Repeatedly beat to a pulp by gamblers, cops, and gangsters, lone wolf Shoji Yamanaka finally finds a home as a Muraoka family hitman and falls in love with boss Muraoka's niece. Meanwhile, the ambitions of mad dog Katsutoshi Otomo draws our series' hero, Shozo Hirono, and the other yakuza into a new round of bloodshed.
Bunta Sugawara Kinya Kitaoji Meiko Kaji Sonny Chiba Hiroshi Nawa Mikio Narita Gin Maeda Asao Koike Shingo Yamashiro Hideo Murota Tatsuo Endō Yoshi Katō Kinji Nakamura Nobuo Kaneko Toshie Kimura Seizō Fukumoto Takuzō Kawatani Junko Matsudaira Eizō Kitamura Akira Shioji Nobuo Yana Hōsei Komatsu Manabu Kitaju Naotsugu Uzaki Gorō Ōki Kazutarō Kuni Masaru Shiga Yoshinobu Hirose Kōjiro Shirakawa Show All…
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whenever someone died and the soundtrack began to play that might be my favorite part.
Action! - The Way of the Yakuza: The Turbulent Battles of Fukasaku
The carnage continues as our point of focus changes; the violence, grit, and backstabbing remain the same. It's very evident that the rise within these circles is paved with blood and lots and lots of chopped-up fingers, full hands, and entire families being dispatched into the other life.
Everyone does a great job, but Kinya Kitaoji as the film's newbie and main character, Shoji Yamanaka, really shines. His somewhat wicked personality provides a striking contrast to Hirono's serene, calculated demeanor but also makes this entry more brutal. The number of dead here seems to be significantly higher than in the first.
All in all, a great followup that…
It's the post-kamikaze class, left behind by the runaway economic growth of the 1950s and just as suicidal, flying a gun instead of a Zero to their inevitable doom, taking crime families, like great war ships, down with them.
And no matter how much power a man has, no matter how cruel they are, no matter how little they value the lives of others, every one of 'em makes the same face when the gun is eventually pulled on them... cowardly, pleading, desperate, and ugly.
Less epic in scope and sprawl than the first film, also less measured. Kinji Fukasaku's rolling chaos-staging and kinetic style drive virtually every single scene this time around.
much more of a worm's-eye view than the first entry with the push-pull between honorable tradition and predatory survival manifested by the two leads. on the one hand there's the devoted Yamanaka, denied the honor of kamikaze in wartime and now motivated by his love for the daughter of the oyabun who took him in, and on the other you have Katsutoshi (Sonny Chiba, doing a pretty fantastic Mifune from SEVEN SAMURAI the whole time) as an upstart out to violently shake shit up to his advantage. to continue my pretentious line from the first film about the old codes being irradiated, these guys are like a couple of fallout neutrons careening through the gangland's atomic bonds, constantly setting off new chain reactions.
Watching the films that comprise "The Yakuza Papers" is what I imagine it is like to drink poison. Men of the yakuza are moving along to a logical end-point of filling the wounds of war with the chase for power and gunfire. There was no coming home. Fukusaka doesn't romanticize the yakuza but instead paints a picture of the horror of men who are washed away in post-war Japan.
Part two of the saga matches the original when it comes to the fast pacing, the intensity and the authenticity of the world portrayed here. This one also adds Sonny Chiba and Pinky Violence idol Meiko Kaji to the mix. That's great casting. We also get a new protagonist and like in the first one I had a little trouble keeping track of the plot and all the characters.
But I do love the direction and style Kinji Fukasaku brings to these movies. The world here really feels gritty, violent and lived in. It all looks very authentic and repulsive. So, a strong sequel that I think is on par with the original. I am still a little confused at times and emotionally detached. But I do appreciate the craftsmanship that went into these movies.
sonny chiba is frothing at the mouth in this, his gangster performance is absolutely deranged, swinging around a pistol and katana and screaming at the top of his lungs like he's a tasmanian devil spinning a tornado through the 50s yakuza underworld. it feels like any time someone casually speaks up against him that he's going to literally chew their head off their shoulders. he roots the aimless chaos of the film in a singular heretical fury that threatens to consume the script, the visuals, the characters, the whole damn thing.
I know I already mentioned I love the post war life gangster flicks of Japan but why this series works for me a lot more is the slums and fallout left after the bombing of Hiroshima. It's starts in the black market dealing in rations and evolves into gambling, drugs, prostitution, and they either evolve with what makes them money or they fall bahind. The younger families come in and introduce a much more violent world. More chaos. More death.
Also, Yamanaka broke outta prison to see Meiko Kaji. I feel you bro, I'd break outta prison for Meiko Kaji as well.
"Hiroshima shitô hen" aka "Battles Without Honor and Humanity: Deadly Fight in Hiroshima" (also "The Yakuza Papers, Vol. 2") was fairly similar to the original, entertaining and enjoyable.
The plot is pretty much a parallel "narrative" to the original but with a new location and other families. The approach taken was fairly similar, lots of "intros", characters and families (and several deaths) and their connections (notes should help lol). Again good pace and rather easy-flowing narrative.
The awesome Meiko Kaji is around! Not a "great" role but a relevant one. Same goes for Sonny Chiba, who had a very memorable role here. They both add some considerable mojo to things, while not really being the "main" characters. Bunta Sugawara reprises…
Sonny Chiba plays Goro Majima so that’s like the greatest thing ever.
And that jazz cover of the Tokyo Drifter theme song that Fukasaku subtly sneaked in here as a loving tribute to Suzuki? I heard that.
"For our honor, I'm ready to die."
I can see why Tarantino loves these movies: one of their greatest strengths is miraculously juggling a massive cast of characters while weaving an intricate web of plot via spitfire-speed dialogue. It's incredible how effectively this character-mapping fleshes out the world of postwar Japan; you have to be a bit proficient at quickly picking up and tracking a whole handful of Japanese names, which I struggled with at times (I paused halfway through this one to read the wikipedia plot synopsis, which I found very helpful), but if you can keep up there's an abundance of richly textured narrative geography to explore here.
I've always struggled to keep up with fast-paced…
