Red Peony Gambler & Red Peony Gambler 2 - Gambler's Obligation

As is traditional in longer running Japanese movie serials, the second part is much better than the first, unless you got a thing for origin stories.
The Red Peony Gambler films are ninkyo eiga with the exciting twist that the honest yakuza hero is actually (gasp) a woman, played by Junko Fuji, wandering all over Japan, righting wrongs by being incredibly virtuous and incredibly good at killing people.
Part one is very watchable, very solid and entertaining enough, but without any real sparks. And letting Ken Takakura do what he always does (be tragic, kill evildoers, die in the last scene) distracts a little too much from our actual heroine, especially adding the way she lets herself be patronized by him.

The second part, helmed by beloved (to some infamous) Norifumi Suzuki works on many more levels in much more interesting ways. Suzuki's direction is as stylish as one expects, the carnage is much bigger and interesting to look at, there are the evil yakuza capitalists, Bunta Sugawara practices his evil stare as henchman no.1. Like in most movies by Suzuki I know, there is also the feeling that he likes the conventions of genre films, but likes to play with these conventions just as much. He has a much easier time to make Fuji the actual heroine of the piece, even if the underlying view of womankind still is a relatively conservative one.
But what really surprised me was the psychological and emotional depth of the movie. It lets some of the stock characters grow into people, transforming melodrama into drama.
The theme of the picture isn't the usual "how to uphold your honor" either. Instead, it is about scars: The way you can't deny them, the way you have to live with them, and the way you can be loved in spite of them.

 

Edit: To correct Ken Takakura's name. What the hell was I thinking!?