Humanity
(series)
Jingi naki tatakai
company: Toei director: Kinji Fukasaku producer: Kazuo Kasahara
serving a term for murder and gets in with the Muraoka clan. But a young, wild-eyed thug from a rival family stirs things up and plunges the clans into war once again. Episode three, Proxy War, finds Shozo in the middle of another gang war, trying to maintain his neutrality especially when tensions increase as a rival yakuza gang from Kobe dives into the fray. Shozo gets sucked into the violence once again. In the fourth episode, Police Tactics, the Tokyo Olympics are about to start and, with growing public unease over the senseless gang blood- shed, pressure is on for the police to quell the chaos. While the gangs and their leaders are rounded up, Shozo makes his move against a rival gangster who crossed him years earlier. Final Episode revolves around the gangs trying to legitimize themselves by entering politics, but that decision does not go down well with certain gangsters, such as Otomo, who want the carnage to continue.
Critique
Although director Kinji Fukasaku had already caused a sensation with his gritty, fiercely unromantic yakuza films Sympathy for the Underdog (1971) and Street Mobster (1972), the multi-part saga Battles Without
Honour and Humanity revolutionized the genre and became a box-
office smash. Unlike the earlier ninkyo eiga (chivalry films) which proved highly successful despite repetitive plot lines involving stoic, heroic criminals – more often than not played by Nikkatsu Studios’ most popular stars, Akira Kobayashi, Yujiro Ishihara, Keiichiro Akagi, and Tetsuya Watari – Fukasaku’s take on the genre was brutally honest, savagely ironic, and visually combustible due to a heavy (though skilful) use of hand-held camera shots. In complete opposi- tion to the predictable, escapist storylines that permeated the genre,
Battles without Honour and Humanity’s plots were unwieldy, complex,
and aggressively political as the series steamrolled on. There was also the vibrant rage at the core of it all. Stylized violence and brutality have always been the crimson-stained hallmark of the genre, but with Fukasaku’s films the violence and anarchy perpetuated by this new criminal class was spectacularly stripped of its heroic, honour-bound traditions, revealing only the ugly brutality and stupidity underneath the tacky hipness.
In many ways, these rough-and-tumble films are the antithesis of Francis Ford Coppola’s more widely known Godfather films (the first one being released the year before Fukasaku’s first instalment). Both series are epic in scope with large casts and complex plots but, where Coppola cannot help but indulge in romanticizing his Italian mobsters to Shakespearean proportions, Fukasaku always maintains that these sharks in suit and ties are still sharks. Based on a series of newspaper articles written by a retired yakuza member, Fukasaku and his screen- writers diligently document the lives of the criminal class, showing us in excruciating detail how completely boring and repetitive all of the backroom squabbling, gambling, and vendetta-making truly is, though without ever boring us. Although it is Fukasaku’s approach to violence which immediately captures our attention, heightened by cinematographer Sadaji Yoshida’s jittery camera work replicating the spontaneity of street violence in all its gritty, uncalculated glory,
screenwriters: Koichi Iiboshi Kazuo Kasahara cinematographer: Sadaji Yoshida art director: Takatoshi Suzuki composer: Toshiaki Tsushima duration (series): 500 minutes cast: Bunta Sugawara Hiroki Matsukata Kunie Tanaka Eiko Nakamura Tsunehiko Watase Goro Ibuki years: 1973, 1974, 1975, 1976 Contemporary Blockbusters 115
upon subsequent viewings it becomes apparent that the camera work, widescreen compositions, and superbly-orchestrated frenetic action scenes are more calculated than initially thought. Almost forty years since these films exploded on screens, the rage contained within them is still overwhelming.
But despite the immediacy and brilliance of these moments, it is the carefully drawn-out and admittedly confusing multi-layered story and central performance by the coolly magnetic Bunta Sugawa that remain the series’ strong points. Fukasaku’s series has frequently been compared to Coppola’s Godfather films and the comparison is not as reckless as it initially seems. Both are complex, dense, and stylish dis- sections of their subject matter. But whereas Coppola’s epics are self- consciously artistic and infuse his cast of gangsters with moral depth, equating the Corleone family with something far more noble and mythic than they arguably deserve, Fukasaku never deviates from por- traying his killers as killers, although actor Bunta Sugawara’s character does have his own tarnished badge of honour to defend. Coppola’s films, despite their virtuosic artistry, are removed from the reality of accurate mob life – a condemnation that could never be hurled at Fukasaku’s loser wolves. And because of that, Fukasaku’s series is the harder to digest at the end of it all, and the harder to shake. Despite the overall thematic complexities of the two series, Fukasaku’s films are closer in spirit to William Friedkin’s police procedural The French
Connection (1971) and Martin Scorsese’s own demythologized
gangster epic Goodfellas (1990). Perhaps if he had clouded up his vision with romantic subplots, pop psychology, and grandiose violent set-pieces, Fukasaku’s thugs would be spoken of with reverence the world over as well. Thankfully, there is still something threatening and unwholesome underlying it all. Even underneath the larger-than-life swagger and anti-authoritarianism, these cinematic predators still have the ability to startle.
derek Hill
Synopsis
Aoshima works as a detective for the Wangan Police Service in the bay area of Tokyo. After the precinct’s commissioner is kidnapped out- side his home, Aoshima and his local colleagues are supplanted from the case by the more senior Special Investigations service. One of the main investigators is Aoshima’s friend and former Wangan colleague, Muroi. After a failed ransom exchange, however, the sophisticated techniques of Special Investigations fail to produce any substantial leads. In the meantime Inspector Waku has also been kidnapped after trailing a suspicious character returning to the kidnapping scene. Although consigned to traffic duty, Aoshima takes it upon himself to question Hyuga, a brilliant but sociopathic criminal recently captured by the Wangan police, and to track down the kidnapper.