Japan Organized Crime Boss

Fukasaku’s first film about modern Yakuza after his return to the Toei Studio. Toei’s Yakuza star Tsuruta Koji plays the lead of a bitterly battling gang leader who tries to keep the age old codes of honour alive and to maintain his position in a bloody battle for power between two rival gangs. In Yokohama, a battle breaks out between two Yakuza gangs, one concentrated around Tokyo and the other one around Osaka, both out to expand their territory. Both link up with smaller local gangs. After eight years, the head of one of the gangs comes out of jail and becomes involved against his wishes in the emerging power struggle. He violently resists the new kind of Yakuza monstrous alliance that is trying to pull the strings in politics too. The indirect gang war in which local gangs have to do the dirty work is a reflection of the postwar underbelly of Japanese society, portrayed with almost delirious camerawork; a style and theme that later return in the series Battles Without Honour and Humanity. Another theme of Fukasaku that will return even more often is the symbolising of the two fundamentally different ways in which the Japanese come to terms with the postwar reconstruction, expressed here in the hostility between two gang members who confront each other despite once having been blood brothers. Ando Noboru was a striking star who exchanged his existence as a real Yakuza boss for a film career and played the lead in many Yakuza films from the Toei Studio. This was Fukasaku’s first cooperation with Ando, and also with Sugawara Bunta and Wakayama Tomosaburo, the two other popular stars from the glorious days of the Yakuza film.