Tag: Tsutomu Harada

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)

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.

Village of Eight Gravestones (八つ墓村, Yoshitaro Nomura, 1977)

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Can a curse end up being “real” just because people believe in it? Unlike many of his other crime films which were adapted from the novels of Seicho Matsumoto, Yoshitaro Nomura’s The Village of the Eight Gravestones (八つ墓村, Yatsuhaka-mura) edges towards the idea that the curse at its centre is real in a more literal sense with grimly grinning samurai standing on their hilltop and rejoicing in the fulfilment of the 400-year campaign of vengeance, but also hints at a toxic legacy of enmity and warfare along with a karmic sensibility found in many of Seishi Yokomizo’s other mysteries in which a noble family must account for the way it gained its riches. 

In this case, the Tajimi family which now owns most of the village became prosperous after betraying a band of eight displaced samurai during the Sengoku era. Fleeing the battlefield in defeat, the samurai had originally frightened the villagers when they came down off the mountain but were in actuality non-threatening, simply settling down to a life of farming and peaceful co-existence. But some members of the community became greedy and accepted the promises of riches from a rival clan for the service of eliminating the eight samurai. Cruelly inviting them to the local festival in what seemed like a moment of acceptance as members of the village, they betrayed them killing some by poison and others by the sword. 

Now, hundreds of years later, the Tajimi family is on the verge of extinction with the eldest daughter unable to bear children and the oldest son bedridden and soon to die which explains why they’re keen to track down long lost grandson Tatsuya Terada (Kenichi Hagiwara) who was presumably adopted by his stepfather and bears his name after his now deceased mother Teruko left the family to escape her abusive relationship with half-mad husband Yozo (Tsutomu Yamazaki). Surprisingly, it’s his maternal grandfather Ushimatsu Igawa (Yoshi Kato), who comes looking for him only to drop dead as soon as they meet of apparently strychnine poisoning in the first of several murders that all echo the ancestral curse placed upon the Tajimi family by samurai leader Yoshitaka Amako (Isao Natsuyagi) as he died. 

Like many of Nomura’s films this too features a journey only this one is in a sense into the past as Tatsuya ventures to the rural heart of Japan hoping to see his mother’s birthplace and satiate his curiosity about his birth father. What he discovers there is obviously a lot of what seems like unfounded local superstition along with a degree of unpleasant stigmatisation as he’s immediately accosted by a shamaness who calls him a murderer to his face for his connections with the Tajimis to whom he feels himself a stranger, and then is later blamed for all the weird goings on which only began after he arrived. The film uproots itself from the original 1948 setting to the present day which perhaps lessens the impact of its central theme about the legacy of violence and betrayal that is stoked by war and enmity along with the destructive capacity of human greed that encourages some to betray others for their own advancement only to discover that success founded on human sacrifice will never get you very far. 

Ironically in a more real world sense, it turns out to be greed that motivates these present crimes with the villain hoping to usurp the Tajimi family fortune and utilising the curse as a means to do so. Much of the action takes place in a network of underground caves filled with glowing green lakes where the villain eventually takes on demonic proportions, face ghostly white with yellowish eyes and a crazed expression that echoes those of the samurai as they died. Nomura hints at the sense of ancient dread in this very old place while also surprisingly bloody in his flashbacks which feature scenes of shocking violence including severed heads one of which seems to lick its lips and stare intently even while on display. This being a Kindaichi (Kiyoshi Atsumi) mystery, the famous detective does indeed appear though remains a background presence quietly solving the crime behind the scenes while Tatsuya searches for the key to his own history and an escape from this legacy of violence and destruction in reclaiming his own identity.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Terror in the Streets (悪魔が呼んでいる, Michio Yamamoto, 1970)

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How much bad luck can one person have before they start thinking someone’s out to get them? Released as part of double bill with The Vampire Doll and based on a novel by Kikuo Tsunoda, Terror in the Streets (悪魔が呼んでいる, Akuma ga Yondeiru) draws inspiration from contemporary folk horror and the paranoia thriller as one young woman finds herself in the crosshairs of mysterious forces seemingly hellbent on derailing her otherwise very ordinary and aspirational existence. 

