Tag: Toshio Masuda

Jeans Blues: No Future (ジーンズブルース　明日なき無頼派, Sadao Nakajima, 1974)

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Nihilistic lovers on the run make a break for the sea only to find their pathway blocked in Sadao Nakajima’s anarchic love tragedy, Jeans Blues: No Future (ジーンズブルース　明日なき無頼派, Jeans Blues: Asu naki Buraiha). As the title suggests, the heroes find themselves devoid of hope, pressing the accelerator as far it’ll go with no clear destination in sight and nothing really left to lose while discovering a twisted kind of salvation in their unlikely connection.

Sensing danger in the air, grave-digging drifter Jiro (Tsunehiko Watase) decides to run off with all the money after his gangster friends off a moneylender on the orders of a businessman. Meanwhile, across town, bar lady Hijiriko (Meiko Kaji) decides to walk out on her unsatisfying life taking some money from the till and her boyfriend’s car for good measure. The pair quite literally collide, but realise that they are much the same in their growing sense of emptiness and impossibility. Nothing really really interests Hijiriko anymore, and watching the car burn after Jiro tossed a cigarette is the only thing that’s made her feel alive in eons. Running through his many and various jobs, Jiro reflects that work is “no fun” either and that the reason he wanted the money was for his sister who he says has run up huge debts paying for medical treatment for a close friend and is now facing the threat of being forced into sex work. 

His sense of impotence is palpable in his desperation and the knowledge that there is no good way to come by large amounts of money especially for a young man from the country with limited prospects. At one point he is beaten by a man with a golf club, a symbol of the class privilege and middle class success that will always elude him. The money, much more than he needs for his sister, gives him a new sense of confidence and possibility even if he remains somewhat frugal, picking up an old banger from a second hand car salesman that immediately blows a tire and apparently belonged to “Koji the murderer” which explains the huge dent in the bonnet. Yet he does at least pay his way, even leaving a collection of notes next to the body of a man he ran over intended to pay for medical treatment which casts him as something of a naive innocent cast adrift in a corrupt society and driven into criminality by desperation.

Trapped inside a shipping container and fearing he may be about to die, Jiro comes to see his fate as karmic retribution for having taken the money that was earned by killing others. Inside the container, the pair are in a sense already dead but also undergo a kind of rebirth if only one fuelled by desperation and the connection that has arisen between them. Hijiriko appears to be suffering from some kind of trauma, experiencing a flashback to the orgy going on at the bar which she had been invited to join but declined much to her customer’s disappointment. He remarks that she always did before, a comment which seems to annoy her though perhaps not as much as the arrival of an older woman a male voice tells her on the phone is a actually quite wealthy and doesn’t need the money but does sex work as a kind of hobby. 

It’s Hijiriko who begins to fight back against the world, dressed in the stylish black leather suit Jiro buys her while he struts around in a cap and three-piece tartan suit. Jiro does not actually kill anyone, but Hijiriko does without a second thought perhaps because she herself is already dead. Using her sexuality as a weapon, she asks a hunter if she can hold his gun and trying his luck he lets her only to end up getting shot when he tries to fight back. The pair rob a petrol station for money but come up with only a few notes and coins while the attendant reveals they’ve already made their daily deposit at the bank signalling just how out of luck these lovers really are. They’re bound for the sea, but travel to the mountains and find there only danger and disappointment. Nakajima lends their flight from a dissatisfying existence a kind of desperation in its breakneck pace and frenetic camera work but equally injects a sense of cosmic irony in the many coincidences and reversals that frustrate the lovers’ escape and in the end leave them only one way out from the society which constrains them.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Zero (零戦燃ゆ, Toshio Masuda, 1984)

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The Zero Fighter has taken on a kind of mythic existence in a romanticised vision of warfare, yet as Toshio Masuda’s Zero (零戦燃ゆ零戦燃ゆ, Zerosen moyu) implies its time in the spotlight was in fact comparatively short. Soon eclipsed by sleeker planes flown by foreign pilots, the Zero’s glory faded until these once unbeatable fighters were relegated to suicide missions. On one level, the film uses the Zero as a metaphor for national hubris, a plane that ironically flew too close to the sun, but on another can never overcome the simple fact that this marvel of engineering was also a tool of war and destruction. 

The film is loosely framed around two members of Japan’s Imperial Navy, Hamada (Daijiro Tsutsumi) and Mizushima (Kunio Mizushima), who as cadets consider deserting to escape the brutality of Navy discipline. Having left the base they’re accosted by an inspirational captain who talks them out of leaving by showing them a prototype model of the Zero and convincing them they only need to stick it out for a few more years in order to get the opportunity to fly one. Mizushima, the film’s narrator, doesn’t qualify as a pilot and is related to the ground crew while Hamada does indeed get to pilot a Zero fighter and becomes one of the top pilots in the service. 

The viewpoint is is then split between the view from the ground and that from the clouds. Mizushima makes occasionally surprising statements such as candidly telling love interest Shizuko (Yû Hayami) that they are unlikely to win the war, while becoming ever more concerned for Hamada at one point telling him there’s a problem with his plane in the hope that he won’t take off that day. Hamada meanwhile is completely taken over by the spirit of the Zero and even when given a chance to escape the war after being badly injured, chooses to return because he does not know what else to do. When he visits home after leaving hospital, no one is there. His mother eventually arrives and explains that the family has become scattered with his siblings seconded to the war effort in various places throughout the country. 

