Radiance Films: The Boxer (1977) - Reviewed

Images courtesy of Radiance Films

Back in 2024, Michelle Kisner of The Movie Sleuth assembled an excellent Director Spotlight article on three key works of surrealist elliptical Japanese filmmaker Shuji Terayama.  Comprehensive and detailed, she covered his debut film Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets, his BDSM drama Fruits of Passion and today’s Radiance Films acquisition with his 1977 sports drama The Boxer.  Starring Bunta Sugawara of their recently released The Japanese Godfather Trilogy box, the film was previously only available to Western consumers through third party sellers.  Thanks to recent efforts by Toei Films to give the picture a proper worldwide Blu-ray disc premiere, Radiance Films have put together a comprehensive package of a film that predates works like Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull in terms of subverting how we think we characterize and process fight sequences in contemporary Japanese cinema.
 
Former boxing champion Hayabusa (Bunta Sugawara) one day decides to throw in the towel, allowing his opponent to overpower him before quitting boxing entirely and leaving his wife and daughter behind while choosing to live in a squalid flat with his mangled but trusty Doberman.  On the cusp of his brother’s wedding, tragedy strikes when another employee named Tenma (Kentaro Shimizu) working a forklift on a construction site accidentally drops heavy car parts on the man, killing him.  Sensing it was motivated by jealousy as Tenma also expressed romantic feelings for his brother’s fiancée, Hayabusa sets out to avenge himself on the youth.  Against expectations and odds, however, Tenma who is rejected by boxing trainers because of his limp and determined to make amends with Hayabusa.  Despite his resentment, Hayabusa gradually warms up to the chance and finds kinship in the disabled youth as his own eyesight begins fading as he struggles to keep vision of the fight ensuing before him. 

 
Elliptical, hyperkinetic and intentionally disjointed with some sequences leaning towards near total artifice from Moonlight Serenade cinematographer Tatsuo Suzuki’s frequently multicolored camerawork drifting in and out of sepia, Technicolor and psychedelia to eventual Revolutionary Girl Utena composer J.A. Seazer’s jazz/rock infused score, The Boxer is like no other boxing sports drama you’ve seen before.  Despite immediate comparisons some will draw to the underdog boxing opus Rocky, Terayama’s film is firmly rooted in distinctly Japanese poverty whether it resides on the moors or in seaside ports with a soft-lit grittiness reminiscent of Vilmos Zsigmond’s work on The Deer Hunter.  Terayama’s vision of Japanese pubs and bars our hero saunters in and out of presents a Japan not wholly dissimilar from the ones lensed by Kinji Fukusaku or Kiyoshi Kurosawa: in squalor with the struggling underdog boxing trainee clawing his way to the top.

 
Bunta Sugawara brings over to his boxer Hayabusa a combination of pride, shame, internal conflict and a need for redemption who draws out another man of equal guilt, despair and a desire to stand back up on his own two feet again.  Playing excellently off of him is Kentaro Shimizu as Tenma who initially seems like a ne’er do well until the path to redemption involves confronting and trying to warm up to his sworn mortal enemy.  One of the virtues of the film is that neither character is all good or bad with both making mistakes that throw our collective opinions about them into question.  Take for instance a subplot where Tenma tries to seduce Hayabusa’s teenage daughter, a move which incurs further wrath upon Tenma while further complicating his own relations with Daddy’s little girl.  There’s palpable anger and resentment being conveyed through Hayabusa’s punches but again it speaks to both troubled characters being lost and finding some kind of solace in one another’s company. 

 
Released in October of 1977 through Toei Films, The Boxer proved to be one of Shuji Terayama’s more accessible pictures compared to what had come before and would follow after.  Still intentionally disjointed and sometimes told in a nonlinear fashion, it both furthered Terayama’s own interest in the boxing arena as an outlet (or perhaps haven) of psychological and physical endurances as well as offered the closest thing to a straightforward genre picture for the director.  Bunta Sugawara and Kentaro Shimizu are both fantastic in equally physically demanding roles and the Radiance Films Blu-ray disc premiere is stacked with extras including an interview with the film’s composer J.A. Seazer, an expansive visual essay by Midnight Eye critic Tom Mes and a collectible booklet of essay writings by Maria Roberta Novielli. 

 
As a newcomer to the Japanese boxing drama as well as the work of Shuji Terayama, The Boxer sidesteps expectations even in today’s oversaturated arena of sports dramas as an incisive and sometimes acerbic character study of two lost souls who strive to overcome each other’s prejudices and preconceptions towards a mutual path of enlightenment.  Radiance Films have done it again with their time-honored OBI spined package and here’s hoping they license out more Terayama works in the near future in maybe Japan’s most iconoclastic surrealist since Seijun Suzuki or Hiroshi Teshigahara. 

--Andrew Kotwicki