Yuri (Wakako Sakai) worries that her status as an orphan has set her back in life, attributing her inability to find permanent employment after managing to put herself through university by working as tutor to a societal stigma against people with no families. Up to now, things had been going pretty well. Though she was only a temp, she had a good gig as office admin staff at big company in the city, lived in a modest but homely flat complete with a small television, and was dating her college sweetheart. But then one day her boss looks at her with an odd expression and then abruptly drops the bombshell that he’s terminating her contract without offering a reason why. When Yuri calls her boyfriend he gives her the same look and says he’s breaking up with her, also refusing to give any kind of explanation aside from not wanting to see her anymore. If all that weren’t enough, her landlady then explains that someone else is very interested in her flat and will pay double for it so she wants Yuri out by the end of the month. 

It’s undoubtedly been quite a bad day, but Yuri tries to stay upbeat reflecting that she didn’t particularly like the job anyway and intends to apply for a position as an editor on literary magazine which would suit her better. But after that nothing quite goes to plan and everything she tries to improve her situation backfires until she finally considers taking her own life at railway crossing only to be rescued by a mysterious man, Fujimura (Takashi Fujiki), who appears as her saviour but then convinces her to take some kind of pill to calm her nerves which predictably leaves her dazed and confused. He then takes her back to her apartment and claims they’re legally married, but when Yuri wakes up the following morning he’s dead with a knife in his chest. 

It’s not the first time that Yuri has experienced an apparent gap in her memory which causes her re-evaluate her sense of reality. She’s beginning to feel as if something or someone is out to get her, realising that Fujimura was the same sinister man she’d caught sight of before staring into her window. Meanwhile, she often hears a strange tune played on an ocarina that sounds like a medieval fugue. The film’s Japanese title is “the Devil calls” and it’s not a huge stretch to assume that Yuri’s been caught up in some kind of dark magic or supernatural curse, yet it’s also the collision of outdated and feudalistic notions of class and patriarchy that have her in their clutches. All of these weird men seemingly want to marry her or at least make her theirs with less than romantic overtures while chief among her aggressors Katagiri (Hideji Otaki) describes himself as an Earl and insists that noble blood is the most valuable thing in the world.

But far as she knows Yuri has no noble blood and is alone and friendless as an orphan with only a “distant relative” she mentions in passing who does not live in Tokyo. She has in effect been made a pawn in a cruel and ironic game played by a distant aristocracy which makes sport of the innocent and powerless by wielding the privileges of wealth and class. The only way she can escape is by renouncing her claim on its legacy, declaring herself uninterested in their games or rewards while ceding the prize to another woman who seems to have been driven out of her mind by a similar series of torments that may have lasted her entire adult life. Yamamoto films the contemporary city in an eerie light, a place of greed and darkness inhabited by sinister and shady forces that prey on the innocent and earnest like Yuri but then there is something to be said for the idea that in the end you can’t con an honest man and Yuri’s pure hearted rejection of unearned wealth just might be her salvation.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

The Devil’s Ballad (悪魔の手毬唄, Kon Ichikawa, 1977)

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Devil's Ballad posterA year after his box office smash The Inugami Family, Kon Ichikawa returns to the world of eccentric detective Kosuke Kindaichi with The Devil’s Ballad (悪魔の手毬唄, Akuma no Temari Uta). Like many a Kindaichi mystery, Devil’s Ballad finds him called upon to delve back into the past to satisfy an ageing detective’s anxiety about an old case, only to be faced with a series of new ones as a consequence. This time, however, the mystery leans less on buried secrets than deeply held grudges, betrayals, and lingering feudal feuds as the post-war society tries and fails to free itself from ancient oppressions.