Hamada’s dedication and personal sacrifice are in some senses held up as the embodiment of the Zero. The reason for its success is revealed to lie in the decision to remove the armouring for the cockpit leaving the pilot’s life unprotected, something which the American engineers describe as unthinkable. In an early meeting, a superior officer complains that they’re losing too many pilots and need to reinstall some of the armouring, but finds little support. Not only this is a cold and inhuman decision, but it’s poor economic sense given that skilled pilots are incredibly valuable and in short supply. After all, you can’t just make more. If you start from scratch you’ll need to wait 20 years and then teach them fly, but it’s a lesson the Navy never learns that is only exacerbated with the expansion of the kamikaze squads which squander both men and pilots for comparatively little gain. 

These “philosophical differences” are embodied in the nature of the Zero which is configured to be nimble and outmanoeuvre the enemy but is quickly eclipsed not least when foreign powers figure out the way to beat it lies in numbers in which they have the advantage. There is something of a post-Meiji spirit in the feeling that Japan is lagging behind Western powers and desperately needs to develop its own military tech in order to defend itself. On hearing rumours of the Zero fighter, MacArthur scoffs and says that Japan can’t even build cars so he doesn’t believe they could design a plane that could fly such large distances while others suggest that they will still need the element of surprise if they ever go to war with America because its technology is still superior. 

Walking a fine line, the film tries to avoid glorifying “war”, but it cannot always help indulging in nationalist fantasy such as in its statement that thanks to the Zero “the Japanese flag covered a vast area of the Pacific” in the wake of Pearl Harbour. These may be fantastically well designed machines that were incredibly good at what they were created to do, only what they were created to do was kill and destroy. The plane’s fortunes and Japan’s are intrinsically linked, the sense of superiority in the air lasts only a short time before Western technological advances over take it and the war continues to go badly. The film dramatises the tragedy of war through the friendship between the two men which eventually causes Mizushima to sacrifice his love for Shizuko by convincing her marry Hamada hoping that his priorities would change and he’d decide to take a position as an instructor rather than heading back to the front. 

For her part, it seems that Shizuko was also in love with Mizushima, but also caught in a moment of confusion between love and patriotism that encourages her to think she should do as Mizushima says and embrace this man who has dedicated his life to his country. In the end, it buys them each loss and misery, but also a moment of transcendent hope even if it was based on a falsehood in the pleasant memory that Mizushima gives Hamada of the life he is giving up by rejecting it to return to the front. For Mizushima, Hamada and the Zero may become one and the same. At the end of the war he can’t bear to see the remaining Zero’s sold for scrap and asked to be “gifted” one as the Captain who’d first shown one to him said he would be, so that he can give it a proper a “funeral”, or perhaps send it to Hamada in the afterlife after he is killed mere days before the surrender. Masuda cannot help romanticising the wartime conflict with his dashing pilots and their thrilling dogfights, often depicting it more as a kind of game than an ugly struggle of death and destruction, but does lend a note of poignancy to his tale of lives thwarted by the folly of war.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Operation Plazma in Osaka (実録外伝 大阪電撃作戦, Sadao Nakajima, 1976)

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The precarious balance of the post-war yakuza society begins to crumble in Sadao Nakajima’s jitsuroku eiga, Operation Plazma in Osaka (実録外伝 大阪電撃作戦, Jitsuroku gaiden: Osaka dengeki sakusen). The Japanese title might more accurately be translated as “shock tactics in Osaka” which is a neat encapsulation of the turf war which arises when a larger gang from Kobe decides to muscle in and take over the city while a small upstart continues to agitate contemplating taking the whole prize for themselves. 

Inspired by a real life turf war which took place in Osaka in 1960, the film opens with classic jitsuroku voiceover revealing that a precarious balance had been held in the local underworld since the Meiji era in part because the city is simply too big to be ruled by any one gang. But times are changing, yakuza conglomerates are in style, and so it is that the Kawada gang mounts a largely political campaign to claim the city without bloodshed, as boss Yamaji (Akira Kobayashi) puts it, by convincing the smaller gangs to join up with them. According to the voiceover, however, it wasn’t Kawada that upset the balance but a small upstart group that came out of nowhere, Soryu. 

The screen then cuts to a map of Osaka, while the stills behind the credits feature the Tsuruhashi Market in Korea town. The thing about the Soryu group is that many of its leading members are ethnically Korean which sets them apart from most of the other mobsters in town. Even so, it’s hotheaded Yasuda (Hiroki Matsukata) that first gets them in trouble by getting into a fight with Takayama (Tsunehiko Watase) at a boxing match after climbing into the ring himself when the guy he bet on looks like he’s about to lose. This sets up a conflict between the Soryu and the Nanbara gang who run the boxing hall, but it never takes off because the recently released Daito suddenly announces that he’s bought the “Dance Hall” the ring is being run from and wants to turn it into a cabaret bar. It seems clear that someone’s backing Daito, but no one quite knows who. 

