Street Mobster

The first film in which Fukasaku worked with Sugawara Bunta as protagonist and the start of a lengthy cooperation that would demonstrate its explosive power a year later in the first Battles Without Honour and Humanity film. In this film too, just as in Under the Flag of the Rising Sun, it is a matter of Fukasaku’s emotions and ideas about the great postwar changes in Japanese society, this time in the more anarchic form of a Yakuza gang war. After spending five years in jail, the protagonist returns to society to find out that ‘his spot’ has changed beyond recognition. With his gang members he comes into conflict with another Yakuza gang for the same territory and rushes round with his sidekicks in a whirlwind of unbridled violence. They decide to accept a lucrative offer and to join another gang, but when this gang later comes under the control of an even larger crime syndicate, the new gang threatens to sacrifice them to their own interests. This leads to a violent apotheosis in which Sugawara and his gang take on their powerful opponents. It is no coincidence that Sugawara’s character was born on 15 August 1945, the day of Japan’s capitulation. In the film he roams round as a hungry wolf in a desolate landscape and is reminiscent of the many street urchins who populated the burnt out cities of Japan after the war. In the last scene, Fukasaku again leaves the spectator with the intense images of the theme he clings onto doggedly: the dissolution of solidarity within a group of partners in misfortune. Mitani Noboru strikingly plays the tragic figure of a poor veteran who can barely survive on the seamy side of postwar life. The intensity of the anarchist rebellion with which the film is imbued returns in the sequel Hito-kiri yota: kyoken san-kyodai, also with Sugawara Bunta, Nagisa Mayumi and Mitani Noboru.