The film opens with a tryst between two adolescent lovers in the ominously named “Devil’s Skull Village” in 1950. Yasu (Yoko Takahashi), the girl, is at pains to let her boyfriend, Kanao (Koji Kita), know that she is keen to take the relationship to the next level but he is old fashioned and wants to wait until their union is formalised. The pair are interrupted by some of their friends who are in the middle of planning a celebration for a visit from a girl who moved to the city, Chie (Akiko Nishina). Meanwhile, Kindaichi (Koji Ishizaka) has arrived at the inn owned by Kanao’s mother Rika (Keiko Kishi) on invitation from a retired policeman, Isokawa (Tomisaburo Wakayama), who wants Kindaichi to look into the murder of Rika’s husband twenty years ago. Isokawa, then a young rookie, is convinced that Rika’s husband was not the victim but the murderer and the corpse actually belonged to another man entirely – Onda, a drifter who defrauded half the village with a wreath making scam.

Rika and her children – 20-year-old Kanao and his younger sister Satoko (Eiko Nagashima) who has prominent facial birthmarks and rarely leaves the house, came to the village with her husband and are therefore slightly divorced from the longstanding social rivalries. The village has two noble families – the Yuras and the Nires. Feeling the need to modernise, the Nires bet everything on vineyards and it paid off. The Yuras, by contrast, were defrauded by Onda’s wreath scam and lost their fortune and social standing. Yasu, Kanao’s girlfriend, is a daughter of the Yuras, but the Nire’s have been petitioning Rika for quite some time to have her son marry their daughter, Fumiko (Yukiko Nagano), who also has a crush on him (though this is largely irrelevant to her father’s dynastic ambitions). When the younger generation start getting bumped off in ways eerily similar to a local folk song, Kindaichi and Isokawa are on the case, wondering if these new murders have anything to do with their old one.

Despite its 1950 setting, Devil’s Ballad is unusual in resolutely making an irrelevance of the war which only receives a brief mention as an explanation for why some of the case files have been destroyed and for why marriage is such a hot button issue given the lack of men and abundance of women. Nevertheless, the crimes span a turbulent 20 years of Japanese history with the original murder taking place in the early ‘30s during a period of economic instability following the Manchurian Incident. In the socially conservative pre-war era, it seems Onda also got around and may have fathered several illegitimate children with women in the village, some of them noble, some not. These buried secrets seem primed to bubble to the surface now that the children are coming of age and marriage again becomes an issue as worried parents try to think of acceptable ways to block potentially “inappropriate” matches without sending their children off into ruinous elopements or tipping off the wrong people that their kids may not be their kids.

The crimes themselves, old fashioned as they are, are partly reactions to a changing society. We discover that the reason Rika and her husband were forced to come back to the village was that their showbiz careers were stalling – she was a vaudeville performer specialising in shamisen, and he a “benshi” (narrator of silent films) who became convinced his job was obsolete after witnessing a subtitled print of Morocco. Likewise, the two rival families cannot let go of their petty provincial privileges, and as Kanao angrily snaps back at his mother, Japan is now a democratic country and he is free to choose his own wife at a time of his own choosing with or without parental blessing. This remote village is perhaps isolated from the privations of the post-war world but it’s also stuck in the past, hung up on past transgressions and unable to move forward into the new era. However, the primary motivations for murder are as old as time – guilt, humiliation, and self preservation.

Ichikawa keeps things simple but splices in a few strange, avant-garde sequences of kokeshi dolls menacingly bouncing balls coupled with shifts to black and white, fast-paced reaction shots, and stuttering still frame sequences all while Kindaichi showers innocent passersby with his famous dandruff, the idiot police officer continues to offer ridiculous theories while his sergeant dutifully follows him around, and the local bobby perfects a line in hilarious pratfalls. Overlong at two and a half hours and falling prey to the curse of the prestige crime drama in spoiling its mystery through casting, the Devil’s Ballad may not be the best of the Kindaichi mysteries but offers enough of a satisfying twist to prove worthy of the Kindaichi name.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

The Most Dangerous Game (最も危険な遊戯, Toru Murakawa, 1978)

