Kinji Fukasaku

Kamata kôshinkyoku (1982)
Quote:
The English title Fall Guy is fitting – this is a film about a stuntman who takes several plunges for his movie star friend – but there’s a clever touch of subversion in the less obvious Japanese title. Kamata Koshin-Kyoku refers to Shochiku studio’s theme song. But this film about the production of a samurai epic on the Toei studio lot in Kyoto is hardly a fawning tribute to the world of cinema. It’s a film by Kinji Fukasaku. Like the director’s masterpiece, Battles Without Honor and Humanity, Fall Guy exposes the injustices visited on honest, hard-working men serving corrupt and undeserving bosses; all he has done is change the setting. In the place of low-ranking yakuza are stuntmen, the foot soldiers of the entertainment industry. In the place of Japan’s criminal underground is a movie set.Read More »

IMDb comments:
You can watch this crime drama as a sort of Japanese DESPERATE HOURS. A just married ordinary man has his family held as hostage by three hoodlums who want him to do something for them. Get a big package of money from his boss, and not a Yakuza. This is not a yakuza movie, folks, but a true suspense film, a bit far from what Kinji Fukasaku used to show us. A tale told with a terrific nick of time pace, with splendid editing and simple filming skills. The main lead character, the poor man who is lost in the city because he knows that he must obey to what the gangsters ordered him to do, this man’s play is so convincing. I was not lucky enough to see it with subtitles, and I am sure I unfortunately missed a lot. But I followed the basic scheme anyway. I would have imagined Koji Tsuruta as the husband’s character. A golden gem that deserves to be seen at all costs.Read More »

An elaborate criminal tango based around treasure hidden during WWII.

Write-up by sketchesofcinema:
Sonny Chiba and Kinji Fukasaku head to Taiwan in this international action thriller influenced by spy films and Hitchcock movies. Chiba is a playboy pilot who is mistaken for someone who he isn’t after witnessing a murder in ski centre. The other witness is a Taiwanese lady who is vacationing in Japan. Chiba agrees to fly her back home, but as soon as they land they run into gangsters who are searching for a lost WWII treasure and believe Chiba is the key to finding it.Read More »

Quote:
Set during the turbulent post-war years, Fukasaku’s original 1975 film charts the rise and fall of real-life gangster Rikio Ishikawa (Tetsuya Watari, Outlaw Gangster VIP). Shot through with the same stark realism and quasi-documentarian approach as Fukasaku’s earlier Battles Without Honor and Humanity, Fukasaku nonetheless breaks new ground through his portrayal of a gangster utterly without honor or ethics, surviving by any means necessary in a world of brutal criminality.Read More »

Set in the late 1950s, when geisha culture was threatened by moral crusades, it tells the story of Omacha (Miyamoto Maki), a young girl who sees the geisha life as a way to lift her poverty-stricken family from their hand-to-mouth existence. Through her eyes, we see the protocols and complex financial relationships which dictate the running of the geisha house. Fukasaku’s film is a work of great delicacy with moments of hypnotic beauty, and his tender direction, often touched with a sense of wonder, fills the screen with lovingly constructed scenes. At its heart is the poignant situation of the women who must sacrifice their normal relationships to live an ambiguous life in which they are a key part of society while being kept, for the most part, on its periphery, like perpetual mistresses.Read More »

Synopsis:
From Kinji Fukasaku (Battles Without Honor & Humanity) comes this pivotal early crime drama in the celebrated career of the director who changed the face of Japanese action cinema. Stylish and hard-boiled, Sympathy for the Underdog stars Koji Tsuruta, one of Japan’s seminal figures in the Yakuza genre, as Gunji, an aging Yakuza who is released from prison after ten years. Gunji lives by a code of honor that has no place among Tokyo’s modern corporate gangs. He gets a new lease on life by reforming his former gang and taking over the whiskey trade on the island of Okinawa. But he is forced to make a final, fateful, bloody stand against the mainland gang that sent him to prison.Read More »

Synopsis:
As Japan gears up for the 1964 Olympic games, the cops start to crack down under pressure from the public and the press, adding a new dimension in the war for power among the yakuza families of Hiroshima. Takeda (Akira Kobayashi) tries to keep a lid on things, but hotheaded underlings create chaos, with one boss whacked in neutral territory and the craven boss, Uchimoto, informing on an assassination attempt by his own minions. While the police round up hundreds of yakuza foot soldiers, Shozo Hirono (Bunta Sugawara) plots to finally take out longtime nemesis, boss Yamamori.Read More »

Synopsis:
The successor to Hiroshima’s most powerful yakuza family, the Muraokas, is whacked in broad daylight on a busy city street. What unfolds is a yakuza succession crisis, as the weaseley Uchimoto (Takeshi Kato) dithers and the slimy, backstabbing boss Yamamori steps in as the Muraoka’s new boss. Bunta Sugawara’s would-be independent yakuza, Shozo Hirono, is caught in the middle, having to play powerbroker. But the opposing factions seek support from powerful families in Kobe, making all out war inevitable.Read More »

Synopsis:
Repeatedly beat to a pulp by gamblers, cops, and gangsters, lone wolf Shoji Yamanaka (Kinya Kitaoji, who went on to star as Rhett Butler in the Tokyo stage version of Gone with the Wind), finally finds a home as a Muraoka family hit man and falls in love with boss Muraoka’s niece. Meanwhile, the ambitions of mad dog Katsutoshi Otomo (Sonny Chiba) draws our series’ hero, Shozo Hirono (Bunta Sugawara), into a new round of bloodshed, culminating with the tragic demise of the young Yamanka.Read More »