70s Rewind: Kinji Fukasaku's COPS VS. THUGS

United Red Army, Kôji Wakamatsu's terrifying gut-punch epic, opens tomorrow in New York for a limited run, and would appear to have no connection at all with Kinji Fukasaku's Cops vs. Thugs, beyond sharing the same country of origin. (We'll get to the connective tissue later.) Truthfully, when I pulled the DVD of the latter film off my shelf, I wanted to sit back and allow a slam-bang action flick to snap me out of a minor mental funk.

But that would be too easy for Kinji Fukasaku. Even with both hands tied behind his back, he could toss off kinetic action scenes, seemingly at will. By 1975, Fukasaku had made more than 30 films, most if not all in the Toei studio system; at the age of 45, he had a superb command of the camera and a keen sense of storytelling, melded with an instinct for making populist entertainment.

As I wrote several years ago, my introduction to Fukasaku was ass-backwards. I saw his last film first: Battle Royale on a crappy-looking VCD, before I had a region-free DVD player. I threw it on, post-midnight, just to watch a few minutes before going to bed, probably ten years ago. Two hours later I sat stunned in my living room, shell-shocked, chills running down my spine. Even when the subject matter is not sensational, he lights the screen on fire: ordinary Joes fighting to make lives for themselves (If You Were Young: Rage), bizarre and moody shenanigans (Black Rose), epic stories of yakuza dynasties (The Yakuza Papers), tiny tales of fierce yakuza carving our lives for themselves (Sympathy for the Underdog, Street Mobster). And now that I think about it, I always thought the Japanese sequences in Tora! Tora! Tora! were far more compelling than the American scenes, so I guess that was my real introduction to a director I always want to know better.

Cops vs. Thugs was one of four films that Fukasaku directed in 1975; it's yet another film about the yakuza, written by Kazuo Kasahara, who also wrote the first four installments of the Yakuza Papers (AKA Battles Without Honor and Humanity) series. Cops vs. Thugs builds on the realistic framework created by that series, depicting warring crime families in Kurashima City in western Japan.

The story is supposedly based on real-life people and incidents, though the names have been changed. (The setting is sufficiently generic that I couldn't find any "Kurashima City" via Google, other than an island.) In any event, the milieu feels authentic. The Ohara crime family was founded in 1946 and ruled the seaside city until an underling named Miyake broke away to start his own family. Chaos reigned until Miyake was killed in 1958; Ohara was sent to prison. Two years later, former Ohara gangster Tomoyasu quits and is eventually elected a city assemblyman. We pick things up in 1963, with Ken Hirotani (Hiroki Matsukata) in command of the Ohara family, Katsumi Kawade (Mikio Narita) in charge of the former Miyake gang, and Tomoyasu playing one side against the other -- but favoring the Kawade family for the financial rewards he accrues.

Detective Kuno (the great Bunta Sugawara) is thoroughly corrupt, though he doesn't see it that way. He joined the police force after WWII because, he says, he wanted to carry a gun, yet he has vivid memories of fighting for black market rice in an impoverished city. Such desperate straits are bound to blur the boundaries between good and evil; Kuno has been living in a gray world of amorality for so long that it seems normal to him.

Most of the detective squad seems to share Kuno's sentiments. They think nothing of drinking and carousing with their gangster buddies; at one point, Kuno hails a police car to give his drunken friends a lift home. The cops are under the spell of the yakuza and enthralled by Ken's brutish, magnetic personality, but they're all in denial.

After the rough, ragged atmosphere is set, the plot kicks into motion with a land deal that brings out the greedy monster in the gangsters. (The politicians want their taste, as well.) Cops vs. Thugs was already set at a fever pitch, but when a war breaks out between the gangs, Fukasaku kicks it into an insane gear. The handheld camera work heightens the tension -- it feels like you're trapped inside a compact car packed with gangsters in the middle of a high-speed gun battle.

Fukasaku does not, however, suffer from Restless Camera Syndrome.

He knows how to modulate the pace, from action frenzy to contemplative regret. His use of flashbacks is brilliant and varied: news footage-style photographs for one, Dutch angled black and white (complete with trembling saxophone) for another. In some of the most effective scenes, the camera remains stationary. (One fight scene feature silhouetted figures in the foreground, with the reaction of bystanders -- or sitters, in this case -- featured in the background.) In others, he finds a fresh angle to shoot the action.

It's a heightened view of street-level action, with social criticism of post-war Japan knitted into the fabric. For comparison's sake, several US films in 1975 integrated social commentary of one kind or another (Nashville, Shampoo, Dog Day Afternoon, Death Race 2000), but the wave of mob pictures had died down, unless we include Sydney Pollack's The Yakuza, which deserves its own entry in this series.

As for the "connective tissue" to United Red Army? Cops vs. Thugs ends as the events in United Red Army begin; the characters in Cops vs. Thugs remain resolutely focused on internal issues, while the people in United Red Army are motivated by outside forces. United Red Army ends before the real-life production of Cops vs. Thugs began. Both are based on real-life people and incidents. Both Wakamatsu and Fukasaku can rightly be called mavericks.

And, improbably enough, both films build to climaxes that are eerily similar, and incredibly powerful.

United Red Army opens tomorrow at the IFC Center in New York for a one-week engagement. Cops vs. Thugs is available on Region 1 DVD from Kino Video.

Photo credit: Copyright 1975 Toei Co., Ltd., via Asian Cine Fest. Key source: Midnight Eye's Tom Mes for his in-depth feature on the director.