Prolific
Japanese auteur and often director-for-hire Kinji Fukusaku established himself
in the early 1970s as one of the top yakuza genre picture directors with his
quintet of postwar Yakuza action thrillers, Battles
Without Honor and Humanity. Having
wrapped up the series with Final Episode,
the fifth entry in the series starring Bunta Sugawara as former soldier turned
yakuza hero Shozo Hirono, Fukusaku capped the series off but not before Toei
Company asked the director if he’d be willing to make three more given the
popularity of the series at the time.
Where Fukusaku stood by ending the original series in the manner he did,
the filmmaker agreed to Toei’s wishes and wound up generating three more loosely
connected entries resulting in what became the New Battles Without Honor and Humanity film trilogy.
Prominently
featuring Bunta Sugawara yet overlapping the time periods within the first
series while recasting the actors in swapped roles, compounded by a greater
emphasis on the female characters caught in the crossfire this time around,
this new series of films are somewhat meta while offering viewers more or less
a brief spinoff series to the smash hit Battles
Without Honor and Humanity series.
While these new films don’t necessarily require newcomers to have seen
the previous quintet of films leading up to them, as they each play as
standalone stories with only the actors and director connecting them, this
small trilogy of yakuza pictures play almost like bonus episodes for loyal fans
with subtle nods to the original series while very much being their own items
which aren’t linked in any chronological chain of events like the first series
was. In any event, with Arrow Video’s
first-time home video release of these films in the United States, let us take
a look at this spinoff series from one of Japan’s greatest yakuza filmmakers.
New Battles Without Honor and Humanity (1974)
In
the first entry of the series generated almost immediately after the end of the
Final Episode, New Battles Without Honor and Humanity jettisons much of the
documentary approach utilized in the original series and fewer introductory
notes to ease the audience into the proceedings. More or less, we’re dropped into this series
with only our familiarity being Bunta Sugarawa and director Fukusaku while
offering up an entirely new set of characters and timelines. Starring Sugawara as Miyoshi Makio as a
yakuza underling who after prison time becomes the focus between two criminals,
Yamamori and Aoki, who are struggling to get him to side with their respective
factions. On the side, Miyoshi shacks up
with a prostitute he develops an affection for, offering up a newfound element
of feminism absent from the previous Battles
Without Honor and Humanity series.
What
is present, as always, is Fukusaku’s frenetic handheld visual style, mixing
chaotic and intentionally bumpy tracking shots with canted angles give viewers
something of a fly-on-the-wall perspective of the yakuza mayhem and bloodshed
ensuing. Fukusaku’s direction of the
action sequence remains distinctive and clearly influential on modern day
action pictures and while what’s being exercised in this New Battles Without Honor and Humanity don’t necessarily offer
Fukusaku fans something wholly ‘new’ per se, the imagery and frantic energies
are unmistakably Fukusaku’s. Also
carrying over from the original series is Sugawara’s debonair cool, stoic
figure and formidability as a yakuza giant audiences learn to love while
keeping their guard up around. As with
Sonny Chiba, Sugawara is pretty clearly Fukusaku’s teammate with an implicit
understanding of how to approach the character, further explaining how Fukusaku
and Sugawara were able to generate this new film only six months after the Final Episode had ended.
On
it’s own, this first New Battles Without
Honor and Humanity entry which deliberately plays like a semi-related kid
cousin to the first series and as such, fans of the genre and Fukusaku will get
a solid and entertaining standalone effort.
Seen in conjunction with the original series, the new film plays like
more of the same which Fukusaku admittedly serves up in the action department
and the casting. While new ground isn’t
necessarily being broken here, that Fukusaku was content to explore his own
film series as a kind of spinoff while satisfying the demands of Toei Company
shows the auteur as a unique and content artist who neither harbored too much
pride to revisit the series that made him a namesake in Japan nor
condescendingly offered up the same shtick again and again like most ongoing
series of genre films tend to. New Battles Without Honor and Humanity
clearly is by design intended to stand in the shadows of the films which came
before it but Fukusaku derails the settings and plotlines just enough that it
can be regarded as it’s own animal.
Score:
The Boss's Head (1975)
Only
a year later after the first loosely connected New Battles Without Honor and Humanity emerged, Fukusaku and
Sugawara reunited again on the new series’ second entry, The Boss’s Head. Falling
somewhere between Fukusaku’s Doberman Cop
and Cops Vs. Thugs than his
preexisting Battles Without Honor and
Humanity films, The Boss’s Head
presents Sugawara again torn between rivaling factions when he tries to help
out his heroin addicted friend and fellow yakuza Tetsuya (Tsutomu Yamazaki)
take out a rival yakuza. Needless to
say, it goes wrong and Sugawara ultimately takes the fall, resulting in the
battleground for a revenge thriller as Sugawara vows for justice. Adding to the cast this time around is Female Prisoner Scorpion actress Meiko
Kaji as Tetsuya’s wife Misako struggling with her husband’s downward spiral
into addiction.
