Radiance Films: Eighteen Years in Prison (1967) - Reviewed

Images courtesy of Radiance Films

Before becoming a film director himself, Tai Kato was a screenwriter and assistant director to Akira Kurosawa on his legendary 1950 jidaigeki Rashomon who initially worked for Toho as a documentary filmmaker.  After the Second World War, Kato moved away from documentaries into the jidaigeki himself before shifting gears again in the 1960s with a tenure at Toei where he churned out a wide variety of yakuza pictures.  Spoken of the same breath as Kinji Fukusaku or Yasuharu Hasebe with the visual flair and uncompromising brutality of both directors, the filmmaker’s own experience with the shifting social mores of postwar Japanese society invariably played into his 1967 prison drama/yakuza actioner Eighteen Years in Prison.
 
Unveiled in its world blu-ray disc premiere through Radiance Films, the film echoes the timeline lived not only by its director but particularly former soldier turned yakuza turned movie star Noboru Ando who doesn’t inhabit the role of wrongfully imprisoned Kawada so much as he relives it.  In the film, Kawada (Noboru Ando) and his partner Tsukada (Asao Koike) are wading through postwar contraband amid American occupation when a gunfight sends Tsukada off and running while Kawada takes the fall and winds up in a brutal unforgiving prison system commandeered by thuggish warden Hannya (Lone Wolf and Cub star Tomisaburo Wakayama).  Meanwhile Tsukada forms a yakuza gang whose exploits threaten the safety of a young woman both men are smitten by and Kawada vows to escape and hit the reset button on this sordid operation once and for all.

 
An examination of the ongoing remnants and battle scars left behind by war and a particular period of occupation where former soldiers found themselves swept up in an underworld of crime from drugs to sex trafficking, violence and murder, Eighteen Years in Prison serves many functions.  It works as a nonjudgmental if not searing historical drama, then it segues into the prison picture with hints of the yakuza film looming over the proceedings before all three disparate subgenres clash.  Conveying onscreen a very real postwar image of the reintegrated soldier drifting in and out of prison and/or criminal retribution, Noboru Ando becomes the face of many Japanese men who found themselves at crossroads in a country withering in ruin.  For many involved, the war hadn’t ended for them so much as it merely took on another shape. 

 
Co-written by Kazuo Kasahara and Shin Morita with arresting scope cinematography by Osamu Furuya which manages to be vast or claustrophobic including but not limited to heavy use of deep shadows and darkness and a somber softly jazzy score by Hajime Kaburagi, Eighteen Years in Prison is something of an iron-fisted progenitor to Kinji Fukusaku’s hit film series Battles Without Honor and Humanity while also zeroing in on the difficulties of being Japanese during that violently transitional period.  

Utilizing tight close-ups of actors’ faces with particular regard for their piercing eyes, the tone and aura of the film is one of constant threat with a very strong likelihood you’ll be kicked in the face, punched in the stomach or locked up in solitary confinement.  As an ensemble actor’s piece it largely rests on the shoulders of Noboru Ando’s real-world life experience carrying over onto the silver screen.  It is worth noting the film also co-stars Asao Koike in the role of Tsukada from Radiance Films’ own recently released Sympathy for the Underdog.  Having grown used to Tomisaburo Wakayama in heroic leading roles, it is a nice change of pace seeing him play a thuggish heavy.

 
Released in 1967 to Japanese cinemas, the film was immediately regarded as an uncompromising genre classic highlighting war-torn Japan, the reaction to the occupation and the proliferation of yakuza crime lords in a stylistic manner with a relatable actor more or less playing the role he was born to play.  A definitive screen image of the Japanese yakuza in a postwar American occupied Japan and one of the strongest prison films of the end of the 1960s, Eighteen Years in Prison while considered universally to be the blueprint for a certain Kinji Fukusaku film series nevertheless finds its own teeth and footing as perhaps one of the most unlikely authentic portraits of post-WWII featuring an actual army veteran who fought in the war since William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives.  As always, Radiance Films have put together a wonderful comprehensive package replete with original essays by Tom Mes, Tony Rayns and an original interview with Noboru Ando.

--Andrew Kotwicki