David Desser, ‘The Gunman and the Gun’
The biggest star of Nikkatsu Action films was Ishihara Yujiro, who had made his mark in the exciting and influential Crazed Fruit (Kurutta Kajitsu, Nakahira Ko, 1956). As successful as it was, the ‘sun tribe’ (taiyo-zoku) films wee short lived, mostly because of public outrage, so Ishihara and the studio moved to the mukokuseki action genre, including, in 1957, I Am Waiting and The Guy Who Started a Storm (Arashi o yobu otoko, Inoue Umetsugu). The latter film, a huge hit, utilized modern, Westernised locations and imagery such as the Ginza at night and its nightclubs, pop music and a violent ex-con seeking to go straight as a drummer. These invocations of noir would combine with the conscious attempts at borderlessness in Red Quay (Akai hatoba, Masuda Toshio, 1958). Despite its title, the film was in black and white (Nikkatsu was split between colour and black and white in this period, though Eastmancolor would win out for the majority of their productions soon after), which Schilling claims is a ‘reworking’ o Pépé le Moko (Julien Duvivier, 1937). It is the very seeting along the ‘quay’ (hatoba) that invokes a liminal space or borderlessness and perhaps also calls to mind Le Quai des brumes (Port of Shadow, Marcel Carne, 1938) – the two French films essentially containing the essence of noir. Ishihara, himself, contained something of borderless about him – his long legs made him seem somehow un-Japanese and the way he walked was closer to John Wayne than to any Japanese star.
The influence of both French and Hollywood cinema would continue to be apparent in Nikkatsu Action. Following in the footsteps of Ishihara Yujiro came Kobayashi Akira, three years Ishihara’s junior (both actors made their film debut in 1956, but Ishihara was an immediate star.) It was in 1959 that Kobayashi made his breakthrough out of a combination of Nikkatsu genre and Hollywood themes. Inoue Umetsugu’s The Friendship that Started a Storm (Arashi o yobu yujo) was clearly a reference to Ishiahra’s 1957 hit as was the film’s setting in Tokyo’s burgeoning jazz ilieu. Saito Buichi’s Farewell to Southern Tosa (Nangoku Tosa o ato ni shite) was another of those tales about the ex-con who is trying to go straight but is pulled back into his old life. It, too, was a smash.
Kobayashi made numerous films every year in typical Nikkatsu business mode. Yet, the films were hardly thoughtless; they may have been churned out, but they had things in mind. The mukokuseki ideal was at the top of the list. The paradigmatic borderless films were to be the wataridori series inaugurated by Saito’s The Rambling Guitarist (Guitar o motta wataridori, 1959). These were modeled on Hollywood westerns and today films in this series have come to be understood as part of a subgenre known as the Asian western. Over half a dozen installments of the series testify to their popularity and to the star’s appeal.
With Ishihara and Kobayashi churning out action films )with a touch of romance – Kitahara Mie for Ihihara, Asaoka Ruriko for Kobayashi) Nikkatsu made sure to find more dynamic young male stars and did so in the appealing forms of Wada Koji and Akagi Keiichiro, forming the ‘Diamond Line’. In the early 1960s, Joe Shishido joined the line as he became a leading man, if a decidedly unromantic one. And romance was certainly important. Kitahara and Asaoka became big stars, but not as action heroines. That was left to Kaji Meiko, who found her niche in action films in 1970 with Stray Cat Rock: Delinquent Girl Boss (Nora-neko rock: onna bancho, Hasebe Ysuharu) and extending through four more films, the most famous of which is Stray Cat Rock: Sex Hunter (Nora-neko rock: sex hunter, Hasebe). The introduction of the issue of race into the film brings a social consciousness to the cycle. Here the figures of half-black-half-Japanese teenagers bring forth a host of underlying tensions, including mixed race vs Japanese purity; the social inferiority of Africa and African-American in the Japanese mindl and the reminder of Japanese defeat in the war and the continueing presence of American soldiers on Japanese soil. Shot near the US naval base in Yokosuka, the film manages to balance its exploitation elements with its social concerns.
