The Drifting Avenger (1968)

Original title: Kôya no toseinin

A gang of stagecoach robbers stumble into the Old American West cabin of an expat samurai (three minutes of Takashi Shimura are better than no Takashi Shimura), shoot the man and his wife and leave their cowboy son Ken (Ken Takakura), also pretty shot, for dead.

Because this is a western, Ken survives with a righteous lust for vengeance only tempered by the samurai code his father taught him, and rides out in search for the killers. He still doesn’t quite have the killer instinct he’d actually need to conclude the whole avenging business successfully, and lacks some of the technical skill of the proper gunman as well, so it comes in useful he soon encounters the experienced Marvin (Ken Goodlet), who is good with guns, paternal advice and being an old west kind of guy. He also happens to be the father of one of the killers, though that conflict isn’t quite resolved as you’d expect, or made as much of as you’d hope for.

Ken does seem to have a thing for fallen in with relatives of his prospective victims. For he also develops paternal feelings for the son of another one of the killers, and also gets close to the same man’s soon to be widow, who takes her husband’s fate philosophically even before he is dead.

Vengeance, it turns out, is a place full of relatives who are rather more okay with having their family killed than Ken is.

Despite being more than just a little fond of classic Japanese genre cinema, I’ve never been able to see any of the westerns some of the major studios at put out, so my only actual contact with this somewhat surprising genre has been Takashi Miike’s Sukiyaki Western Django until now – and that’s of course neither a classic era studio movie nor sane nor normal. On the other hand, there’s been so much back and forth influence between chanbara in Japan and the western in the US and Italy, it’s not as if I’m moving through unknown territory here.

Still, this is my first proper Japanese western (if one shot in Australia with an Australian cast apart from its star and a couple of intro characters). The film was directed by Toei contract man Junya Sato, whose direction tends to the technically competent yet workmanlike, at least in most of his films I’ve seen. This certainly applies to Drifting Avenger. There’s nothing here that’s badly staged or ugly to look at, but there’s also a certain lack of flair and visual energy – as a western director, he’s certainly no Leone, Boetticher, Ford, or Corbucci. Which is a particular shame because the Australian landscape would at the very least offer up some spectacular – if not very American looking – vistas beyond what Sato shows here.

The script is more routine than inspired as well, with some attempts at complicating Ken’s quest for vengeance via entanglements between honour and humanity that equally speak to western, chanbara and yakuza film traditions but that never feel as emotionally or intellectually captivating as they could. The film’s structure is a little too episodic for this to work as well as it should, particularly since it repeats plot beats between Marvin and the other killer’s family that would have been better explored through a single set of characters.

The situation isn’t helped by the fact that Takakura and Goodlet are the only professional screen actors in larger roles – the rest of the Australian cast only has this as their single film credits, and the lack of experience and ability gets in the way of proper emotional and thematic exploration, even though everyone is dubbed into Japanese. An all Japanese cast out of Toei’s stable of character actors, stars and pros would have provided much needed personality to everyone. And while Takakura is great as always, he does need other actors to play off of when emoting, instead of the walking talking cardboard he has to cope with here throughout.

Still, The Drifting Avenger is not a terrible movie by any means, just one that’s never more than very basically entertaining.

Winter’s Flower (1978)

Original title: Fuyu no hana

After fifteen years spent in prison for murdering a friend and traitor to his group, yakuza Kano (Ken Takakura) is released.

Not much awaits him outside. Well, there’s an empty apartment bought for him as a make-up gift for his sacrifice, and, for complicated reasons, the now teenage daughter of the man he killed. While he was in prison, Kano wrote letters “from Brazil” to the girl, pretending to be her uncle, while providing her with money and protection through his yakuza friends. Now, outside, he’s circling around the borders of her life. She has turned into a symbol of a life not lived where guilt and the daughter he never had meet, and he’s sad and wise enough to know that actually meeting the girl would not lead anywhere good.

So the sad middle-aged man goes back to the yakuza life. He’s doing so only reluctantly, and he is encountering old friends and associates that mostly seem just as dissatisfied with it as he is, just less conscious of how much they are going nowhere. Unlike Kano, they are blaming the times instead of themselves.

