• 仁義なき戦い (Battles Without Honor and Humanity)

11/9/17 (Thurs)

Duty is the great theme of traditional Japanese Kabuki theater, with characters typically forced to choose between their all-important loyalty to their lord or society and a betrayal of that duty with an act of compassion or emotion. Compassion often wins out but only at great cost, usually death. The best known example of a pure loyalty tale is the ever-popular The 47 Loyal Retainers (忠臣蔵), where duty to a murdered lord leads to a meticulously planned, suicidal act of revenge by his former retainers. That sense of loyalty carries over as well into typical samurai and yakuza dramas, where duty is often itself the point.

The 1973 film Battles Without Honor and Humanity (the name would be punchier without the “humanity”’; also known by the much better title The Yakuza Papers) doesn’t just puncture that ideal but renders it a useless relic of a lost age. It was produced the year after The Godfather, which it superficially resembles, but lacks a mafia-like code or any sense of fidelity to anyone or any discernible cause whatsoever. It represents a furious scramble by the yakuza for dominance in the ashes of post-war Japan, with every man for himself as a devastated nation tries to pull itself back together. A man (a fantastic Sugawara Bunta) is drawn unwittingly into the yakuza world as a means of survival, but it takes all his wits to outmaneuver the varied forces against him.

The film is unsparing and unsentimental, carried by its own momentum rather than any artificial story. The restless handheld camerawork at the opening perfectly sets the scene for the unstable post-war world, and there are some startling angles and effects that keep us off-kilter while managing to feel organic to the world being presented. This is not simply violence for violence’s sake, but a portrayal of a world where violence is the norm, where society is still being built step by step.

Hiroshima is a perfect setting not only as a well-known yakuza base but as a symbol of the chaotic state of Japanese society at the time (the film opens with a mushroom cloud). It’s hard to keep up with the rapid series of characters given all the dealings and double dealings and worse; the murdered men are helpfully labeled with onscreen titles identifying them and their gangs. I’m not even sure if the one remaining is the good guy (or a good guy), but he’s the most memorable character as played by Bunta.

The film benefits from terrific camerawork and spot-on acting by a superb and well picked cast. The jumpy direction and cinematography are distinctive and perfect for the material, which generated numerous well regarded sequels. Fukasaku Kinji is the same director who later helmed the popular black comedy The Fall Guy (蒲田行進曲), another film questioning the notion of honor and duty. Essential.