By Bryan Hartzheim
Film critic Mark Schilling's illuminating series "No Limits, No Borders," a 13-film program that debuted at the Udine Film Festival, showcased a collection of gangster films from studio Nikkatsu produced during the late 50s to late 60s, a series dubbed Nikkatsu akushon ("Nikkatsu action") that is little known outside of Japan. A melting pot of westerns, youth films, detective potboilers, and a dash of romantic mixer, the mukokuseki akushon ("borderless action") films from Nikkatsu during this period not only helped launch the careers of the "Diamond Line," a small lineup of macho stars like Yujiro Ishihara, Akira Kobayashi, Keiichiro "Tony" Akagi, Tetsuya Watari, and Jo Shishido -- along with their female counterparts Ruriko Asaoka, Mie Kitahara, and Izumi Ashikawa -- but were also a creative outlet for up-and-coming young directors, Seijun Suzuki being the most recognized in the west, who were given more free reign to experiment than with the usual studio product.
Schilling's book on the subject was finally given a wider release late last year, and half of the thirteen films made their way to a recent retrospective at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood, California. Since Suzuki's films are widely acclaimed and available in the west, Schilling's original series included films from notable but overlooked directors like Toshio Masuda, Yasuharu Hasebe, and Koreyoshi Kurahara. What the Egyptian series does not include are any movies from the most popular player of the "Diamond Line," Yujiro Ishihara, whose rebellious poses inspired an enthusiasm for cinema in young girls across Japan like no other actor before or since. Still, the screening of the Egyptian's selected six has enough variation -- chiefly in their locales, which span Tokyo, Kobe, and Yokohama (none of the Hokkaido-based Wanderer series were unfortunately included). Like similar abbreviated retrospectives across the U.S., the Nikkatsu Action film series will hopefully introduce more filmgoers to this neglected period of Japanese cinema, as well as induce distribution companies to pick up these titles which, save for The Velvet Hustler, are commercially unavailable on DVD or VHS with English subtitles. Below are brief reviews of four of the six films screened:
My Colt is My Passport (Koruto wa Ore no Passport, 1967)
Jo Shishido plays Kamimura, a gangster who has been hired to kill a rival yakuza boss. After completing the deed, he and his young partner (Jerry Fujio) attempt to flee the country, but are cut off at every turn by big bosses -- both their rival's and their own. The two hole up in a hotel that serves as a rest stop for truckers while they try to find a way to catch a boat out of Yokohama's docks. The innovation obviously lies not in the plot, but in the fusion of film styles, genres, and even musical scores, presaging some of the stylistic grandstanding Suzuki would employ in Branded to Kill but without the parodic undertone.
The party bag of elements in My Colt is My Passport is a result of some deft collaboration, including several figures working at the top of their craft, particularly the trio of director Takashi Nomura, composer Harumi Ibe, and DP Shigeyoshi Mine. Nomura's direction is swift and meticulous. The film lays out the lengthy approach to an assassination and ends it before one realizes it's even begun. Ibe's dramatic score, typical for a genre picture, is mixed with a stunning Ennio Morricone-like spaghetti-western melody and a jazz soundtrack, while Mine's cinematography is full of justly famous and fresh compositions, notable among them a 15-minute opening sequence full of POV shots strictly from the assassin's rifle and an airport lounge full of lurking hitmen. Shishido also deserves special recognition. The film, a personal favorite of his, helped launch his career as an action star, and his performance is toughness distilled to its totally alienated essence.
The Velvet Hustler (Kurenai no Nagareboshi, 1967)
Toshio Masuda might have lacked the stylistic bravura of his contemporaries like Koreyoshi Kurahara or Yasuharu Hasebe, but his product was like his frequently cast male protagonist Tetsuya Watari: no frills, reliable, workmanlike, and consistently professional. The Velvet Hustler, itself a remake of Masuda's 1958 Red Quay, is titled presumably for Watari's hat-donning, insouciant yakuza punk Goro, but the Japanese title, "A Crimson Shooting Star," seems more appropriate.
