by ·Comments Off on Kanto Wanderer (1963, Seijun Suzuki)

Unique structure, starting with the girls in a crime town gazing at the local criminals, then spiraling into the lives of the criminals themselves. Who here is a Kanto wanderer, though?

Gutsy chick Hanako (Fukasaku regular Sanae Nakahara) gets sold into prostitution, sidelining the young women, while scarfaced Kat (Akira Kobayashi, between Rusty Knife and the Yakuza Papers) tries in vain to protect his boss while the rival gang’s warrior Diamond is on a bloody rampage. Kat is also hot for Diamond’s gambler-hustler sister (Hiroko Ito of Tattooed Life), flashing back to when he got his scar over her years earlier.

It’s a pretty okay story, but sometimes leads to great moments like this:

by ·Comments Off on White Heat (1949, Raoul Walsh)

Cagney and his dimwitted men rob a train and kill a lotta guys then hide out, but boring cop John Archer (Destination Moon) and his men are closing in, so Cagney confesses to a different, non-fatal job as an alibi for the train heist and goes to jail for a little while. “A very good friend of mine… me!” sounds like an Odenkirk line.

The cops want more on Cagney so they send Large-faced Eddie “Rock Around the Rockpile” O’Brien to jail as a mole to gain his trust. Rivalries in jail then prison break, while outside Big Ed steals his girl Virgino Mayo (Walsh’s Colorado Territory the same year) and they kill Cagney’s beloved Ma (Margaret Wycherly, fake mystic of The Thirteenth Chair). This is the movie where Cagney is a mother-obsessed seizure-prone psychopath, but I don’t find him any more psychotic than most movie gangsters. The cops track him to the next job with newfangled radio equipment – trapped in a burning building he’s made it, ma, top of the world.

by ·Comments Off on The Warriors (1979, Walter Hill)

A 1979 movie set in “the future”, which looks like… 1980. Cyrus is holding a conclave, wants to unite all street gangs to overthrow the cops and run the city, but so many gangs show up to the meeting and a Vincent Gallo-looking guy shoots Cy from the crowd then fingers the only witness as the shooter. After all this commotion the Warriors have to get back to their home borough with every creep gunning for them, but they don’t even figure out until the movie’s last 20 minutes why everyone’s mad at them. The action choreography is not great, nor sometimes are the goofy costumes (the overalls-and-rollerskates “punks” being the worst). But the comic-book Escape from New York adventure is compelling, and it was already giving West Side Story vibes with its gang stylings when I realized that the shooter is Jerry Horne, whose Twin Peaks costar Dr. Amp was in West Side.

Exactly the pose you make when you’re about to get shot:

Jerry Horne, cartoon version:

Warriors:

by ·Comments Off on Outrage Coda (2017, Takeshi Kitano)

I’m starting to wonder if these movies do have continuity and they’re not just starting over every time with the same cast playing new characters. I checked my writeups for parts one and two, and still don’t know for sure – but hey, one of those cops is back in this one.

The bulk of the movie is the higher-ups of a Japanese crime family plotting against each other: Ren Osugi, Sansei Shiomi, Toshiyuki Nishida. This goes on forever, and right when you can’t take any more of it, Kitano flies in with his buddy Ichi and they shoot a hundred guys. A few women appear, all of them prostitutes. I’m making this sound bad, but of course it’s a good time, and I’m looking forward to the brand new Kitano joint.

by ·Comments Off on Ichi the Killer (2001, Takashi Miike)

One of those movies I watched in grungy lo-fi copies enough times that I thought it would feel weird to see in HD, but Ichi is going to be kinda grungy no matter how much resolution you throw at it. It’s also a movie with two prolific actors who I see every year and call “that guy from Ichi The Killer” (most recently when BOTH appeared in Kubi). Lumped in with the Asian horror crowd when it came out, but its over-the-top death and torture scenes are mixed in with the perverse Ichi story, a yakuza war, fucked up music by Boredoms and much crazed humor.

Besides Ichi and Kakihara, we got Shinya Tsukamoto as Ichi’s handler/manipulator – everyone calls him an old fart then he’s revealed to be massively muscled, killing head enforcer Shun Sugata (Tokyo Gore Police chief). Sabu of Shinjuku Triad Society is an ex-cop turned bodyguard for Kaki’s gang to pay the bills, and Suzuki Matsuo (Shin Kamen Rider) plays their identical twin colleages. The rival who Kaki repeatedly tortures is Kitano regular Susumu Terajima.

