Battles Without Honor and Humanity

REVIEW
FATALIST'S EYE VIEW
Cynical and nihilistic, Kinji Fukasaku's films are huge in Japan but barely known in the United States.

BY DAVID WALKER
dwalker@wweek.com

Kinji Fukasaku was born in 1930, a year before Japan invaded China. His formative years were spent in a nation constantly at war. Then we dropped the bomb. Suddenly, 15 years after his birth, Japan had surrendered to the United States. For the young Fukasaku, the years to come would be spent living in the shadow of a defeated warrior society, where honor had meant everything.

Still a teenager, disillusioned with the power structure that had led his nation to defeat and disgrace, Fukasaku retreated into the world of films.

Years later, he emerged a cynical visionary with a fatalistic view of what his once-great nation had become--a view that would make him one of the most revered filmmakers in the history of Japanese cinema.

Beginning this week, the Northwest Film Center presents a retrospective of Fukasaku's work, to this day barely known in the United States. He was one of three directors to work on the World War II epic Tora! Tora! Tora!, and science-fiction buffs will know him from the Saturday afternoon B-movie favorite The Green Slime. Arthouse-loving drag queens may know Black Lizard, Fukasaku's psychedelic cat-and-mouse detective caper. But for the most part, Fukasaku, who is revered along with the likes of Akira Kurosawa and has nearly 50 films to his credit, is a treat long denied American audiences.

Fukasaku is credited with redefining the yakuza (Japanese gangster) films and giving the genre a raw brutality it had been lacking. He is often compared to Martin Scorsese and John Woo, although his career predates both. More fitting comparisons would be Sam Fuller, Sergio Leone, Sam Peckinpah, Anthony Mann and Stanley Kubrick.

The retrospective begins with Black Lizard (7 and 9 pm Friday, March 23, Whitsell Auditorium), a fast-paced film that pits Japan's greatest detective (Isao Kimura) against a diabolical villainess (drag queen Akihiro Maruyama). Although it is one of Fukasaku's best-known films (mainly in queer crowds), it is not the best representation of his work.

Battles Without Honor and Humanity (7 pm Saturday, March 24, Whitsell Auditorium), which many consider Fukasaku's best film and one of the best Japanese films of all time, is an epic tale of yakuza warfare set in postwar Hiroshima that makes Scarface seem like a Disney movie. Tough-guy actor Bunta Sugawara stars as a mobster embroiled in a bloody gang war. Just as Peckinpah and Leone helped redefine the western, Fukasaku's Battles--which spawned eight sequels--helped to redefine the yakuza genre. Where gangsters were once presented as honorable anti-heroes, Fukasaku paints portraits of ruthless killers, sniveling cowards and doublecrossing scumbags who obey no real code of honor.

The retrospective will also include some of the director's early work, such as 1969's Japan's Violent Gangs and 1964's Wolves, Pigs and People. High Noon for Gangsters, one of Fukasaku's earliest films, is reminiscent of noir classics like The Asphalt Jungle and The Killing. Tetsuro Tanba masterminds an armored-car robbery using a ragtag gang that includes two Americans, a Korean and three women. The precursor to Battles Without Honor and Humanity, 1972's Modern Yakuza: Outlaw Killer, is a raw, depraved and brutally relentless bloodbath, a rollercoaster ride of violence. Sugawara plays a psychotic street thug born on the day Japan surrendered in World War II.

With almost none of Kinji Fukasaku's work available on home video in the United States, this retrospective gives audiences a rare chance to see the films of one of Japan's most influential filmmakers.