Big Time Gambling Boss (1968)

Original title: Bakuchiuchi: Sôchô Tobaku

Tokyo 1934. The boss of the city’s clan specialized in the gambling business suffers from a stroke while he’s refusing a plan to help unite the yakuza groups into some kind of national front that will bring drugs and prostitution to “the continent” (read “China”).

The succession to the now bed-ridden and mute man’s position is fraught. The best candidate would be the deeply honourable Nakai (Koji Tsuruta), but he’s refusing the role because he came to Tokyo as a refugee from an Osaka clan following trouble with the law there. Apparently taking on the leading role in his adopted clan would be against the Code of the yakuza. Anyway, going by Nakai’s interpretation of things, the designated successor to the position of boss should be Matsuda (Tomisaburo Wakayama), Nakai’s sworn brother.

As a matter of Code and honour, Nakai may even be right about that. Yet right now, Matsuda is imprisoned for his role in an attack on a rival gang that left that gang not much of a problem anymore, but also saw some of Matsuda’s own young men dead. In general, while nearly as traditionally honourable as Nakai, Matsuda is a bit of an emotional powder keg, leading from the front with quite a bit of violence. So he is somebody the clan as a whole doesn’t really want in its highest leadership position.

Prodded by shifty advisor Senba (Nobuo Kaneko with the most astonishing bit of Hitler facial hair), the clan decides to make the boss’s son-in-law, the somewhat lower-ranking and sweaty Ishido (Hiroshi Nawa) the successor, clearly not the strong choice.

Ishido’s ascension ceremony is to take place during a big gambling do for the highest-ranking yakuza in the country.

At this point, Matsuda has been released from prison and is less than happy with the situation. To his sense of personal betrayal comes the fact that not the obviously ultra-competent Nakai is to be the group’s boss, but the weak Ishido. And Matsuda is not the kind of man who can play the diplomatic game, even if it means burning all bridges.

Soon, the plot becomes a complicated machine of obligations, honour, friendship, and betrayal, full of relationships that are much more complicated than they at first appear to be, and violence that is less than cathartic.

When it is spoken about at all in the West, Kosaku Yamashita’s Big Time Gambling Boss – actually the fourth film of a series, though one that usually has not continuity of plot or characters between films – has the reputation of being one of the greatest yakuza films of the ninkyo eiga style. I can’t disagree with this assessment at all – this is pretty much a perfect film, one that stretches the possibilities of the ninkyo style to its absolute limits. That its writer Kazuo Kasahara would go on to script Kinji Fukasaku’s Battles Without Honour and Humanity series seems just the logical consequence of where this one goes.

Certainly, Gambling Boss shares the later films’ tendency to turn an in theory very simple plot about yakuza intrigue into a web of duties, obligations and interpretations of a code of honour where one’s human feelings only further complicate things. Nearly every single character here has to come to grips with their own conflicts between the supposed honour of their societal rules and their actual humanity – Nakai’s and Matsuda’s internal and personal conflicts are the film’s main thrust, but the younger yakuza that take on the role of Nakai’s replacement sons, and the two men’s wives all go through the same struggles.

Nakai’s wife Tsuyako (Hiroko Sakuramachi), to take an example, at first seems to only fulfil the genre role of the dutiful wife, but one second act conflict suddenly reveals her inner life and the struggles she goes through while keeping up appearances, providing the film not only with a sudden jolt of “wait, that’s not how ninkyo eiga work!” but also emphasising one of the film’s thematic undercurrents: the utter destructiveness of a way of life that knows no compromise and lets problems grow and fester until they are only resolved in the most violent and destructive ways. Every character in the movie goes through this, or something comparable, and all of them end up destroyed or dead – and the film clearly isn’t applauding this as the only honourable way to exist but treats it as the tragedy it is.

There is indeed a great deal of compassion for its characters in the film, not the sentimental kind yakuza movies (and their fans, me not excluded) generally prefer, but one that feels more humane, sadder and more subtle.

In large part, this effect of greater emotional nuance is enabled by Yamashita’s restrained and intensely focussed direction. This is a film without any distractions in staging, tight framing that is meant to keep the viewer as close to the characters as possible, and not a second of material on screen that isn’t important to the characters or the plot. This means none of the actors can afford to overact or fall back on the simpler tricks in their toolkits – every moment of drama is earned through their complicated portrayals of complicated feelings and relationships. Even Wakayama, not an actor who appeared to like to be subtle (and whom I usually love for it), follows suit, and gives one of the most nuanced and human performances I’ve ever seen from him. Consequently, the film develops an uncommon emotional pull, a feeling of witnessing a genuine tragedy evolve, instead of a series of ritualized scenes that end in an explosion of violence.

Even here, at the climax, the movie refuses the sure-fire way to please the audience of its genre. Instead of showing is the mandatory showdown between Nakai and a large group of enemies, the film cuts away from it. It makes sense too, for the violence that’s actually important for Nakai came before and will come after that fight, and that violence is brutal, and short, and looks the exact opposite of fun.