Amping
up the action with a still spectacular car chase sequence involving three
yakuzas relentlessly pursuing one another amid heavy gunfire, a sequence which
still stuns even today, The Boss’s Head would
afford director Fukusaku with the opportunity to exhibit some of the most
graphic portrayals of heroin addiction presented at the time. Still harrowing and unflinching even now,
it’s a thread which would become characteristic in Fukusaku’s work regarding
yakuzas descending into addiction and the fallout generated therein. A strong factor in both If You Were Young: Rage and Graveyard
of Honor, Japanese drug addiction had yet to be addressed in Japanese film
at the time let alone with the ferocity Fukusaku brought to his depiction. While commonplace now, this was pretty
shocking for it’s day and further established Fukusaku as a hard nosed realist
in Japanese film, giving us all the gory details whether we wanted them or not.
Back
to the film’s place in the Battles
Without Honor and Humanity lore, as with the first entry in the new series,
The Boss’s Head understandably drew
criticisms that Fukusaku was repeating himself with the new series by diving
back into familiar territory. While
maybe true, Fukusaku’s technical mastery of the genre and command of his actors
is so strong you don’t mind so much if you’re knowingly getting more of the
same from him. In a way these new
entries, particularly this one, play like footnotes which offer up other
aspects to series of threads enhancing the original series while finding their
own wings as established yakuza yarns.
Not unlike the Outlaw Gangster:
VIP film series, these were made in a heartbeat and gave viewers similarly
repetitive iterations while presenting their own subtle differences. As such, The
Boss’s Head on it’s own stands as a gritty, funky, rain soaked and often
noir-ish Yakuza yarn that proved to be an even more satisfying genre exercise
than the first film kicking off the new
series.
Score:
The Last Days of the Boss (1976)
Fukusaku
regular Bunta Sugawara returns to the leading role of the New Battles Without Honor and Humanity series one last time as
vengeful yakuza Nozaki with the third and final installment, The Last Days of the Boss. Bringing closure to the brief spinoff series
following the success of his smash hit Battles
Without Honor and Humanity yakuza action film series, of the three The Last Days of the Boss is often
regarded as the most polished and linear of the trilogy which tended with
Fukusaku’s fragmented and chaotic narrative approach to be all over the place. Joining the cast this time around is Outlaw Gangster VIP regular Chieko
Matsubara as Nozaki’s sister who finds herself in the crossfire of a yakuza war
when Nozaki vows vengeance for the assassination of the boss who changed his
life. As with the previous two features,
the stories remain disparate from the original Battles Without Honor and Humanity series, playing out like three
episodes from a spinoff series which takes place within the same world yet with
a new set of characters.
The
New Battles Without Honor and Humanity series
is noted for the depiction of how the yakuza world’s female characters are
treated and nowhere is that truer here, opening the film on a bloody crime
scene involving a murdered prostitute.
Further still, Chieko Matsubara, carrying over her own connection to the
yakuza world from her Nikkatsu pictures, puts herself in a dangerous spot by
being on the receiving end of the thuggish behavior of her fellow yakuza
men. While maltreatment of women in the
yakuza picture remains an ugly reality of the world being dramatized, Fukusaku
brought it to the forefront while presenting viewers with fully fledged three
dimensional female characters who must fight to survive in the male dominated
crime syndicate. Moreover, it
illustrates from a dramatic standpoint the emotional scars inflicted on the
siblings of a battered woman and the toll it takes on the film’s hero trying to
inject righteousness in a world chock full of wrongdoing.
The
idea of assassinating a boss and the seriousness with which the yakuza
treatment of women is addressed in The
Last Days of the Boss closes the trilogy on notes viewers at the time never
considered before. In a way, The Last Days of the Boss was groundbreaking
for the time for turning the genre picture on it’s head while serving up the
familiar yakuza warfare filmgoers came to love.
While the prior two entries in the New
Battles Without Honor and Humanity series hinted at the impending female
perspective absent from the original film series, it comes into full bloom
here, making the experience simultaneously tragic and cathartic. Yes we get the usual hyperviolent action
chase sequences and rapid gunfire as before, but it’s counterbalanced by a
point of view that gives solidarity, heart and emotional resonance to the
piece, rounding it out as easily the best of the trilogy.
Score:
- Andrew Kotwicki