As Yamaji had said it would be, it starts of as a very modern silent war in which he slowly seduces various yakuza gangs convincing them that they’re stronger together with a slight note of join us or die. Yasuda and Takayama are two men who don’t like being told what to do and each end up exiled from their gangs thanks to their opposition to Kawada. Having failed to assassinate Yamaji, boss Nanbara pathetically rolls over and decides to join him instead while the Soryu gang is sent on the run leaving Yasuda and and Takayama to form an unlikely brotherhood brokered by Yasuda’s odd decision to gift his nightclub singer girlfriend to his sometime rival leaving Takayama permanently in his debt and touched by his selfless gesture.

Even by the standards of the jitsuroku, Operation Plazma in Osaka is rabidly misogynistic and often sleazy with an early scene seeing the Soryu gang cause trouble by stripping a hostess naked as one pours alcohol over her body and another drinks it from between her legs. Naked women are repeatedly fondled by fully clothed men, while nightclub singer Yoshiko (Yuko Katagiri) is treated largely as a pawn, a tool used to mediate the latent homoerotic desire between Yasuda and Takayama. Then again, everything in this world is extreme. The conflicted Miyatake (Tatsuo Umemiya) who had once tried to protect Takayama eventually tries to boil a man alive to get him to reveal Takayama’s location while Nakajima’s anarchic handheld camera desperately tries to keep up with the increasingly nihilistic violence. 

The resolution arrives not with death but total defeat, the traditional yakuza forced into submission by the corporatising giant with the survivors realising they will live the rest of their lives in subjugation making an “unconditional surrender” to changing times. Yasuda had claimed that the Soryu gang was a “free democracy” standing in opposition to the latent fascism of traditional gangsterdom which then finds its way into the corporate and the extreme hostile takeover Yamaji has just performed on the city of Osaka. Suddenly all that’s left of traditional yakuza is a pinkie in a jar, a grim a reminder of what happens when those in a position to resist back down in the face of an authoritarian power.

Velvet Hustler (紅の流れ星, Toshio Masuda, 1967)

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Perhaps overlooked in comparison with his better known contemporaries, Toshio Masuda was a bankable talent at Nikkatsu directing some of the studio’s biggest box office hits largely thanks to his long association with tentpole star Yujiro Ishihara. Nine years on from their collaborative debut Rusty Knife, however, times had perhaps begun to change. Featuring vibrant colour production design by Tokyo Drifter’s Takeo Kimura, a frequent Seijun Suzuki collaborator, 1967’s Velvet Hustler (紅の流れ星, Kurenai no Nagareboshi, AKA Like a Shooting Star) is a reworking of Masuda’s own Red Pier, itself inspired by Julien Duvivier’s 1937 French thriller Pepé le Moko, with Tetsuya Watari in the role originally filled by Ishihara. Apparently drawing inspiration from Godard’s Breathless, Velvet Hustler is a thoroughly post-modern retake, a parodic tale of gangster ennui and post-war emptiness in which rising economic prosperity has brought with it only despair. 

When we first meet petty gangster Goro (Tetsuya Watari), he’s coolly standing by, leaning on a fencepost like a bored gunslinger as he waits for the perfect getaway vehicle. Jumping into a fancy red convertible which it seems has already been stolen by the young man who parked it in this packed car park, the wires handily hanging striped and exposed, Goro barrels along the highway and and performs an infinitely efficient drive-by shooting on a rival gang boss. According to the man who hired him, Goro was only supposed to cause serious injury, not death, but as he points out if the guy insists on dying that’s hardly his problem. Taking his paycheque, Goro agrees to lie low in Kobe for the next six months after which his boss will come and get him. A year later, however, and he’s still there doing not much of anything, hanging out with the local kids and acting as a procurer dragging sailors on shore leave into gang-run clubs where Americans get into fights with Vietnamese émigrés. So desperate for escape are they that Goro’s underling even suggests they go to war, later thinking better of it when he remembers seeing horrific photos from the front.  

In a convenient but unsatisfying relationship with bar hostess Yukari (Kayo Matsuo), Goro explains that it’s not that he doesn’t like her, but he’s bored, “bored with fooling around with women”, but also of the business of living. The sun comes up, the sun goes down, and then it comes up again, every day all the same. His life has become completely meaningless and he has no idea what to do about it. He longs to go back to Tokyo, but is trapped in this strange Kobe limbo land, an end of the line sea port in which there is ironically no sense of escape. He doesn’t know it yet, but there’s a killer (Jo Shishido) on his trail, a killer who eventually reminds Goro that even if he kills him first another man will come. The bullets you fire are aimed squarely at yourself, Goro’s destiny is already set. There is only one way out of Kobe and it doesn’t lead back to Tokyo. 

Meanwhile, another possibility presents itself in the beautiful Keiko (Ruriko Asaoka), a temporary visitor from the capital looking for her missing fiancé presumed to have done a bunk with her father’s money. Keiko is a distinctly cool yet self-assured figure, generating an instant connection with the affable gangster at once reassured by a sympathetic mama-san that Goro is good but also warned that he’s still a yakuza and as such no good for a smart young woman like her. Keiko thinks that Tokyo is pretentious and boring, confused by Goro’s insistence on getting back there but like him perhaps in waiting. “I love you to death” she later ironically confesses while simultaneously insisting that men and women are different. There is no escape for her. Goro is tired of running but refuses to be handcuffed, choosing perhaps the only path to freedom presented to him. 

