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| Images courtesy of Arrow Video |
Immediately following his 1964 crime thriller Wolves, Pigs
and Men and years prior to the emergence of his yakuza film series Battles
Without Honor and Humanity, Japanese maverick writer-director Kinji
Fukusaku was churning out films at a staggering rate one after another before
landing on his 1966 home invasion thriller The Threat. A riff on William Wyler’s The Desperate
Hours involving two escaped convicts who invade an ordinary family’s home
with the intent of using hostages to fulfill their gains and evade authority
capture and incarceration, this Toei Company offering was notable for its co-writer/director
Fukusaku returning to the black-and-white panoramic widescreen format with
monaural sound. Prominently starring
Akira Kurosawa stalwart Ko Nishimura as the leader of the criminal duo preying
on civilian weakness and spoken of the same breath as that director’s ransom
drama High and Low, Fukusaku’s largely overlooked crime thriller gem
comes to blu-ray in the United States for the first time thanks to the ongoing
efforts of Arrow Video in their new limited special edition release.
Prestigious advertising agency account manager Misawa
(Rentaro Mikuni) is a family man with a beautiful wife Hiroki (Masumi Harukawa)
and his two children leads a fruitful yet quiet city life as the defining example
of Japan’s postwar economic miracle.
However, this carefully constructed modernized tranquility comes with a
cost when their home is invaded by two dangerous and brutally violent death row
prison escapees Kawanishi (Ko Nishimura) and Sabu (Hideo Murota) who have also
kidnapped the grandson of cancer expert Dr. Sakata (Ken Mitsuda) for
ransom. Forcing Misawa at gunpoint and
at the threat of endangering his family’s safety, he becomes an unwanted
intermediary between Sakata and the two gangsters. Meanwhile as authorities continue to search relentlessly
for the escapees, the beleaguered nebbish Misawa is forced into a corner where,
not wholly unlike the hero of The Desperate Hours or Straw Dogs,
the seemingly meek figure slowly finds his inner manhood as he prepares to take
on the two criminals himself and save his family.
In league with the aforementioned Kurosawa effort with Kinji
Fukusaku’s trademark freneticism from fast editing to wickedly energetic
handheld camerawork often tilting towards Dutch angles, The Threat is a
solid Japanese home invasion thriller with a decidedly more abrasive edge to it
when it comes to criminal violence. From
an attempted sexual attack by Sabu against Misawa’s wife Hiroki to a startling
scene where Misawa freely takes a furious beating from Sabu only to stand back
upright unfazed by the attack, the movie is as much about the titular threat of
criminal violence as it is about the civilized man’s weaknesses when backed
into a corner followed by unexpected measures of strength. What initially began as a study of the upper
class versus the lower-class ala High and Low eventually morphs into a
portrait of a mild-mannered man slowly conquering his own fears until he
decides to up and take his and his family’s lives back.
Lensed in black-and-white 35mm 2.35:1 scope widescreen by Abashiri
Prison cinematographer Yoshikazu Yamazawa, the film is a technical mixture
of elegant framing and composition and the director’s trademark handheld
camerawork that feels like a feral wild animal attacking every corner of its cage
trying to claw its way out. To have seen
a Fukusaku film in the theater, a progenitor to the eventual style of Paul
Greengrass, must’ve been like being on a roller coaster ride. When he isn’t using Dutch angles of actors’
faces, he uses superimpositions of Tokyo night life that must’ve paved the way
for some of the more hallucinatory travelogues in Gaspar Noe’s Enter the Void. The score by Jungle Emperor Leo and Demon
Pond composer Isao Tomita is the stuff of melancholic jazzy Hell somewhere
between the Japan night life and a kind of Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew brassy
sound that signals chaos and disorder reflecting the feelings of Misawa under
criminal control.
As an ensemble piece, The Threat is splendidly acted
across the board with Rentaro Mikuni as the film’s patriarch who finds his
world besieged by murderous escaped convicts giving an excellent performance as
a man who initially doesn’t know how to act in the situation and finds himself
taking out his frustrations on his terrified wife Hiroki also played
excellently by Masumi Harukawa. Veteran
Kurosawa actor Ko Nishimura of The Bad Sleep Well makes escaped convict
Kawanishi into a dangerous and threatening presence while his dumb boorish toady
Sabu played by Hideo Murota does all the heavy lifting for Kawanishi. Overall an ensemble piece anchored by the
four principal actors, The Threat is a tense thriller for how it
establishes all the characters and raises the stakes as it nears closer to the
finish line.
Produced and released by Toei in 1966, the brisk and swift
black-and-white home invasion crime thriller The Threat co-written by
Ichiro Miyagawa (The Sinners of Hell) comes to Arrow Video in a deluxe
limited edition featuring a collectible essay booklet, new audio commentary by
Tom Mes and reversible sleeve and poster art.
Looking at it now, it functions as a taut companion piece of sorts to
William Wyler’s The Desperate Hours in terms of portraying how ordinary
civilized families respond to violent invading attack and the gradual finding
of one’s own inner strength to fight back.
Fukusaku’s filmography is diverse and all across the map but The
Threat is rather grounded and has the aura of a chamber piece with the hostages
tightly packed together under duress as they think their way out of the
situation. Arrow’s release is beautiful
and makes another important inclusion of the great Japanese director’s work
into our home video libraries.
--Andrew Kotwicki