Mirroring what happened fifteen years ago, there’s pressure for Kano’s group to unite with another, bigger, more powerful, more modern and more ruthless one. Very much despite of himself(or is it because of himself?), Kano is letting himself be drawn into repeating the same bad choices he made when he probably didn’t know any better.

Yasuo Furuhata’s Winter’s Flower is very typical of the yakuza films Ken Takakura starred in at this stage in his career, when the genre wasn’t as successful anymore, and Takakura had been doing predominantly other types of films for quite some time. In the yakuza films he still made, often directed by Furuhata, and not really fitting into the ninkyo/jitsuroku divide, Takakura was always a man of his actual age, either having left the yakuza life only to be drawn in again, or not quite managing to in the first place.

These are films dominated by a quiet, very middle-aged, sadness and melancholia. It’s not the railing at the skies of the young, but the quieter kind of desperation of lives badly spent, promises broken and hopes that have just faded away, perhaps alleviated by a hope for some kind of simple, quiet contentment that the men in these films inevitably can’t quite keep their grips on. These are qualities Takakura embodied as much as those of the upright yakuza of his earlier years, with a subtle, and never whiny, gravitas that feels as if it came from lived experience – his performances in this part of career are all deep gazes and small gestures as far away from melodrama as possible, and feel as true to an actual inner life expressed this way as I can imagine.

This is how Winter’s Flower works as a whole – there are opportunities to great melodrama and violence in the plot, but Furuhata decides to focus on quieter readings of situations and characters that develop the pull of truthfulness by an insistence on quietly observing Kano and his world. Melodrama is for the young, and this is a movie neither about, nor for, them, and so the unflashy, steady direction doesn’t try to sell this tale to them.

As a middle-aged guy myself, I can relate.

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.

Three Films Make A Post: The monkey that likes killing our family …it's back.

The Monkey (2025): It has finally happened – Oz Perkins made a movie I don’t adore. In fact, I’d go as far as calling this bit of monkey business based on a Stephen King short genuinely bad. It’s the kind of horror comedy that believes a handful of gore gags and watching a bunch of characters the film itself can’t seem to find any interest in do little of note somehow does a movie make; that making this thin bit of nothing look slick (Perkins certainly doesn’t suddenly stop being a technically accomplished director) and professional somehow helps things along; that watching a film torture characters it clearly loathes for laughs is somehow funny.

Dark Nuns (2025): This takes place in the same nonsense version of exorcist South Korean Catholicism as The Priests. As such, I was hoping for a film with an equal amount of involuntary humour as that dubious bit of horror. Alas, Kwon Hyeok-jae’s spin-off doesn’t reach the heights of a movie whose dramatic climax is priests hunting for a possessed piglet; it is certainly as pompously self-serious as the original film, but never becomes quite weird enough with it to be interesting.

As a straightforward horror film, this suffers from the fact its – not completely uninteresting – attempt at mixing Shamanist and Catholic exorcism movie tropes only leads to double the amount of clichés, as much effort as poor Song Hye-kyo as a renegade exorcist nun puts into the whole thing.

International Gang of Kobe aka Kobe Kokusai Gang (1975): With Noboru Tanaka taking time out from his brilliant Roman Porn work for Nikkatsu to make a jitsuroku style yakuza film for Toei, and Ken Takakura and Bunta Sugawara in the leads, this should by all rights be a slam dunk. Despite appropriate amounts of sex and violence, it isn’t, alas. There’s a lack of focus and coherence, and while some scenes look and feel well enough, they never cohere into much of a whole. Even Takakura’s and Sugawara’s performances seem slightly distracted and off, as if the filmmakers couldn’t decide if they needed them to act or to take on their star personas, leaving them adrift somewhere in the limbo between these states.

Three Films Make A Post: Sometimes, No Tagline’s Forthcoming

Death Occurred Last Night aka La morte risale a ieri sera (1970): The mentally disabled daughter of a single parent father (Raf Vallone), disappears without much of a trace. An increasingly invested cop (Frank Wolff) takes on the case to find some rather nasty business concerning a prostitution racket and personal betrayal.