Kaji continued her career and achieved even greater cult fame at Toei with the ‘Female Convict 701: Scorpion’ (Joshu 701-go: Sasori, Ito Shunya) series beginning in 1972. The noir elements are even stronger here than in her previous series, as Kaji’s character Nami is set up by her corrupt police officer boyfriend to take the fall for his crimes. Her attempt to stab him lands her in prison and we have, then, also a Women-in-Prison film replete with all the rape, torture, beatings and other excuses for nudity typical of the form (which began in 1971 with Roger Corman’s The Big Doll House and Women in Cages). Sequel inevitably followed, of course, though the third, Female Convict Scorpion; Beast Stable (Joshuu saori: Kemono-beya, Ito, 1973), find Nami/Sasori out of prison and trying to go straight. AS in classic Japanese noir, she is inevitably drawn into the dark world of the city, the world of yakuza, prostitutes, vengeful cops and a touch of incest. Exploitation, perhaps, but the nor world gives such exploitation every excuse to thrive.
Back at Nikkatsu at the turn of the 1960s, the ‘Kenju’ or ‘Tales of a Gunman’ film cycle, all films of which were made in 1960 and directed by Noguch Hiroshi – Ryuji the Gun Slinger (Kenjūburaichō: Nukiuchi no Ryū); Man in Lighting (Kenjūburaichō: Futeki ni warau otoko); Man without Tomorrow (Kenjūburaichō: Asunaki otoko) – mark an important transition to noir/ These films star Akagi Keiichiro and Joe Shishido as rival gunmen, hired killers, who end up working together. Mark Schilling describes their dominant tone as ‘norish’. Agaki died in a car accident on the Nikkatsu lot in 1961; his last film was another story of a hitman, Crimson Pistol (Kurenai no Kenjū, Ushihara Yoichi, 1961).
As the early 1960s gave way to the mid-1960s, Nikkatsu’s stars, directors and audiences aged, as will inevitably happen. One could say, too, that borderless action suffered the inevitable decline of all genres – over-exposure and over-familiarity. The films of the mid-60s began to take on a darker tone and more adult themes. Films from this period especially those of Ishihara Yojiro, came to be called ‘mood action’ and, as Schilling puts it, ‘the mood was usually down’. It was during this period, beginning in 1963 with Yuth of the Beast (Yaju no seishun) under the increasingly inventive direction of Suzuki Seijun, that Joe Shishido became a star and, later, a cult figure. Schilling claims that his films at this time – A Colt Is My Passport, Branded to Kill (Koroshi no rakuin) and Slaughter Gun (Minagoroshi no Kenjū, Hasebe Yasuharu) – began to allow him to venture into the dark underside of contemporary Japanese life.
Watari tEtsuya represented the last of Nikkatsu’s attempts to bring back the glory days of the ‘Diamond Line’. He first made two films with Ishihara Yujiro in 1965-6, and starred in remakes of four of his older colleague’s films, including Velvet Hustler (Kurenai no nagareboshi, 1967), Masuda Toshio’s loose remake of Red Quay. Schilling notes that the hitman played by Watari was modeled on Jean-Paul Belmondo’s character in Breathless.
It is Branded to Kill, Suzuki’s wildly incoherent and hilarious look at a hitman with some interesting psycho-sexual proclivities, the film for which he was notoriously fired in 1968, that has best come to represent the ‘Nikkatsu Noir’ mode. The use of black and white as late as 1967 is one reason for its paradigmatic status. But, as Miyao reminds us,
The sark surfaces of film noir … came about as a result of the financial
Limitations imposed upon B pictures. In order to hide their cheap sets,
lighting was usued in such movies in a very sparse and economical
manner. Branded was eventually shot in black and white even though it
was planned as a color film from the very beginning.
The studio was experiencing a severe economic downturn at this time and so the balck and white might have been one concession to budgets. We note that A Colt Is My Passport also boast monochrome cinematography. Putting the two films side by side, so to speak, reveals interesting similarities, including that of style as well as the presence of Joe Shisido. Thoug perhaps less ‘delirious’ than Suzuki’s film, Colt, under the direction of Nomura Takashi, does some interestingly avant-garde things. A Nikkatsu contract director like Suzuki, Nomura had previously directed The Quick Draw Kid (Hayauchi yaro, 1961), another perfect paradigm of the borderless action movie, where its hero, Ace no Joe (Shshido), outwits and outshoots ‘the bad guys in a Japanese “Wild East” town the likes of which could only have existed in a Japanese studio’. Colt differes from Branded only in degree, not in kind. The climatic shoot-out features a segment of shot-reverse shot with takes of around one second each. Nor is the script particularly tight: a subplot involving the waitress at the hotel where the hitman and his driver hide out never really pays off in terms of narrative or emotional closure.
