The gangster film "Blood of the Lone Wolf" produced by Toei in 2018 is a film that goes against the trend of the times, and it seems that it should belong to the 1970s, the era of live-action films full of fighting and betrayal, represented by Fukaku Shinji.
After the [Battle of the Inhumans] series, the gangster film genre seems to have been exhausted in Japan, and there were no Renxia in the Heisei era, only the Extreme Way.
[Blood of a Lone Wolf]
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > historical legacy</h1>
It is often said that Japan is the only country in the world that allows the legal existence of gangsters.
This is somewhat one-sided, but to be precise, the Japanese government allows the existence of "organizations", after all, the Constitution stipulates that citizens have the right to free association.
Once there is a criminal act, the police often target the perpetrator itself, rather than banning the organization, and at most after a number of illegal and criminal acts in an organization, it is characterized as a violent group and strictly controlled.
This ambiguous approach has left the impression that the Japanese police are condoning the underworld.
Japan's earliest gangsters originated in the Meiji era. After the abolition of the samurai class, a large number of lower-ranking samurai lost their source of livelihood and could only commit themselves to the "underworld" to engage in illegal trades.
The Zhizhixiong gang in [Ranger Sword Heart] is more similar to the underworld gang in terms of scale than a rebel, so the government wants to eliminate them, and it is the police rather than the army.
When the samurai lost the object of allegiance, this force tended to run wild, and the so-called samurai spirit began to beautify into the spirit of renxia during this period.
Renxia films were once the highest-grossing commercial film genre in the Japanese film market.
The era background of this type of film is taken from the Meiji and Taisho eras, with gang members or ronin people with the spirit of renxia as the protagonists, and the focus is to hoe the strong and help the weak, and to do heroic deeds.
Series of films starring Ken Takakura, such as "The Legend of The Japanese Hero" and "The Legend of the Showa Heroes", were all the rage, and he became synonymous with big stars and tough guys that no one knew.
[Showa Remnant Biography]
The characteristics of Renxia's movie, in addition to the protagonist who adheres to the spirit of Renxia will definitely eliminate the villain group, the characters in the film basically do not use guns, and the fight and fight are all based on a samurai sword.
This idealism is the foundation of Renxia's films, and it also glorifies the righteous gangsters, who can see the fading projection of the samurai spirit in them.
[Blood of the Lone Wolf] is Toei's remembrance of the heyday of gangster films, and the restoration is not the Renxia film that most people love to watch, but a documentary film that shows the real gangster struggle.
"Blood of the Lone Wolf" tells the story of the struggle between two major gangs in Hiroshima in the 1980s from the perspective of two policemen.
This plot is taken from the "Hiroshima Proxy War" that really happened in the 1960s.
The two major gang groups, the Yamaguchi Group and the HondoKai, respectively, supported the Tatsukai under the Umbrella and the Yamamura Group, and launched an unprecedented six-year-long fight, with countless deaths and injuries on both sides, and the police handled 5173 cases.
Shinji Fukasaku's "Battle of No Mercy" series is also a transcript of the "Hiroshima Proxy War".
This series spreads the greed and violence of the members of the underworld and the deception of themselves on the table, and they do not speak of any morality for the sake of profit.
With the word "real record", Fukasaku Shinji established the status of the gangster film grandmaster, and also swept the Renxia film into the dust of history.
Most of the gangster films that have come out since then can see the shadow of [The Battle of No Mercy], chivalry and morality are nowhere to be found, and all the blacks between gangs are black.
Flourishing and declining, this kind of film that shows the dark side of society in large quantities is obviously not as good as the heroic Renxia film that is in line with the public aesthetic, and Toei's gangster movies are gradually marginalized and lose audience support.
So [Blood of the Lone Wolf] is both a restoration of gangster documentaries and a remembrance of Toei's golden age.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > the pole path of immortality</h1>
Although gangster movies have long been not the mainstream of the market, they have never died, and as long as the underworld organization still exists in Japanese society, this genre film will appear from time to time to attract attention.
Sometimes, gangster movies are not filming gangsters, but shooting people's changes.
In the early years of Heisei (1989), Takeshi Kitano directed his first film work: "The Violent Man".
The film was first planned to be directed by Shinji Fukasaku and starring Takeshi Kitano, but since Shinji Fukasaku had no schedule, it was taken over by Takeshi Kitano and directed and acted by himself.
Letting Takeshi Kitano, who was completely inexperienced at the time, direct it was entirely for the sake of the fame of this national comedian.
In this decisive film, Wu Ye implemented his later "no nonsense is dry" style, and became another gangster film master after Fukasaku Shinji.
Yakuza, the Japanese word has two meanings, one is the worst card in the card game, and the derivative meaning is the underworld - who is not from the bottom of society, who will mix the underworld.
Takeshi Kitano's father was a painter and often worked for the underworld, and according to Takeshi Kitano, his father was a "violent man" who, if it were not for his mother's insistence on letting him go to college, would have gone astray like his father. (As for smashing the editorial board of weekly FRIED WITH his apprentice "Kitano Takeshi" after becoming famous, Kitano Takeshi does not admit that this is Yakuza's act.)