Even though it is often strikingly shot and edited with as mix of inventiveness and intelligence, and features fine performances by the always great Vallone and Wolff, I never quite managed to connect with this police procedural (whoever pretends this to be a giallo as the genre is typically understood is simply lying). Perhaps the reason is Duccio Tessari’s unwillingness to ever show as much of the sordidness this tale is built upon as would be actually necessary? The overwhelming sense of watching a film that really wants to make it clear that it is socially conscious and rather important?

Never Give Up aka Yasei no shomei (1978): Junya Sato’s often somewhat too slow and vague narrative style – the film is nearly two and a half hours long! – never quite manages to disguise quite how strange of a genre mixture this Ken Takakura vehicle is: it’s a melodrama about a man of violence trying to do penance for past sins, a 70s conspiracy thriller about a female journalist stumbling upon a small town conspiracy that is at the same time apparently nation-wide, a movie about a psychic kid, an action movie that prefigures some beats of the final act of First Blood. There’s just a lot going on here, and for at least the film’s first third, it is not exactly easy to parse how all these disparate elements connect.

However, once they do – or if you enjoy figuring out vague narratives – Never Give Up becomes more than just a little compelling. Needless to say, the acting is pretty wonderful, and there’s a very 70s fearlessness on display when it comes to the death of central characters and downer endings.

Mars Express (2023): I don’t understand the high praise this French piece of science fiction animation is getting all around the net. To these eyes, Jérémie Périn’s film is about as generic as science fiction action gets, and neither its animation nor its design is much to write home about – unless you’re deeply into things looking as if they were done with strict professional competence. The narrative is as been there, done that as it gets, and the worldbuilding nothing that hasn’t been done in science fiction again and again to better effect.

It doesn’t improve my appreciation that the film shunts its only compelling ideas into its final fifteen minutes.

Station (1981)

Original title: Eki

The first half of the film portrays various occurrences in the life of policeman and sports shooter Eiji Mikami (Ken Takakura) that eventually come together to bring to a quiet crisis of conscience and grief.

In the second half, Mikami returns to his snowy home on Hokkaido for a family festival and to decide on quitting the police and finding some better way to live. Here, he also meets bar maid Kiriko (Chieko Baisho), another slightly lost and damaged soul with whom he might find a degree of peace and even love.

Yasuo Furuhata’s drama with mild crime movie elements Station (called so for reasons of metaphor, but also because train stations take on a central role in various decision points in Mikami’s life) is a film I found very difficult to get into. The first hour of this two hour plus movie often seems pointless, draggy, and confusingly edited. It’s not very easy to even grasp the form and structure of what’s going on – let’s not even speak of character relations and timeline – because the film jumps around in the chronological order of Mikami’s life from scene to scene, often without any visual markers suggesting that it does so; there are no attempts at making Takakura look different in any part of the timeline either. So, for quite some time, it’s rather difficult to figure out what’s even going on in the movie at all, so much so, there’s little space to understand where all of this is actually going. Many scenes only make sense in the hindsight of the second hour, when the timeline collides into a linear narrative thread and we can begin to appreciate what we’ve seen before, how it connects, and how it brought Mikami to the emotional low point he is at now.

And once he has brought his film into this calmer rhythm, Furuhata turns out to be rather great at exploring this middle-aged kind of quiet grief and regret for the things one has done and encountered in the past, for the roads not taken, for the unkindness towards others and oneself, in a manner that never becomes melodramatic or whiny but carries a depth of emotion and understanding (also of the fact that one can’t really escape oneself, ever) under the poise of small gestures and quietly spoken (or unspoken) words, and lots and lots of snow.

Takakura – one of Japan’s great actors of the small gesture in most cases – is absolutely fantastic in the role. He suggests much of the weight of the past, the small fire of awakening hope, and the depths of his sadness through tiny shifts in his body language, the telling small gesture, and the way he says his most important lines in the most incidental manner. Baisho meets him gesture by gesture, and even has to do him one better by having to also suggest an hour of backstory about her we don’t get to see, using the same methods by which Takakura shows the results of his past on his present state. It’s all wonderfully understated, yet also precise and clear (not simplistic, mind you).

