Noboru Ando’s Chronicle of Fugitive Days and Sex (1976)

Following an attack on a business man he ordered, gang leader – historically he wasn’t a “proper” yakuza - Noboru Ando (Noboru Ando) has to go on the run. A process that consists of a lot of drinking, watching TV, and spending time at all of his many girlfriends’ places. Most of these women love Ando very much indeed, so he has to cope not just with proving his potency again and again, but also fending off various attempts from the various ladies to follow him on the lam.

As you may or may not know, before he became an actor, Noboru Ando was an actual criminal, clearly a darling of the Japanese yellow press, and just as clearly pretty damn awesome at building his own public mythology, like a John Ford western character gone mad. This isn’t even the first movie to dramatize the misadventure that earned Ando the prison sentence which in turn earned him his acting career, but it certainly is the first and only one based on the decision to turn the whole affair into a mix of standard yakuza tropes, some broad satire, and pinku style sex.

Directed by softcore auteur Noboru Tanaka, this puts a heavy emphasis on typically highly unerotic – and often very funny - sex scenes during which Ando does his very best not to move a single facial muscle. Does he enjoy the act as much as his writhing, moaning, love-sick partners do? He certainly ain’t telling. Also appearing are a “sexy”, hot dog based dance (not committed by Ando, because not even yakuzasploitation like this would be that cruel), tuberculosis jokes (I got nothing), and a climactic fight during which a very young looking Renji Ishibashi holds off the police while Ando attempts to finish a bit of spontaneous sex with a random partner. Which he doesn’t manage, so we finish on an indelible scene of Ando jerking off in a police car while cops look on, displeased. Again, I’ve got nothing.

If you’re of a certain mindset, this will make Chronicle sound like a slam-dunk of the weird and the wonderful – and I haven’t even mentioned the scene of Ando and Ishibashi walking a beach philosophising about being bacteria in the national host body. Indeed, when the movie is on point – particularly during its final twenty minutes or so – it is quite the experience of smut, absurdity and weird energy. But it is also slow, lacking in any dramatic progression or tension, and incredibly repetitive – watching Ando not moving a facial muscle during sex one time is great, watching this ten times causes it to lose a considerable amount of its lustre, so the whole thing is more than just a bit of a slog.

Still, the idea of the film alone is worth some mind space and time, and the moments when Chronicle of Fugitive Days and Sex is as bizarre as it promises to be make up for all that unsexy sex and scenes of watching characters watch TV, at least to a degree.

A True Story of the Ginza Private Police (1973)

Original title: 実録・私設銀座警察

1946, Ginza shortly after the end of World War II. A group of traumatized and incredibly violent soldiers realize – as much as these guys have the self-consciousness for it – their shared nihilism. Thus enabled to embrace their worst selves, they begin taking over the district’s organized crime business through rape, murder and all kinds of blunt-force trauma.

After a time, when Japan starts to stabilize a little, and hunger and desperation become less of a valid factor (or excuse) for vile deeds, the comparatively less insane Iketani (Noboru Ando) strikes out on his own to build a somewhat more civilized criminal empire based on blackmail and rather more controlled violence. Something a group whose main killer is a drug-addicted soldier (Tsunehiko Watase) who murdered a baby and beat his wife to death in the film’s opening scene cannot offer.

I’m not often going around calling films “nihilistic”, but Junya Sato’s early entry in the cycle of ripped from the headlines, “realistic” jitsuroku yakuza cycle is absolutely that. From that still shocking beginning you really have to see to believe to an ending where everybody loses in the most brutal manner and the world clearly doesn’t care whatsoever, this is feel bad cinema of the highest (lowest?) calibre. The characters are all pieces of shit – whose lack of humanity is explained but never excused by their war trauma – doing horrible things to innocent and guilty alike for the whole of the film’s running time with a complete lack of remorse, moving through a society too tired and bitter to even react to them with the proper outrage or willingness to defend itself against what they embody.

The fruits of their crimes are the most basic creature comforts, and the greatest plan anybody of them can imagine is to grab more and more power he’ll perhaps sometimes use to finance an underling marrying his mistress – and even that will cost a lot of people their lives.

Sato portrays post-War Ginza as an utter hellhole without human kindness or even the good old beauty growing from the gutter – there is nothing here to strive for, no happiness, no future, and a past that’s just going to make the characters more angry at the world and themselves.

Visually, this is an absolute assault on the senses with a blaring free jazz score and later some freeform noise ascribed to Masanobu Higurashi over jittery handheld camera and barely a scene that isn’t drenched in mud, blood, or screams. The film is so intense, the violence still so direct, it borders on an actual assault on the audience. True Story is absolutely relentless, daring its viewers to look.

It’s a masterpiece of its kind, though perhaps not the kind of film to watch when you’re already on a low point of your opinion on humanity.