Wandering Ginza Butterfly & Red Peony Gambler 3 - The Flower Cards Game

Two ninkyo eiga, still two very different things.
Wandering Ginza Butterfly takes place in the Seventies and is a standard but extremely unsleazy member of its genre. It's (yeah you guessed it) very solid, but has three points of brilliance: A billiard sequence that takes the place of more traditional ways of gambling and is just great fun; the scene after the climactic battle, when our heroes are standing on a street corner, waiting to be arrested, smiling and looking as if waiting for a taxi; and the great, grand and always glorious Meiko Kaji.

Red Peony Gambler 3 is the first movie by ninkyo directing god Tai Kato I've seen and if this is indicative of his usual style there is no way I'm not going to find more of them.
Design and feel of the movie are striving (and seem) to be much more historically accurate than in parts one and two, there's a palpable tension in each angle and although the level of melodrama is cranked up to eleven, the whole film feels tight. The way heavy melodrama and heavy violence feed each other reminds me of the later "heroic bloodshed" genre in Hong Kong Cinema. I would be greatly surprised if John Woo had not seen more than one film in this style.
Also, blood is very thick and red.