A nihilistic tale of gangster ennui in which life itself no longer has value, Velvet Hustler is a curiously cheerful affair despite its essential melancholy, Goro and Keiko sparring in a romantic war of attrition while he almost flirts with the dogged detective (Tatsuya Fuji) determined to bring him down. The kitschy production design gives way to Antonioni-esque shots of a strangely empty city while an ethereal sequence of dissolves eventually leaves the pair alone on the dance floor as if to imply their single moment of romance is but a brief dream of emotional escape. The trappings of post-war success are everywhere from Keiko’s elegant outfits to the cute red sports car and the weird club where Goro dad dances in front of his minions, not so much older than them but clearly out of place in this distinctly unhip seaside bar, but finally all there is is a dead end and an infinite emptiness the embrace of which is, perhaps, the only viable path to freedom. 

The Perfect Game (完全な遊戯, Toshio Masuda, 1958)

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In the mid-1950s, Nikkatsu had courted controversy with a series of films depicting the amoral excesses of the immediate post-war generation. The “Sun Tribe” movies embedded themselves in a world of new bright young things who were largely independently wealthy and thoroughly bored by the ease of their lives. Nikkatsu was forced to halt production on the Sun Tribe films after only three (Toho and Daiei added one each of their own), but they did precipitate a wholesale shift towards youth movies which became the studio’s signature theme. 

Best remembered for his contributions to Nikkatsu’s action noir, Toshio Masuda’s The Perfect Game (完全な遊戯, Kanzenna Yugi, AKA The Tragedy of Today) arrived two years after the Sun Tribe craze but neatly picked up the baton dropped by Kon Ichikawa’s Punishment Room in its tale of nihilistic college boy amorality. As the film opens, our four heroes are playing mahjong and lamenting their lack of funds. They are all, it goes without saying, middle class boys largely supported by their parents who, as far as we know, are high ranking salarymen. They are not hungry, or worrying about how to pay rent or tuition, they are just bored and want extra money to go out having fun before they they are forced into the corporate straightjacket with the regular salaryman jobs many of them already have in the bag thanks to the tremendous power of nepotism. 

As the the opening text implied, they viewed their money making exploits as a game, proving how clever they think they are in getting one over on the universe, but all too quickly it spirals out of control. Toda (Yasukiyo Umeno), the ring leader, has come up with an ingenious money making scheme. It turns out that there’s an illegal betting office some distance away from the bicycle racing stadium that keeps taking bets until someone rings from the track and tells them who won, which means there’s about a five minute delay between the winner being declared and bets being called. The boys figure that if they can somehow beat the lag they can win big. To make it work, they ask their “friend” Kazu (Masumi Okada), who they seem to regard as a bit dim, to join them as well as recruiting an old codger to call the race before the boards go up. Surprisingly it works out, but unfortunately the yakuza-backed bookmaker, Matsui (Ryoji Hayama), wasn’t banking on such a big win and doesn’t have the funds to pay out in one go. 

Toda in particular is pissed off. The wind taken out of his sails, he’s not sure what to do which is when So (Akira Kobayashi), the pretty boy of the group, suggests an ironic punishment. Matsui had joked that he’d put up his adorable kid sister Kyoko (Izumi Ashikawa) as collateral if he couldn’t pay out, so why don’t the boys take him at his word and kidnap her. Rewinding a little, these snotty college boys are about to become kidnappers, adding a little blackmail on the side. This isn’t a fun game anymore, someone is going to get hurt whatever happens even if they can’t know the extent to which their plan to earn a few bucks to blow on jazz bars and pool rooms is going to incur collateral damage. 

Unlike the boys, Kyoko is a working class girl. She wants to keep her head down and work hard, not quite approving of her brother’s involvement with the yakuza and wishing he’d find an honest job but also acknowledging that he had few options and it’s his job at the bookies that’s been keeping them all this time. Their father died in the war, and their mother (Yumi Takano) is very ill, bedridden with heart trouble. Kyoko is no innocent, she brushes off So’s attempts to court her by revealing that dozens of creepy guys try the same thing every day, and most of them don’t stop at passing notes. For whatever reason she ends up warming to him, making him take her to a theme park while her mother worries at home, while he also begins to feel conflicted about the plan in falling for her for real. 

So’s mistake is the childish belief that they’re still playing a game and everything will be alright in the end. He foolishly trusts that his friend’s are men of honour and that Matsui will come up with the money and redeem his sister in no time at all. But money’s not easy to come by even if you’re a yakuza, and the boys might not want it anyway if it comes with additional complications. Visiting with Kyoko’s sickly mother, he perhaps begins to see the gap between his comfortable existence and theirs of constant struggle. He’d been so proud to tell Kyoko that he had an interview lined up at a big company because of family connections, but when he arrives there he feels irrelevant. The interview board only ask him questions about his dad, as if he didn’t really exist. Finally they ask him to talk about what he did at uni, what his “passions” are, if he did anything of note in the past few years, perhaps even fall in love? They’ve unwittingly touched a nerve, but So is in any case forced to reflect on the meaninglessness not only of his adolescence, but of his future. This interview has been a farce, but they’re giving him the job anyway because he’s his father’s son. What more is there to say?