Takeshi Kitano's films inherit some of the essence of Shinji Fukasaku's "no benevolence", that is, the violent, bloody, unscrupulous side of gangster fights.
However, unlike fukasaku Shinji's films, Kitano Takeshi's "Hanabi" and [Dolls] are half cruel and half warm, just like the world-famous "Kitano Blue" hue, people are helpless in the rivers and lakes, and the tenacity of surviving in the sinister world.
Although he is an underworld who has committed many mistakes, he can still see the brilliance of humanity in the final stages of his life - eventually moving towards self-destruction in the fire and massacres filled with violent shots. He will not leave a way for the protagonist, who is mostly played by himself, to live.
If Toei's early Renxia film is a cool film, people have admiration for the chivalrous style of the underworld; The documentary film of Shinji Fukasaku is a documentary, which makes people see through the essence of the underworld as a vicious criminal from the root;
Then Takeshi Kitano's early films are more like educational films, warning the world that once the underworld is chosen, there is no turning back - the only mercy left to [the sky of bad boys], and the young pony being driven out of the organization is only a knife, rather than drinking bullets to kill themselves, it is a great fortune.
The trilogy exhausts all kinds of situations in gangster fighting, from internal tilting and downward gramming, as well as two opposing organizations competing for turf, and even collusion between the underworld and the police;
In terms of specific matters, there are custom shops, casinos, and even drug trafficking. All imaginable Yakuza figures are covered in the "Extremely Evil" series.
But on the other hand, [Extremely Evil Non-Dao] has not broken through the shackles of traditional gangster films, or in other words, the limits of this genre have been seen in [Extremely Evil Non-Dao].
In this series, Kitano Takeshi created the image of Otomo's Extreme Path, even if all the members are evil, he must stick to his own way, to put it bluntly, it is righteousness.
In the heart of the idealist, the pole can die until there is no one left, and the spirit is immortal.
<h1 class= "pgc-h-arrow-right" > the tragedy of a pluralistic society</h1>
The issue of Koreans in Japan has always been a chronic disease of Japanese society, in fact, the reason why Japanese underworld organizations can grow to this level is closely related to "in Japan".
At the end of World War II, hundreds of thousands of Koreans remained in Japan, discriminated against and out of step with the mainstream of society, and many of them had to engage in illegal activities in groups, once becoming the most powerful criminal organization.
The smooth rise of the Japanese underworld is largely connived by the police, allowing them to go as big as they want, and to compete with the organizations of Koreans in Japan.
"Blood and Bone," directed by Choi Yoichi and starring Takeshi Kitano, reflects the living conditions of Koreans in Japan, where the head of the family engages in the illegal act of plundering others.
In Shunji Iwai's [Swallowtail Butterfly], there is a dispute between the "Shanghai Gang" and the "Fuqing Gang", which is a product of a special era.
Before the bursting of the bubble economy, Japan was portrayed as a country full of gold, and a large number of Chinese to the east to become a black household. With no language barrier and no skills, these treasure hunters became criminals.
When the newcomers to the Yamaguchi group cut their little fingers for fear of pain and secretly ran to the hospital to fight anesthesia and became a laughing stock, the gang from China made the Japanese wielding baseball bats feel frightened by their fierce and lifeless style.
[Swallowtail Butterfly] is somewhat fairy tale color, the "Shanghai Gang" big man Liu Liangkui has helped his compatriots many times, and the [Shinjuku Incident] of The Hong Kong director Er Dongsheng of China has filmed the cannibalism of the Chinese gangsters in Japan so that people cannot look directly at them, so that the audience has eradicated their illusions.
Another gangster movie mob, Takashi Miike, was a biker party in his early years, and in the words of [Ryu Sakura], Abe Hiroshi said: The Rampage Clan is not a violent group, it is different.
Miike's early trilogy of triads ([Shinjuku Underworld], [Japanese Underworld], [Extreme Underworld]) can be regarded as The final glory of Daiei.
Takashi Miike's underworld films, including the later "Killer Aichi", are all low-budget Clut films, bloody, curious, and perverted.
The reason is that Miike said very clearly, there is no money, to make an entertainment movie that can attract the audience to watch with a low budget, it can only be how to repeat how to come.
It wasn't until Sanchi was able to take the helm of Toho commercial films that he began to try to sell some sentiments.
In [Hot Blood College 2], Fengxian Boss warned his subordinates that men should use their fists when fighting, not to move knives, is it a bit of a style that in the early years of RenXia film did not shoot and only used a samurai sword?
The "Blood Block" series directed by Shigeaki Kubo is an idol drama dressed up in the cloak of underworld competition for territory, and watching the members of the three generations fight fiercely and burn arbitrarily, there will be a feeling of blood boiling - this is 108,000 miles away from the bloody traditional polar film. But no one has as many air traffic control, and the handsome is finished.
What is your favorite Japanese gangster movie?