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.