The other boys are also worried about their job prospects, concerned that someone might talk and they’ll be forever tarnished by “youthful exuberance”, refusing to take any personal responsibility for the consequences of their “perfect game”. Unlike So they still want to live in that inherently unfair world which exists for upperclass men to do as they please. Toda and So weren’t quite like their friends. They felt conflicted. Toda embarrassed to be borrowing money from his girlfriend but rejecting the others’ belief that you don’t have to pay women back, only to angrily bark at her that there’s “no way a woman can understand” the intensely masculine debate he’s just had with So about responsibility, which he accepted by deflecting in pushing So’s complicity back on him in an attempt to share his guilt. Unlike the Sun Tribe films, youth takes responsibility for itself and its friends, but can find no way to atone for its moral abnegation. 

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Rusty Knife (錆びたナイフ, Toshio Masuda, 1958)

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rusty knife posterPost-war Japan was in a precarious place but by the mid-1950s, things were beginning to pick up. Unfortunately, this involved picking up a few bad habits too – namely, crime. The yakuza, as far as the movies went, were largely a pre-war affair – noble gangsters who had inherited the codes of samurai honour and were (nominally) committed to protecting the little guy. The first of many collaborations between up and coming director Toshio Masuda and the poster boy for alienated youth, Yujiro Ishihara, Rusty Knife (錆びたナイフ, Sabita Knife) shows us the other kind of movie mobster – the one that would stick for years to come. These petty thugs have no honour and are symptomatic parasites of Japan’s rapidly recovering economy, subverting the desperation of the immediate post-war era and turning it into a nihilistic struggle for total freedom from both laws and morals.

Public support is, largely, behind this new force of order as seen in the local uproar when top gangster Katsumata (Naoki Sugiura) is arrested in connection with an assault. Things being what they are, Katsumata is soon released to laugh at law enforcement from a safe distance but the past is coming for him. Some years ago Katsumata killed a local councillor, Nishida (Ikunosuke Koizumi), and made it look like suicide but three guys from a local gang saw him do it. He paid them to keep quiet, but now one of them feels like talking and thinks Katsumata might like to pay a little more to reseal the deal.

Chatty Tokyo thug Shima (Jo Shishido) gets pushed off a train for his pains but Katsumata is worried enough about the other two to send his guys out to make some enquires. He’s particularly worried about Tachibana (Yujiro Ishihara) – a “sleeping lion”, Tachibana is a hot head who’s now gone straight after coming out of jail for murdering a guy he thought was a direct cause of his girlfriend’s death. Luckily enough, Tachibana now runs a bar where he employs the other witness, Terada (Akira Kobayashi), to whom he acts as a stern big brother hoping to keep them both on the straight and narrow. Tachibana is unlikely to talk, he wants out of the gangster world for good, but Terada is young and ambitious with a girlfriend to impress. He takes more hush money from Katsumata, not realising what he’s getting himself into, and then lets it go to his head.

Tachibana is the rusty knife of the title. After letting his rage consume him in murdering a petty mobster in revenge for the rape of his girlfriend who later committed suicide, Tachibana has vowed to quell his anger and live a decent, peaceful life. Angry outbursts are, however, never far from the surface and following recent revelations, a rusty knife may find its cutting edge once again.

Keiko (Mie Kitahara), a customer at Tachibana’s bar, is making a documentary about violence in the city which coincidentally turns up a few clues as to Tachibana’s past, not to mention her own. The daughter of the murdered councilman, Nishida, and the niece of another powerful politician, Keiko is a figure of righteousness, charting her own course through the difficult post-war world and attempting to do so with dignity and elegance while refusing to abandon her sense of decency and compassion. Later a real life married couple, Kitahara and Ishihara were a frequent on screen romantic pairing though this time around the connection is more subtle as Keiko begins to sympathise with Tachibana’s plight and commits herself to saving him from destroying himself in becoming consumed by his barely suppressed rage.

Tachibana is indeed raging, though his rage is understandable. As someone later puts it “nothing in this city makes sense”. The systems are corrupt, the wartime generation continue to run the show and run it badly, or at least for their own ends, robbing youth of its rightful place at the forefront of economic recovery. Yet even if Ishihara is a symbol of youthful alienation, his rage is one which must be quelled. Even in this city where nothing makes sense, self control is one’s greatest weapon. If youth is to walk forward into the exciting post-war future, it will have to drop its rusty knives.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Aesthetics of a Bullet (鉄砲玉の美学, Sadao Nakajima, 1973)

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aesthetics of a bullet1973 is the year the ninkyo eiga died. Or that is to say, staggered off into an alleyway clutching its stomach and vowing revenge whilst simultaneously seeking forgiveness from its beloved oyabun after being cruelly betrayed by the changing times! You might think it was Kinji Fukasaku who turned traitor and hammered the final nail into the coffin of Toei’s most popular genre, but Sadao Nakajima helped ram it home with the riotous explosion of proto-punk youth movie and jitsuroku-style naturalistic look at the pettiness and squalor inherent in the yakuza life – Aesthetics of a Bullet (鉄砲玉の美学, Teppodama no Bigaku). This tale of a small time loser playing the supercool big shot with no clue that he’s a sacrificial pawn in a much larger power struggle is one that has universal resonance despite the unpleasantness of its “hero”.