What we must take away here is that a dual fascination had developed in Japan in the 1960s, culminating in these two odd films: the hitman and the gun. We have already seen the popularity of kenjū(gun) in the ‘Tales of a Gunman’ series and we should not now the numerous other films that use kenjū in their title, as listed above. These films combine the gun with the gunman, typically a hitman. We might well wonder which of these linked icons – the gunman and the gun – give rise to the other. Guns are, in Japan, the province of criminals and policemen. Japan has extremely tough and restrictive gun-control laws; only shotguns and air rifles are legal and even they are difficult to acquire, made onerous by various levels of state control. What is forbidden in life may be fascinating on screen, and the man (or woman) who possesses a gun, who is skilled in its use and knowedgeable of its properties, perhaps becomes doubly fascinating. The figure of the hitman, though often employed by a criminal organization, is in stark contrast to the yakuza of the nikyo films popularised by Toei Studios in the postwar era through the 1970s and made by Nikkatsu too in the mid-1960s.
Ninkyo-eiga is the term used in Japan to describe a specific variation of what is more generally called the yakuza film (yakuza-eiga). The Ninkyo-eiga, or chivalry film, featured stories focusing on garishly tatooed gangsters attached to warring gnangs in the early part of the twentieth century. Nikkatsu utilised young Takahashi Hideki in their variation of the form, particularly the Otoko no monsho (Symbol of a Man) series beginning in 1963. Of these roles, he is best known for Tatooed Life (Irezumi ichidai, 1965), a relatively straightforward film considering it was made by Suzuki Seijun. But it is the Toei films that best reveal the distinction between ninkyo yakuza and the hitman variation. In lieu of a gun, the favoured weapon of the yakuza is a sword (a shorter version of the samurai katana, kept in a plain wooden scabbard); instead of a suit the yakuza wears a plain kimono that, when he prepares for a fight, is pulled down to reveal the complex interweaving of tatoos on his back. Concepts of giri/ninjo, yalty to the oyabun (gang boss) and to the yakuza brotherhood are central, as are various rituals that make for exciting cinema, especially the infamous yubitusme (slicing off the tip pf the left little fingure). The use of a modified samurai sword and the practice of yubitsume (a derivation of seppuku, presumably) link the yakuza to the samurai tradition and thus place the individual yakuza within a strong social context. Invariably there is betrayal, divided loyalties, perhaps a romance (though what is now called a ‘bromance’ is a stronger thematic), and a violent, cathartic climax that usually sees the hero dead. The hitman, with his techno-weaponry, expernsive suit and fast cars, is also a loner, a figure of modernity and not of tradition. This is what makes the gun and the gunman films far closer to noir than the yakuza film – which is often a variation of the jidai-geki (especially as the films are set in the past, albeit the more recent pat) – with its values and weapnry. Betrayal, shifting lyalties, a romance and a bromance are not uncommon, but the world in which the hitman lives is an isolated and atomised one.
Writing about Kurosawa Akira’s noir, Dolores Martinez, adapting my own ideas about Kurosawa’s portrayal of modernity and the problem of heroism, notes that for Japan and the US, ‘the struggle to be a good man in uncertain times is central to the film noir narrative ... Both postwar Japan and the USA, despite their different societies, shared this modern predicament, born within the very conditions that would produce a sense of postmodernity’. While this is undeniably ture of the Kurosawa films, it is far less ture of Nikkatsu noir. Although the times are indeed uncertain, seen in the constant betrayals that characterise the films, the hero is not necessarily a good man, except in relative terms. The ex-con trying to go straight is the closest these films come to that trope, wherein the hero used to be a bad guy and now is trying to be a good guy. The gunman movies insisit that the hero is a killer. Yet by circumscribing the world in which he operates, the films remove the greater society and leave only the yakuza world and its related locales: the restaurants, bars, nightclubs, docks, fleabag hotels and so on (what in Chinese is poetically called the jianghu – literally rivers and lakes, but referring to the world of martial artists and the people with whom they typically interact.) This separation from society, if one wishes to see it that way, but it seems clearer that the separation from sarariman reality is what is at stake. In fact, the Toei ninkyoyakuza films had an overwhelming working-class male audience, just as the Nikkatsu Noir appealed to educated youngsters: the former alienated from mainstream middle-class society; the latter resisting inclusion therein.