The film begins with Goro hotwiring a red sports car, gunning down a rival yakuza member, and speeding down a highway ramp all to the tune of an infectious whistle of a pop song. Goro ducks to Kobe for a year, biding his time between easy women and chimpira (small-time yakuza). While he craves a return to Tokyo, he's comfortable with his Kobe existence. He's suddenly hounded by a police detective and a rival assassin who both want to bring him down, but it's only after he meets a mysterious rich girl from Tokyo who has come to Kobe looking for her jewelry dealer fiancé (Ruriko Asaoka) that he begins to act with conviction -- trying to save her and sleep with her in the process.
Watari's performance here has been compared to the work of Jean Paul Belmondo, no doubt due to the many references by The Velvet Hustler to Jean Luc Godard's Breathless. But Watari actually owes far more to the gangsters of Humphrey Bogart. His yakuza might be a brat and a punk who kills casually, but he never gets off on it. Watari's Goro is a romantic with a wide sentimental streak, a petty thug only too willing to let his guard down, but only for that special, one-of-a-kind gal. The interplay between his shuffling and jiving before Asaoka's cryptic elegance is not only convincingly humorous, but in the end, convincingly moving. The Velvet Hustler is more romance than action and is thus representative of a sub-genre within Nikkatsu's violence: the muudo akushon ("mood action") movie.
Gangster VIP (Burai Yori Daikanbu, 1968)
Watari is most famous in the west for his starring role in the Suzuki camp classic Tokyo Drifter, but his fame was cemented with the six-film Burai series focusing on a yakuza cast out not only from society but his own warring clan. The Burai series is also director Masuda's contribution to the evolution of the yakuza picture: in tone and thematic meat, it resembles and precedes the nihilistic impulses of Kinji Fukusaku's gangster flicks far more than Seijun Suzuki's.
The first of the series, Gangster VIP, begins with the origins of Watari's Goro (this time based on the confessions of real-life ex-gangster Goro Fujita), who has been forced into the world of crime after being helpless to prevent the death of his little sister when he was a child. After serving a three-year prison sentence for stabbing a rival hitman, Goro returns to a Tokyo very different from how he left it: his fiancé has married an ordinary salaryman, his mistakes are not forgiven by rival bosses with the offering of a severed finger, and his boss no longer finds Goro worth backing in the face of an impending gang war. Even the stabbed hitman, who Goro has known since he was a child, is no longer favored by his own clan. Both attempt to start over in new towns with new loves, but even leaving doesn't come easy for Goro. The women are once again doe-eyed saints here, but Watari's empathetic performance -- charismatic to the hilt -- overshadows and elevates even the weakest of other roles.
The Weird Lovemakers (aka The Warped Ones) (Kyonetsu no Kisetsu, 1960)
This is ostensibly more of a youth film than a gangster film, but the youths are more sadistic than any of the gangsters. The lead protagonist Akira, played by the volatile Tamio Kawachi, is good-looking, tanned, and villainous, a delinquent who refuses to inhibit even his most criminal impulses. He rapes and robs to the tune of a jazz record in his head; if you stop it, he goes berserk. If the world were a basketball court, Akira would be Ron Artest and the entire Bad Boys roster packed into the lean frame of a surfer boy.
The film meanders, following the rapid thoughts of Akira and his two friends, one a prostitute, the other an incipient yakuza thug. Akira, however, for all of his carnal activity, doesn't dig violence or the yakuza; his world has a sort of insane but consistent logic, and it is the intention of director Koreyoshi Kurahara to reflect that logic visually. He does it mightily, with rapid swish-pans, still frames, and jump cuts from one frenetic scene to another, all under the steady employment of a handheld camera that is operated with disregard and yet total control. If this is Tokyo, it's as unrecognizable as any of the homeless shanties of Kurosawa or Imamura -- and as artfully rendered as well. Kurahara went on to a career of family movies following his experimental Nikkatsu days, and Kawachi -- one-third of Nikkatsu's "Bad Boy Trio" (along with Akira Kobayashi and Tadao Sawamoto) -- would go on to instill his volcanic vitality into a number of crime pictures, most notably the seven-part Viper Brothers series (Mamushi no kyodai) alongside Bunta Sugawara in the 1970s. But the two's strongest, most audacious work was their first collaboration here.