Brave Red Flower of the North (1970)

Original title: Nihon jokyo-den: makka na dokyo-bana 日本女侠伝 真赤な度胸花

Following the death of her estranged father in Hokkaido, Yuki (Junk Fuji) travels to the frontier he tried to tame by building a horse-breeding based economy where attempts at farming had not worked out too well. At least in his opinion.

The local horse-breeding association wants her to take her father’s place as their head to counter attempts of the yakuza-industrial complex – enemies in many a ninkyo eiga of the genre’s late stages – to take control of the area.

At first, Yuki isn’t too happy about that, but she’s played by Fuji at the heights of her star power, so she’s too morally upright not to decide to finish what her father started.

Obviously, the other side is not going to play fair, so quite a bit of violence and suffering lies ahead until our heroine is allowed to commit her own, final acts of violence against her enemies. Along the way, she befriends some ainu, breaks hearts, and has one of those longing with burning gazes and hot virtuous speeches relationships of the style we know and love with a somewhat mysterious stranger (Ken Takakura). Of course, the man has reasons to hate her family, yet oh! the honour! and oh! the barely repressed sexuality! It’s ninkyo eiga relationship perfection.

During my recent illness, I somehow stumbled into a Junko Fuji ninkyo eiga phase. Because fever is that way, quite a few of those films have by now dissolved in my mind into a mix of tears, blood and close-ups of Fuji’s face, so there will, alas, not be a series of write-ups of all eight Red Peony Gambler movies coming up this year.

In any case, this late period of ninkyo at Toei, centring around the incredible Fuji, the house troupe of character actors, romantic male leads like the triple threat of Takakura, Bunta Sugawara and Koji Tsuruta and great directors like Tai Kato, Kosaku Yamashita, Shigero Ozawa and this films Yasuo Furuhata is an incredible group of movies. Between 1968 and her too early retirement in 1972 (and her later reappearance as Sumiko Fuji), Fuji specifically does not appear to have starred in a single weak or even just middling film – everything she appeared in was good to golden.

Typically, the ninkyo eiga version of the yakuza film is treated as a rather limited genre, with too many strict beats to hold to, conservative and old-fashioned in its mores. But when you watch a lot of these films in close succession, you can actually see how different they are working inside their handful of rules. As long as your heroes and heroines are chivalric and everything ends in a ritualized bit of slaughter, there’s rather a lot of different things to be done in-between. It certainly helps that yakuza in the realm of the ninkyo does not need mean gambler or gangster, but also concerns all kinds of people that are part of the non-farming working class – coal-mining, transporting businesses and the entertainment world are all part of this world in one way or the other.

Or, in this case, horse-breeding. Stylistically, this is actually a successful attempt at mixing the ninkyo with the western (or, given the weather and geographical location, the northern), featuring the kind of musical score that mixes typical Toei style with Italian western trumpets, and features lots of horse-riding, and an emphasis on gunplay in the western style (though Fuji does get a couple of aikido moments, as is her right).

As many good ninkyo of this phase, this isn’t a film of quite as clear-cut morals than you’d expect. Yuki is as morally upright as any Fuji character – which only works because the actress is utterly convincing as the impossible ideal she is tasked to play again and again in these films – but the world around her isn’t quite as clear-cut. Her father certainly had good intentions, but we will learn he used methods not unlike those now utilized by Yuki’s enemies – the frontier business isn’t a clean one even with the best of intentions.

As always when Fuji and Takakura are together, there’s an impressive erotic tension for a genre whose loves are nearly always doomed and only seldom allowed to be expressed physically – there’s a reason these two were in so many movies together.