Blood of Revenge (1965)

Original title: 明治侠客伝 三代目襲名

Osaka in the late Meiji period, quite literally the end of an era in Japan. Upright Asajiro (Koji Tsuruta) is the right-hand man of his yakuza clan boss. The boss really wants his clan operations turn away from criminality and become completely straight. To achieve this, he attempts to build up a fully legal construction business, hopefully eventually to be put under the leadership of his immature son, guided by Asajiro. Alas, the actually legal construction business that is their main rival goes in exactly the other direction and has financed their own yakuza clan.

These fully-owned criminals are of course not at all honourable, assassinate the clan boss and do their darndest to destroy Asajiro’s clan by means subtle and direct. As if trying to do legal business and straighten out a young fool weren’t enough of a job for a man.

Parallel to this, we witness the doomed – this is a ninkyo eiga, after all - romance between Asajiro and prostitute Hatsue (Junko Fuji, here in one of her final completely traditionally female coded roles of this part of her career) – it certainly doesn’t help the case of their love that the head of the evil yakuza clan wants to claim Hatsue as his own. Words of aggressive possession used deliberately.

Tai Kato was of course one of the masters of the ninkyo eiga form. In this particularly wonderful effort, the violence plays second fiddle to the melodrama of Asajiro attempting to drag his people into a new age that will make men like himself obsolete, and the riveting and moving love story between Hatsue and him. Both plot lines can only end in painful sacrifice and death, obviously. As always, we’ll never learn if the sacrifice does at least achieve what it’s meant to.

Usually, the Tsuruta/Fuji pairing isn’t terribly strong when it comes to Fuji and Toei’s main romantic male leads – it might be the age difference, or simply chemistry – but here, both actors project an intensity and eventually a quiet desperation that’s as exquisitely stylized as it paradoxically feels completely real and authentic. Kato appears to have had a rather great hand with his actors, getting their best and most subtle efforts, even if they’re shooting their fifth ninkyo of the year.

In general, Kato’s films don’t treat the romance plots as obligatory elements to include on the way to the climactic violence, but treats this aspect of the human heart with full seriousness, which does tend to make everything surrounding it more emotionally involving as well.

When the violence comes, it is stark and effective, chaotic yet precisely staged, shot with intensity as well as artsy angles, carrying weight – often the weight of real violence and that of satisfying genre violence at the same time, as if it were easy to do it that way.

Kato does of course include a quietly spectacular bit of action on a train (I believe I have yet to see a Kato movie without at least some prominent train tracks in an important scene), and quite a few of his famed low angle shots, but Blood of Revenge also amply demonstrates some of his other specialities as a director – the organisation of large groups of people in a frame, the economical yet dynamic editing – the first scene is a masterclass in both – and the ability to know when to choose movement and when to choose stillness in any given scene.

That last ability seems to be particularly important in the ninkyo eiga, with its insistence on a kind of stoicism that in the end always dissolves in quick and brutal violence.

Three Films Make A Post: Their thoughts can kill!

Scanners (1981): This is sometimes treated as one of the lesser movies in David Cronenberg’s incredible run as a director from 1977 to 1996, but there’s so much to love in this version of the 70s conspiracy thriller as seen through the eyes of Philip K. Dick. Performances that are spot on or so weird they actually are spot on exactly because of their weirdness (Stephen Lack), a plot that starts in the realm of semi-plausible spy-fi but drifts further and further into the realm of the outright surreal, and a direction whose by now proverbial cool eye is all that stands between the material and utter, screaming lunacy. Plus, exploding heads are inherently cool (unless it’s your own head exploding).

Closed Circuit aka Circuito chiuso (1978): This Italian TV movie by Giuliano Montaldo does overstay its welcome a little, so that its turn from the locked room murder mystery to the outright fantastical doesn’t hit quite as hard as it could in a more concentrated form, but there’s much to recommend it: a clear love for the cinema experience of the time grounded in an ability to actually show the way cinemas at this time and place worked procedurally, a cast that has fun with the range of characters (all with secrets that have nothing to do with the case, of course) on offer, and the joy of seeing that most mock-rational of genres (as much as I have grown to enjoy golden age style murder mysteries, their ideas about logic and reason are utter nonsense) break down into the realm of the kind of fantasy that admits it is one.