Kiyoshi Koike is a former chef with a gambling problem and a living room full of rabbits that he bought hoping to sell as pets but his sales patter could use some work and the business is not exactly taking off. Getting violent with his girlfriend after borrowing money from her to play mahjong and then getting annoyed when she doesn’t seem keen to lend him more to change his rabbit business into a dog business, Kiyoshi is at an impasse. So, when the local gangsters are looking for a patsy they can send into enemy territory as a “bullet” Kiyoshi’s name is high on the list. They need someone “hotblooded, must have daredevil courage, when he flips he should make a huge racket” – Kiyoshi more than fits the bill, and more to the point he has no idea what he’s doing.

Given a large amount of money and a gun, Kiyoshi gets a haircut and buys some fancy suits to play his part as a super cool gangster who doesn’t take any shit from anyone. He goes around telling everyone his name and gang affiliation very loudly, waving his pistol and acting like a big shot despite the fact he obviously has no name and no reputation. The plan is he fires his gun, gets killed, his gang swoop in for a gang war and wipe out the opposition. Only, when Kiyoshi gets too invested in his part and beats up a rival gangster, the local boss apologises and offers him a knife to make things even with the guy who just disrespected him…

If he fires his gun, it’s game over but what exactly is keeping his finger off the trigger – fear, or self preservation? Either way, Kiyoshi is way over his head in a game he never understood in the first place.

This is no ninkyo eiga. There’s no nobility here, these men are animals with no humanity let alone a pretence of honour. Kiyoshi is a loser, through and through, but once the gun is in his hand he transforms into something else. The gun becomes an extension of himself, a symbol of his new found gangster hero status. A fancy suit and a fire arm are handy props for a method actor but the performance only runs so deep, what is Kiyoshi now, a man, or a bullet?

Whatever he is, he’s no hero. In his untransformed state he violently beat his girlfriend whom he also forced to work as a prostitute, and even after getting the gun he witnesses a woman being gang raped yet appears to be more amused than anything else. He ends up getting into a fight with the other two guys waiting for their go and seems to feel heroic after the woman gets away but his intention was never to rescue her. Indeed, bumping into her again he makes a clumsy attempt at subtle blackmail though she gets a kind of revenge on him in the end. Even his “romantic” encounter with the glamorous former photo model girlfriend of the rival gang boss ends with a bizarre sex game in which he makes her get on all fours and bark like a dog.

When the time comes, Kiyoshi can’t contemplate the idea of returning to his old loser self and is fixated on reaching the peak of Kirishima which is said to be the place where the gods descended to Earth. When the bullet finally emerges, it heads in the wrong direction. Self inflicted wounds are the name of the game as an aesthetically pleasing, poetic end to this tragic story follows the only trajectory available for a classic yakuza fable.

After beginning with a montage of people sloppily eating junk food set against a proto-punk rock song dedicated to the idea of living the way you please and not letting anyone get in your way, the film contrasts the independent, non-conformist yakuza ideal of total freedom with Kiyoshi’s lowly status in an increasingly consumerist environment. The yakuza life would indeed prove a passport for a man like Kiyoshi to jump into the mainstream, but this fantasy world is one that cannot last and one way or another the curtain must fall on this expensive piece of advanced performance art.

Aesthetics of a Bullet has, like its hero, been abandoned on the roadside. Whereas the Battles Without Honour series has become a landmark of the yakuza genre, Aesthetics of a Bullet has never even received a home video release in Japan and has received barely a mention even the histories of ATG movies. This is surprising as its noir style and art house approach ought to have made it one of ATG’s more commercially viable releases even with its sleazy, nihilistic tone. Opting for a more naturalistic approach, Nakajima nevertheless breaks the action with expressionistic sequences as Kiyoshi fantasises a glorious death for himself, climaxes through gunshot, or remembers the student riots through a blue tinted sequence of still photographs. A complex yet beautifully made, genre infused character piece, Aesthetics of a Bullet is a long lost classic and one in urgent need of reappraisal.

Title sequence and first scene (unsubtitled)

Outlaw: Gangster VIP the Complete Collection

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outlaw gangster collectionReview of the Outlaw: Gangster VIP the Complete Collection dual format box set from Arrow Films first published by UK Anime Network.

There are two distinct eras of yakuza movies in Japan – the “ninkyo eiga” strand of traditional, noble gangsters acting out of a sense of loyalty and honour and the “jitsuroku” approach exemplified by Kinji Fukasaku’s Battles Without Honour and Humanity series which sought to show yakuza life for what it was – short, bloody and ultimately pointless. The Outlaw series provides a perfect bridge between the two as it’s based on the true life memoirs of former yakuza Goro Fujita but opts for a genre hybrid by essentially reframing the popular youth movies of the day as gangster noir rather than the down and dirty naturalism of Fukasaku’s magnum opus.

The Outlaw series consists of six films though only the first two are in direct continuity with each other. Gangster VIP 1 & 2 begin the saga of noble hearted gangster Goro who was orphaned when his mother died of illness during the war leaving him to look after his younger sister who also later dies either of illness or of malnutrition becoming the first of the women Goro is unable to save. He ends up a street kid and is eventually sent to reform school from where he escapes with an older boy, Sugiyama, who later resurfaces as a member of a rival gang in Part 1. These two films also chronicle Goro’s ongoing romance with the innocent Yukiko who falls in love with him after he saves her from a gang of thugs.