This is very much a film that rewards re-watching, obviously, because once the viewer understands the whole of Station’s structure they can also appreciate all the emotional and incidental detail contained in its first half. Which to me seems to be rather a huge risk to take for a film, structurally, but it does work for Station, if you have some patience with it going in.

The Bullet Train (1975)

Original title: Shinkansen daubakuha

This write-up concerns the full 152 minute version of the film. The various international cuts of 90 to 100 minutes length leave out so much that’s important for the film it’s not even funny.

A small group of desperate and despondent men under the leadership of Tetsuo Okita (Ken Takakura) hide a bomb on a Japanese bullet train. It’s an interesting construction that certainly would not be borrowed by a later US movie about a speeding bus at all, oh no, for it activates when the train goes over the speed of 80 km/h and will blow up once it falls under that limit again. Okita and his men attempt to blackmail a considerable amount of money from the train company, seeing the operation as a crime where nobody will get hurt.

Unfortunately, the police do their best to get as many people hurt as possible, or so it seems, first killing the youngest of Okita’s men during a fake money handover, later heavily wounding but letting escape Okita’s other partner in the next one, and not really getting anywhere with their other inquiries.

While the cops are mishandling the situation, the chief of operations for the shinkansen trains, Kuramochi (Ken Utsui), and an increasingly sweaty and desperate train driver (Shinichi “Sonny” Chiba) try to find the bomb, keep increasingly crazed passengers sane, and resolve the whole situation before the higher political echelons decide that 1,500 people dying on an exploding train an hour earlier than they otherwise would is a perfectly reasonable exchange for the infrastructural costs of having it explode at a station.

Junya Sato’s highly melodramatic crime thriller shouldn’t work at all. It seems, on first look, overly long, with two and a half hours of train stuff, flashbacks to the past of Okita and his people, a birth on board the train that ends badly, and many, many scenes of actors looking dramatically at switchboards and such. However, Sato and his cast treat nearly every single moment of the film with immense intensity, with everyone’s emotions permanently dialled up to eleven and staying there throughout. This larger than life quality to all emotions is perhaps straddling the line to self-parody, but for my taste, it never stumbles over it, and instead uses bigness as a way to grab its audience emotionally in any way it can.

Plus, if you have Sonny Chiba and not decide to let him beat anyone up, you’ll at least need to have him sweat a lot and lose his emotional cool in ways huge enough for him (side note: he’s actually playing a bit less over the top than he usually does, just ends up still taking up the space of two normal actors, or five Tom Cruises); if you hire Ken Takakura, you of course need to have a lot of close-ups on his sad eyes and provide him with a tragic backstory for his new life of crime that even manages to sell his death in the end (as always with these cops, by shots in the back probably fired because they were too lazy to run after an unarmed man) as something bad, despite him having risked the lives of 1,500 people and indirectly killed a baby.

The true moral centre and hero of the film though is Kuramochi, portrayed by Utsui as a man who mixes professionalism with deep emotional involvement and a huge sense of integrity. He is, therefor, the character who most obviously makes various of the film’s ethical arguments. For yes, it turns out this big, loud, melodramatic film also has some remarks to make about the way destiny always seems to kick the little guy when he’s already down, and the unpreparedness of then contemporary Japanese (and not only there and then) society to pick up the universe’s slack. Also under angry scrutiny is the concept of the lesser evil (the movie’s not a fan).


If all this still sounds like a bit much for one film – it isn’t. Sato manages to hold the necessary tension for it all to work throughout, with nary a boring minute. Best of all, he seems in full control of his small army of plot threads and characters, knowing when he can shuffle between them regularly and when it’s time to keep us longer in a sequence. While the director generally doesn’t show the more eccentric, psychedelic and avant-garde tendencies of Japanese 70s genre cinema, this is still a technically very convincing film, with action sequences choreographed to the point, and demonstrating the often nearly uncanny way even the lesser directors of this era in Japanese cinema had with the blocking of scenes.