Bodyguard Kiba (1973)

aka The Bodyguard

Original title: ボディガード牙

This is based on the Japanese version of the movie; the US cut seems to vary considerably.

Kiba (Sonny Chiba), karate ace and all-around tough guy, returns to his native Japan after a long stint with his martial arts master in the USA. He plans on becoming the public face of his school to rid it of its low class implications, for apparently, the public believes this particular style of karate to be the realm of thugs and no-goodniks. Also, don’t mention bull-punching.

Kiba plans on reaching this goal by getting into the public eye: first, he thwarts a plane hijacking to then declare at the following press conference he’s going into the bodyguard business.

Soon, a mysterious woman named Reiko (Mari Atsumi) drops in at the home of Kiba and his sister (Etsuko Shihomi) in the attic of a Catholic church that is only ever shot in Dutch angles to hire him for five days. Kiba is not too happy his new client isn’t telling him why exactly she needs a bodyguard, but he gets somewhat distracted by various attacks on her life from the Japanese arm of the cosa nostra, as well as by various home-grown thugs. Eventually, he learns that Reiko was the lover of an assassinated Mafia boss and is trying to sell off a load of drugs she took from him.

Ryuichi Takamori’s Bodyguard Kiba is situated just before the great Sonny Chiba finally fell into his star character as the central protagonist of Toei’s soon-to-be very fevered style of martial arts exploitation movie.

At this point, we are nearly there: Kiba’s still a bit too nice when compared to many of Chiba’s later characters – at least he never attempts to rape anyone, and will only mutilate his enemies in about half of the fights – and Takamori approaches the nudity and the more extreme moments of violence with a degree of reticence.

This doesn’t mean there isn’t any crazy karate action business going on. In a pretty fantastic early fight, for example, Kiba uses a door and his heavy-breathing based technique to amputate the arm of one of his assailants to later show it to his understandably nonplussed client. There’s also quite a bit of Chiba-caused eye-mutilation going on, though we never get X-Rays of any exploding hearts, nor do we actually see any eyes popping. There’s still a lot of very fun violence on screen, of course, shot with many of the stylistic elements you’d expect from a Japanese movie of this era, with wild hand camera, dramatic zooms, Dutch angles, and sudden bouts of erotic grotesquery. Just as an example, there is an early scene where Kiba’s sister loses a fight against three mafia killers, only for her brother to find her stripped naked and draped in a crucifixion pose on the shadow of the church cross of the place they live in. It’s of dubious taste, obviously, but it is also pretty  inspired on an aesthetic level.

The film’s noirish plot of dark secrets and the double crosses between Reiko, her former pimp and now partner and the various people they want to sell the drugs to or rob and their plans to counter-rob them is quite a bit of fun as well, setting Kiba up as the kind of guy who stays honourable even in utterly corrupt surroundings, rather a lot like a Chandler-esque private eye with a larger propensity for ripping your arm of.

Bodyguard Kiba’s problems – at least if you can cope with the sexual mores and the violence of 70s exploitation cinema – are generally not so much problems of the film doing anything wrong, but of it being so close to the Platonic Ideal of a 70s Chiba movie that would completely come to pass with The Streetfighter but not hitting that film’s crazed heights. So, if you go into this not hoping for revelation but for a very good time in the inimitable early 70s Toei style, you’ll probably walk out happy.