However, after Gangster VIP 2, the series has little internal continuity and the saga of Goro and Yukiko falls silent. This is actually a little confusing as many of the actors from the other films in the series frequently turn up playing entirely different characters, not least Chieko Matsubara who plays Goro’s love interest in every film but is actually a similarly named yet entirely different woman each time even if she also has a very similar backstory to that of Yukiko in the very first film.

Each chapter follows the same basic pattern – Goro gets out of prison/moves/goes looking for someone and ends up getting into trouble with the local gangsters despite his intense desire to leave the yakuza world behind. The chance of salvation is always offered in the form of Chieko Matsubara who plays exactly the same character each time even though she has different names and falls in love with Goro a little quicker with each passing frame. Goro is the noble hearted wanderer so he always opts to sacrifice his own potential happiness rather than get other people mixed up in his bloody and unpredictable gangster world.

The first few films in the series are more deeply rooted in the post-war past with the major theme being the loss of family and the yakuza providing a home for those otherwise without hope. Having been orphaned and left to starve on the streets, cruelly ignored by passersby and the society at large, men like Goro were forced to form associations with each other for survival and to turn to crime through lack of other options. Given the perilousness of their times, even the yakuza brotherhood is uncertain and these relationships are hollow and ever changing – a far cry from the unconditional love and support supposedly offered by the traditional family unit.

Moving on slightly, the series grows up with Goro as he moves form lamenting his rootless nature to an inability to put down roots for himself as he knows that his dangerous lifestyle is not something he wants to bring a wife, and particularly children, into. Things never end well for the married yakuza in these films who often see their wives or girlfriends kidnapped, raped or used against them in some other way and the overriding message is that love is both a weakness and an irresponsible indulgence for those who live or die by the sword.

The series features three different directors with Red Pier director Toshio Masuda helming the first which is perhaps the most accomplished even if Masuda is often criticised for not having a distinctive style of his own. Keiichi Ozawa picks up for parts 2, 4, 5, and 6 which each more or less follow the style laid out by Masuda though he does add in a few flourishes of his own including a very groovy showdown in a contemporary nightclub in the final film. Part three, Heartless, is directed by Mio Ezaki and is perhaps the weakest in the series though does at least break with the style and direction a little more than might be expected whilst adding a few thrills along the way.

The Outlaw series has perhaps not been fully appreciated outside Japan but now hopefully will be thanks to this excellently put together set from Arrow. The series as a whole feels a little safe at times and often pulls its punches where it had the opportunity to push for something with more bite but its doom laded tale of a noble gangster with a ruined heart is the kind of effortless, nihilistic cool that is hard to beat. Another excellent offering of Nikkatsu Noir mixed with existential youth movie and yakuza trappings, the Outlaw series is a long overdue addition to the world of Japanese action movies and one that every genre enthusiast will be eager to explore.

Outlaw: Gangster VIP the Complete Collection is currently available in a region free dual format Blu-ray/DVD box set in both the US and UK.

Trailer for the series as a whole:

Links to reviews of all six films:

Nikkatsu Diamond Guys Vol. 1

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nikkatsudg_av037Review of Arrow’s Nikkatsu Diamond Guys Volume 1 first published on UK Anime Network.

“Diamond Guys” is the name given to the top line of A-list stars at Japan’s oldest film studio Nikkatsu during their period of relaunching themselves as a major production house during the 1950s. At this time, Japanese studios, like their Hollywood counterparts, worked largely on a star system where they held a number of actors and actresses under contract and slotted them into their productions as and where they saw fit. Of the three stars in these pictures, Yujiro Ishihara perhaps burned brightest as a James Dean style apathetic hero and icon of the “sun tribe” era. Hideaki Nitani ultimately carved a niche for himself as a second lead rather than in starring roles and is a little more on the soulful side than the other guys. Akira Kobayashi who’s still fairly young here is probably the most familiar to overseas audiences later starring in a number of gangster pictures including Arrow’s previous releases Retaliation and the Battles Against Honour and Humanity series.

The first film included in the set, Voice Without a Shadow, is a notable inclusion as it’s a little seen, early effort from the notorious master of the surreal, Seijun Suzuki. In a significantly restrained mood here, Suzuki adapts a Seicho Matsumoto short story with noirish overtones as a telephone switchboard operator accidentally connects a wrong number and unwittingly hears the voice of a murderer at a crime scene. Hideaki Nitani plays a conflicted reporter who’s fallen in love with the switchboard operator who is, alas, already engaged. Three years later she hears the voice again in a gangster her husband unwisely becomes involved with only to have him killed and her husband become the prime suspect.

Film number two, Red Pier, comes from Toshio Masuda and stars pinup of the day Yujiro Ishihara in a characteristically cheeky, nihilistic gangster role. Dressed in a bright white suit and sunglasses, “Jiro the Lefty” is a petty yakuza street kid who found a home in a gang but dreams of a better life somewhere else. After witnessing the strange death of a potential target who gets crushed by a crane at the docks, Jiro ends up meeting the man’s sister and, of course, falls for her. Unfortunately, just about everyone now has it in for Jiro and his happily ever after seems very far off indeed.

