly knit gang of her own fronted out of former sex worker Kaoru’s (Yumiko Katayama) bar. To fund the mission, Maki goes on a two week sex work spree mostly bedding American servicemen with whom she later makes a deal to buy a large number of guns and grenades she eventually sells to hotheaded yakuza son Tetsu (Takeo Chii) who is already resentful towards Oba for having stolen his father’s turf.

All Maki has to do to is light the touch paper on a simmering gang war between old school yakuza and the amoral corporatising Oba. She antagonises him by expertly offing one of his guys in a rain drenched assassination scene and getting one of the other girls to strongly hint it was Tetsu’s doing, then pretending to come to Tetsu’s rescue with the guns only to further provoke Oba. The girls even joke they’re doing a public service by cleaning up the town in taking out the corrupt politician who was propping up Oba for his own financial gain. It’s all expertly planned by Maki who appears in a series of quite stunning power suits and sporting giant hair, battling yakuza with killer style and an expert understanding of the way their brains work. But the reason the plan succeeds is the shared sense of solidarity between the women, Masayo included, as they strike back together against an oppressive and patriarchal society.