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| Images courtesy of Arrow Video |
Junya Sato, best known for the 1975 Sonny Chiba co-starring
action-thriller The Bullet Train and Manhunt a year later, teamed
up with film producing giant Haruki Kadokawa to bring Seiichi Morimura’s
best-selling novel Proof of the Man to the Japanese silver screen in
1977. A bilingual, largely-English dialogue
(sometimes Japanese) spoken crime thriller whodunit which alternates between
Harlem to Tokyo, its an international racially charged and socially conscious saga
that sneakily fuses together elements of the Yakuza film, police drama and
Blaxploitation thriller into a wholly original cinematic cocktail that gets
startlingly deep and emotional. Arrow
Video have picked up the domestic blu-ray disc debut rights in a new limited
edition 4K restoration supplied by Kadokawa featuring original essay writing by
The Movie Sleuth’s very own Michelle Kisner, numerous video essays and a new
audio commentary by Rob Buscher and DJ Skeme Richards.
Mixed-race Black-Japanese man Johnny Hayward (Flower
Travellin’ Band singer Joe Yamanaka) is on his way back from his home in
Harlem, New York to Tokyo, Japan when he is brutally stabbed to death in the elevator
of a swanky hotel hosting a catwalk fashion show by elite designer Kyoko
(Mariko Okada). Within the same evening,
Kyoko’s son and her powerful political husband Yohei (the legendary Toshiro Mifune)
get mixed up in a hit-and-run accident and her son flees the country, rousing
the attention of Detective Munesue (Yusaku Matsuda) who ventures out to New
York and joins forces with local American detective Ken Shuftan (George
Kennedy) in search of clues pointing to Johnny Hayward’s background. Amid the journey, Munesue catches wind of his
partner’s own painful links to Japanese history while closing in on Kyoko with
her own subset of skeletons in the closet.
Written for the screen by Zenso Matsuyama of The Human
Condition trilogy and lensed exquisitely by Vengeance is Mine cinematographer
Shinsaku Himeda on location in Japan and New York, Proof of the Man is a
masterful investigation of racial politics and identity stemming from postwar
traumas including but not limited to occupational forces while wrapped up in
the construct of a murder mystery. Featuring
a moody score by Yuji Ono and gifted performances largely from Yusaku Matsuda
and particularly Mariko Okada with a flooring soliloquy that nearly brings the
house down with her, George Kennedy drifting in and out of his element while
zeroing in on the ethnic tensions over mixed-race Black-Japanese men played
with heart and soul by Joe Yamanaka, the film is a powerful ensemble piece that
does a terrific job of cutting freely between the past and present without
overlapping or confusing the audience.
Released in 1977 theatrically, Proof of the Man went
on to become the second highest-grossing Japanese blockbuster film of all time,
amassing ¥2.25 billion in ticket sales.
The soundtrack featuring an original track by Joe Yamanaka Mama, do
you remember became a chart-topping hit in Japan as well as
Chinese-speaking countries. Sometime in
2004 a ten-episode miniseries treatment came about for Fuji TV though
comparatively it never comes close to the staying power of Junya Sato’s Toei
produced crime epic. In the pantheon of
Japanese-English bilingual film productions that travel internationally (Kinji
Fukusaku’s Virus comes to mind), Proof of the Man is undoubtedly
among the most quietly affecting. Even
now, days after seeing it, the powerful coda still lingers and stirs the
emotions and Arrow Video’s deluxe presentation makes this one of their best and
must-own disc releases!
--Andrew Kotwicki