The Rambling Guitarist, by contrast, is the only film in the collection to be filmed in colour but makes fantastic use of its super bright, psychedelic look. Starring Akira Kobayashi as a drifter with a guitar, the film starts out like a western but ends as a yakuza pic with a little youth drama thrown in for good measure. It’s fighting, music, and gunplay with Jo Shishido lending grinning support as a late addition hitman.

In some senses each of these films was built around its star – men want to be them, women want to be with them, you get the picture. The Rambling Guitarist is sort of the odd one out here as it’s of a slightly different strand than the other two with a lighter emphasis on crime and a shift from noir to western in terms of its overseas influences. Both Voice Without a Shadow and Red Pier lean much more towards film noir with Red Pier leaning a little more towards Europe than America. That said, The Rambling Guitarist is perhaps the weakest film on offer simply because of its up to the moment youth orientation which leaves it feeling a little more dated than the other two which can rely on their more classical style to find a modern appeal.

Each of these little seen gems would have been worthy of a solo buy in any case but finding them all offered in this fantastic new package from Arrow is a real treat. Each offered in stunning HD re-masters on blu-ray, even if they show their age in a couple of places the transfers are particularly fine and are likely to be the best these films will ever look. The Nikkatsu films from this era offered crowd pleasing thrills and good looking actors, but they were often also made by interesting directors who injected a little of their own individual, often youthful, flair to lift them well above the generic genre movies also on offer. That isn’t to say that each of their pictures was a smash hit, but the three on offer as part of this set are certainly each worthy of consideration even if for quite different reasons and if the included trailers for Vol. 2 are anything to go by we have even more undiscovered gems to look forward to in the future!

Nikkatsu Diamond Guys Volume 1 is out now on dual format DVD/blu-ray in the UK and USA courtesy of Arrow.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4AUqrF38gQ

 

Red Pier (赤い波止場, Toshio Masuda, 1958)

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Snapshot-2016-01-24 at 11_01_43 PM-1747507265Loosely inspired by Julian Duvivier’s 1937 gangster movie Pépé le Moko, Toshio Masuda’s Red Pier (赤い波止場, Akai Hatoba) was designed as a vehicle for Nikkatsu’s rising star of the time, Yujiro Ishihara – later to become the icon of the Sun Tribe generation. On paper it sounds like a fairly conventional plot – young turk of a gangster comes to town to off a guy, sees said guy killed in an “accident”, and shrugs it off as one of life’s little ironies only to accidentally become acquainted with and fall head over heals for the dead guy’s sister. So far, so film noir yet Masuda adds enough of his own characteristic touches to keep things interesting.

“Jiro the Lefty” (Yujiro Ishihara) is a sharp looking petty yakuza type in a bright white suit and sunglasses. Another of Japan’s post-war abandoned street kids, he found a home in a gang and has never known anything one could call a “normal” way of life. Other than his obvious talent with a gun, he has a cheerful and ironic personality that has him even almost respected by the police and is generally well liked in the area.

Early on Jiro rescues a little boy from almost being hit by a car and later when playing the harmonica for him gets hit by a thunderbolt of love when catching sight of the boy’s aunt, Keiko (Mie Kitahara). This causes him several problems at once: to begin with, she’s the sister of the guy he saw get hit by a crane and she doesn’t seem to know her brother was a gangster, two – Keiko is obviously of a much higher social class and a little out of his reach even if he managed to go straight, three – he can’t go straight, he doesn’t know how to do anything else, four – Mami, his current nightclub dancer “girlfriend” who’s invested a little more in the relationship than he has. Actually this is only the start of a long list of problems Jiro has to deal with, he just doesn’t know about them yet.

The story is set around the docks of Kobe where the living is hard and life is cheap. The local policeman is a fairly laid-back, ironic chap who’s made an odd sort of friendship with Jiro wherein he doesn’t really want to see anything too bad happen to him. He can see this thing with Keiko is not a very good idea and is constantly lurking in the shadows trying to control the situation as much as he can. Jiro, doesn’t know it yet but his own guys are out to get him too and after one of his sworn brothers ends up paying the price for Jiro’s rising profile in the yakuza world, he finds himself on the run from pretty much everyone.

This sounds like quite a complicated set up but Masuda manages to martial everything into a coherent order and even adds a hearty dose of realistic emotion too. As far as the aesthetic goes, Masuda takes his cues from American film noir with harsh lighting and canted angles all employed to show us the crookedness of this underground world but he also makes sure to add occasional touches of artistic flair such as the light bouncing off Jiro’s sunglasses during a night time cab ride or the sheer shock on Ishihara’s face as he first sees Keiko framed against the bright sunshine of Kobe’s harbour.

The too noble for his own good gangster who wants to go straight but knows he has a crooked heart – it’s an old story, but a good one. Red Pier pushes a lot of these ideas to the max but handles them well and adds a traditional “crime doesn’t pay” ending which is both endlessly sad and completely appropriate at the same time. You can’t help feel for Jiro and his small scale existential crisis in which the reluctant gangster wants to jump ship for more peaceful climes but can’t for both personal and societal reasons. Red Pier may not be the best Masuda/Ishihara collaboration but it is certainly an excellent example of everything its genre has to offer.

Red Pier is the Second film included in Arrow’s Nikkatsu Diamond Guys Vol. 1 collection.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JppZs7c9AIY