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the most dangerousThe late Yusaku Matsuda remains an ultra cool pop culture icon thirty years after his death and forty after his reign as the action king of Japanese cinema. Though there were several other contenders for the crown – Sonny Chiba, or the tough guy yakuza stars Ken Takakura and Bunta Sugawara, to name but a few, it’s Matsuda’s intense screen presence which continues to endure as an example of mid-1970s extreme masculinity. This image was in large part created through his work with director Toru Murakawa in roles inspired by hardboiled novelist Haruhiko Oyabu in Resurrection of the Golden Wolf and The Beast Must Die, but before that it was the “Game” trilogy which helped to make his name.

The first of these, The Most Dangerous Game (最も危険な遊戯, Mottomo Kikenna Yuugi), introduces us to Narumi (Yusaku Matsuda) – a sleazy hitman with a gambling problem who is capable of pulling off the most daring and precise of hits but remains a disaster outside of his working life. After losing a mahjong game and getting roughed up by gangsters, Narumi gets a job offer from an arms company currently vying for a large government contract to develop a Star Wars-style air defence system. As reported in the news, a number of top CEOs are being kidnapped for ransom thanks to a plot by the Godai Conglomerate. The Tonichi Corporation want Narumi to rescue their kidnapped employee, Nanjo (Masanori Irie), who also happens to be the son-in-law of CEO Kohinata (Asao Uchida).

Unlike the later Resurrection of the Golden Wolf or The Beast Must Die, the corporate conspiracy and shady government military project are merely background and never really dealt with in any further detail. Nevertheless, it appears Narumi has got himself involved in a much darker world than even he is used to. Kohinata claimed to want to save Nanjo because of their familial connection, but as it turns out he doesn’t really care so much about his daughter’s husband as he does about wiping out the Godai and getting the lucrative government contract all to himself. He’s even willing to pay Narumi twice for doing the same job, but then perhaps he’s not really looking to pay at all. Conspiracy may extend further than just the corporate realm.

Narumi makes for a strange “hero”. His very 1970s bachelor pad is a monument to sleaze with its prominent topless pinups displayed like precious artwork in his living room and his well stocked personal bar – a strange thing to have when it’s clear he does not entertain many visitors. Dancing around with his gun and posing topless in front of the mirror Taxi Driver-style implies perhaps he’s not so confident with his chosen profession yet he’s clearly well known enough to get a phone call out of the blue from the Tonichi Corp. Despite his rather pathetic attitude at the mahjong game and equally pathetic exit after falling asleep during a lap dance at a sex parlour, Narumi’s professional exterior is one of infinite capability and powerful masculinity.

Yet, like many films of the era Narumi’s masculinity is also intensely misogynistic. Gangster’s moll Kyoko (Keiko Tasaka) becomes an unlikely (and inconvenient) love interest after Narumi tries to use her to bait her boyfriend. Lying in wait in Kyoko’s apartment, he surprises her coming out of the shower while she is half naked and vulnerable. She tries to escape, he stops her, phone’s the boyfriend, and begins raping her so that the gangsters can hear her distress over the phone. Kyoko stops struggling and apparently gets into the groove, falling instantly in love with Narumi’s awesome love making skills and following him back to his apartment where she stays for the rest of the film.

Nevertheless Matsuda is presented as the epitome of cool, unshaken by danger and always coming out on top with enough time to strike a pose as he takes down a target with automatic precision. Murakawa’s approach is of its time but leaning towards arthouse rather than Toei’s unusual brand of action cinema. Its vistas are noirish but filled with 70s paranoid claustrophobia while the hopeless, melancholy jazz score by Yuji Ohno adds to the moody hardboiled aesthetic. An exercise in style, The Most Dangerous Game is as cynical as they come but its wry commentary and occasional fits of gleeful comedy lift it above both the B-movie silliness of other contemporary action movies and the dour seriousness of later Matsuda/Murakawa collaborations.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0arB-GItuvw