The Kingdom of Jirocho aka Jirocho sangokushi (1963): This is the first film in the second cycle of films Masahiro Makino made about yakuza boss Shimizu Jirocho (Koji Tsuruta) – a real historical figure that had turned into something of a folk hero, and the embodiment of that most ridiculous of ideas, the good yakuza, honourably helping solve problems wherever he goes. This is really all set-up, showing the first meetings between Jirocho and the core members of his clan, but it does its business in such a light-handed and fun way, I hardly missed the presence of an actual plot.

Makino, apparently well-known for being a quick worker, clearly isn’t a sloppy one. Rather, there’s a lot of camera and character movement here, so much so, you’re never surprised when the protagonists break into song, as they regularly (though not quite regularly enough to call this a musical) do. There’s a joyous quality to the whole thing, unexpected from a film that finds a director repeating a greatest hit.

For fans of 60s/70s Toei ninkyo eiga – as I certainly am – there’s the additional joy of encountering a lot of the usual character and side actors, as well as a very very young Junk Fuji as a flirtatious bar maid (and alas not the female lead).

Brave Red Flower of the North (1970)

Original title: Nihon jokyo-den: makka na dokyo-bana 日本女侠伝 真赤な度胸花

Following the death of her estranged father in Hokkaido, Yuki (Junk Fuji) travels to the frontier he tried to tame by building a horse-breeding based economy where attempts at farming had not worked out too well. At least in his opinion.

The local horse-breeding association wants her to take her father’s place as their head to counter attempts of the yakuza-industrial complex – enemies in many a ninkyo eiga of the genre’s late stages – to take control of the area.

At first, Yuki isn’t too happy about that, but she’s played by Fuji at the heights of her star power, so she’s too morally upright not to decide to finish what her father started.

Obviously, the other side is not going to play fair, so quite a bit of violence and suffering lies ahead until our heroine is allowed to commit her own, final acts of violence against her enemies. Along the way, she befriends some ainu, breaks hearts, and has one of those longing with burning gazes and hot virtuous speeches relationships of the style we know and love with a somewhat mysterious stranger (Ken Takakura). Of course, the man has reasons to hate her family, yet oh! the honour! and oh! the barely repressed sexuality! It’s ninkyo eiga relationship perfection.

During my recent illness, I somehow stumbled into a Junko Fuji ninkyo eiga phase. Because fever is that way, quite a few of those films have by now dissolved in my mind into a mix of tears, blood and close-ups of Fuji’s face, so there will, alas, not be a series of write-ups of all eight Red Peony Gambler movies coming up this year.

In any case, this late period of ninkyo at Toei, centring around the incredible Fuji, the house troupe of character actors, romantic male leads like the triple threat of Takakura, Bunta Sugawara and Koji Tsuruta and great directors like Tai Kato, Kosaku Yamashita, Shigero Ozawa and this films Yasuo Furuhata is an incredible group of movies. Between 1968 and her too early retirement in 1972 (and her later reappearance as Sumiko Fuji), Fuji specifically does not appear to have starred in a single weak or even just middling film – everything she appeared in was good to golden.

Typically, the ninkyo eiga version of the yakuza film is treated as a rather limited genre, with too many strict beats to hold to, conservative and old-fashioned in its mores. But when you watch a lot of these films in close succession, you can actually see how different they are working inside their handful of rules. As long as your heroes and heroines are chivalric and everything ends in a ritualized bit of slaughter, there’s rather a lot of different things to be done in-between. It certainly helps that yakuza in the realm of the ninkyo does not need mean gambler or gangster, but also concerns all kinds of people that are part of the non-farming working class – coal-mining, transporting businesses and the entertainment world are all part of this world in one way or the other.

Or, in this case, horse-breeding. Stylistically, this is actually a successful attempt at mixing the ninkyo with the western (or, given the weather and geographical location, the northern), featuring the kind of musical score that mixes typical Toei style with Italian western trumpets, and features lots of horse-riding, and an emphasis on gunplay in the western style (though Fuji does get a couple of aikido moments, as is her right).

As many good ninkyo of this phase, this isn’t a film of quite as clear-cut morals than you’d expect. Yuki is as morally upright as any Fuji character – which only works because the actress is utterly convincing as the impossible ideal she is tasked to play again and again in these films – but the world around her isn’t quite as clear-cut. Her father certainly had good intentions, but we will learn he used methods not unlike those now utilized by Yuki’s enemies – the frontier business isn’t a clean one even with the best of intentions.

As always when Fuji and Takakura are together, there’s an impressive erotic tension for a genre whose loves are nearly always doomed and only seldom allowed to be expressed physically – there’s a reason these two were in so many movies together.

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.