Ichi’s traumatic backstory is only partly true, Kaki’s attacks on his rivals are based on misinformation and bad guesses, Ichi panics and kills the girls he likes and the boy trying to befriend him. Everyone’s a real mess – but at least Kaki gets what he wanted (to be killed).

by ·Comments Off on The Roaring Twenties (1939, Raoul Walsh)

Felt like following the early-30s gangster movie with a late-30s one. Apologies to Hawks, but this one’s much better, despite the shouty narrator explaining very recent history to the audience. Auto mechanic Cagney, bartender Bogart, and posh law student Jeffrey Lynn (Whiplash) are thrown together during WWI, then after the war Cagney can’t find work and turns to bootlegging with backing from new friend Gladys George (who’s also in postwar drama The Best Years of Our Lives). Schoolgirl Priscilla Lane who’d written him letters during the war is now a grown hottie and aspiring singer, so Cagney uses his power to get her nightclub gigs.

Things are looking good, then they bring on Bogart, who has no morals and starts killing people and getting them in trouble with the cops and rival gang led by sharp-chinned Paul Kelly (Adventure in Sahara). When Cagney calls a meeting for an all-gangster alliance Kelly doesn’t show, drops off the body of their man Frank McHugh instead. Nothing left but for the girl Cagney loves and the girl who loves him to watch his downward spiral ending in a hail of bullets – but belatedly. First Bogart takes over the business, years pass, Cagney becomes a drunken cabbie, the hottie marries the lawyer, old grudges resurface, hail of bullets.

by ·Comments Off on Scarface (1932, Howard Hawks)

Guess I watched an old disc when the 4k remaster is right around the corner, oops. Big showy camera moves in an early sound film, impressive. A good start towards dialogue based cinema, also a cavalcade of atrocious accents. It’s the Ferrari Theory, or just typically Italian: the accents can be as random as you want if the picture is on point. Ben Hecht (and maybe an uncredited Hawks) had written one of the great silent gangster movies Underworld, then after Little Caesar and Public Enemy started a craze, they came back to claim their throne.

Rich party thrower Louis is shot dead, Paul “Scarface” Muni was supposed to be his bodyguard. Scarf’s new boss is Johnny Lobo (Osgood Perkins, grandfather/namesake of the Longlegs director). During Johnny’s rise to the top, Scarface kills all their competition except dapper Boris Karloff, then comes for him too, then kills his own boss and steals his girl Karen Morley. But Scarf is also overprotective of his sister Ann Dvorak, and after he catches her with his prize henchman George Raft, the siblings have got nobody left but each other, and go out in a hail of bullets.

Scarfie having a moment with his sister:

Mabel has parrots:

by ·Comments Off on Eyes of the Spider (1998, Kiyoshi Kurosawa)

Same idea as Serpent’s Path – this time Sho Aikawa’s daughter is the victim, and he dispatches some guy he assumes to be the killer within ten minutes of movie time. Now what?

A guy who looks suspiciously like Creepy but is another actor – somebody Sho presumably killed horribly in Dead or Alive, and the star of Kitano’s Getting Any? – offers the directionless Sho a job at his “import/export” company. The business of this company involves Sho stamping an endless pile of documents in a shabby office while the other guys have some kinda shakedown/blackmail/hitman thing going on. These guys appear small-time, so the boss gets involved, and the boss’s boss, and they want to recruit Sho and put down the others, but they don’t go down so easy. Similar look and tone to the other movie, but goes in a more traditionally yakuza direction.

In here somewhere is Chief Ren Osugi of Nightmare Detective… Ren’s Sonatine and Fireworks costar Susumu Terajima… Kill Bill boss Shun Sugata… but I didn’t catch character names, so I’ll sort it out during the next Kitano or Miike binge.

Kurosawa is a White Dog fan:

Great writeup by John Lehtonen. A small piece:

Eyes of the Spider is a film of emptiness, its protagonist hollowed at the outset. Empty time and empty people, and what is projected onto and, eventually, out of this emptiness. Tonally and generically dynamic, it moves its cipher hero (and Aikawa’s iconographic image) through a variety of generic scenarios and roles: the husband, the salaryman, the yakuza.