The Creature Called Man (1970)

Original title: Jaga wa hashitta

The dictator of a fictional Asian country the subtitles dub “Southnesia” (still better than DC Comics’s Quraq) has managed to flee from the enraged revolution that toppled his government. He’s bound for the USA to build a government in exile (and most probably to milk money from the CIA tit for his own re-coup). However, because his flight was organized by a big Japanese corporation (and because he used a lot of Japanese soldiers who couldn’t get enough of the killing after World War II in the coup that initially brought him to power), his first port of call is Japan.

Because the Japanese police apparently has a “don’t shoot first” policy, his superiors encourage top cop and former Olympic shooter Toda (Yuzo Kayama) to officially step down, and unofficially become their very own killer of the killers the revolutionaries have most certainly sent after the dictator. Outfitted with a souped up VW Beetle (!) and a Mauser – a gun a lot of Japanese movies of this kind really adore - with a silencer, Toda certainly is a force of murder to be reckoned with when it comes to the revolutionaries. However, there’s also a true professional killer involved - Kujo (Jiro Tamiya). Ironically, Kujo was hired by the same company that brought the dictator out after the new government agreed to honour some arms deals of the old guy. But then, the film not so subtly argues, as long as money’s to be made on other people’s suffering, big corporations don’t care too much for yesterday’s business partners.

Toda and Kujo descend into one of those classical duels between killers. During the course of the film, the professional killer regains parts of his humanity through a complicated – and baggaged with some dubious consent business because this is a 70s Japanese movie about manly men who are too weak to take no for an answer – relationship to a woman (Nancy Sommers), while the policeman loses most of the innocence he still had.

At first, Kiyoshi Nishimura’s The Creature Called Man seems to treat the political, moral and emotional background for its pretty wonderful action sequences in a style akin to contemporary men’s adventure manga like Golgo-13 (still waiting on a decent movie adaptation, by the way) – as a mere backdrop that may ground proceedings at a particular place and time but is pretty much interchangeable.

In truth, the film’s just comparatively subtle early on, taking its time to present Toda and Kujo as admirable men of violence with no pesky emotional attachments and no politics who are really good at their jobs. Which, incidentally, seems to be the way these two define themselves in front of their respective mirrors.

Only once the film has shown the audience how these men see themselves and explain their actions to themselves does it start to show us the small hypocrisies and the potentials for change in their behaviour, deconstructing Toda’s stoic willingness to kill for a cause that isn’t his own (or really, anyone’s but the dictator’s) until he eventually even accidentally murders an innocent without consequences, and reconstructing Kujo as a human being through something that doesn’t even start as an act of kindness but still turns into one. Much of this seems to prefigure the emotional interests and arcs common to Hong Kong’s later heroic bloodshed films, and I wouldn’t at all be surprised if this specific film as well as some of its late movie aesthetic choices were a conscious influence on John Woo or Tsui Hark.

Politically, the film becomes acerbic towards all good causes that eventually only cause loss of innocent life (with a brutal nod towards all the hot wars driven by the cold one), and is not always quietly disgusted by all those ways suffering can be turned into profit or real violence fetishized, as shown by a translator and evilcorp assistant played by Mariko Kaga.

All of this is embedded into a cracking good early 70s Toho action movie full of excellently staged – and increasingly big – action that always keeps the personal level of Toda and Kujo in mind too. The inevitable final showdown between the two – of course after a friendly chat – turns a simple warehouse showdown into a crescendo of slow motion, brutal jazz, and one of the best timed moment of absolute silence I have had the pleasure to encounter in this sort of scene, providing an appropriately epic feel to the climax of a film that aims and hits much higher than it at first appears to.