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Cops vs Thugs AKA Kenkei tai soshiki boryoku (Blu-ray)
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray B - United Kingdom - Arrow Films Review written by and copyright: Paul Lewis (31st May 2017). |
The Film
![]() ![]() Fukasaku Kinji made Cops Vs Thugs between the production of the three films which made up the New Battles Without Honor and Humanity series. With his early 1970s films, Fukasaku became a director who was closely associated with gritty ‘ripped from the headlines’ tales of yakuza, depicting the world of organised crime in shades of grey and suggesting that legitimate structures of authority (police, business and politics) were just as corrupt – if not more so – than the world of the yakuza. Cops Vs Thugs is extremely similar to the Battles Without Honor and Humanity films in its worldview and aesthetic; and that’s certainly not a criticism, because despite the repetition of themes and visual tropes, Fukasaku’s yakuza films are consistently exciting. The narrative of Cops Vs Thugs takes place in Kurashima City during 1963. In the film, based on a true story, corrupt cop Kuno (Sugawara Bunta) lives in the pocket of yakuza Hirotani Kenji (Matsukata Hiroki), having saved Hirotani from facing conviction for the murder of Boss Miyaki six years prior. Hirotani is acting boss of the Ohara gang whilst Boss Ohara is serving a long-term prison sentence. Meanwhile, the head of a rival clan, Kawade Katsumi (Narita Mikio), is in league with a crooked politician, Tomayasu. Tomayasu is the former head of a yakuza clan who disbanded his faction in 1960, before being elected to local government in 1962. Tomayasu was Kawade’s mentor during Kawade’s years as a junior yakuza. When Hirotani’s hoods tear up one of Kawade’s clubs, in response to Kawade’s clan selling dope for the Shinmei group on territory run by the Ohara family, tensions between Kawade and Hirotani escalate. Kuno persuades his boss, Chief Ikeda (Fujioka Jukei), to accept Hirotani’s suggestion that the attack on Kawade’s club was in response to a small-time hood’s infatuation with one of the hostesses, Mariko. However, Hirotani asks Kuno to help him take care of the situation with Kawade. ![]() Kuno engineers a plan which will allow him to arrest Kawade, thus causing the deal between Sanyo Oil and Ocean Tours to fall through and leading the Ohara clan into possession of the land. However, things become increasingly complicated when the Prefecture Police Commissioner, Kikuchi, makes plans to clean up corruption within the police force. Kuno is gradually forced into choosing between his allegiance to Hirotani and his work as an officer of the law. In the 1950s and 1970s, the mukokuseki akushon (‘borderless action’) films of Nikkatsu, which began with Furukawa Takumi’s Season of the Sun in 1956, brought tales of the yakuza into the present-day. Prior to those pictures, the yakuza had usually been featured in jidaigeki pictures (period dramas). Those jidaigeki films predominantly featured Westernised villains and depicted the moral code of the yakuza in a largely positive light, as a ‘pure’ system of values that was in contrast with the more ‘corrupt’ Westernised values of the modern world. The mukokuseki akushon films, on the other hand, featured Westernised heroes in contemporary urban settings, and almost invariably offered an implicit (if not explicit) critique of the code of the yakuza which was buried in an exploration of inter-generational conflict: in those films, the elderly male leaders of yakuza clans were frequently depicted as corrupt, corporate oligarchs who victimise the more forward-thinking and youthful heroes, exploiting the protagonists’ sense of loyalty to the hierarchies of the yakuza. However, as Jasper Sharp has noted, despite their modern-day settings, the mokukuseki akushon pictures ‘bore little resemblance to any contemporary Japanese reality’ (Sharp, 2011: 182). ![]() Kate Taylor-Jones has highlighted the fact that, along with many other examples of Jitsoruko, including the Battles Without Honor and Humanity films, Cops Vs Thugs takes as its setting the decades following the Second World War. In doing so, the films depict ‘the post-war Japanese economic drive […] as resulting in a situation where commercial business, yakuza, police and government officials are all equally destructive’ (Taylor-Jones, 2013: 62). The films depict post-war Japan as a dog-eat-dog world in which social turmoil ferments and resentment between different social groups accumulates. ![]() The film continuously erodes the distinction between the ‘cops’ and the ‘thugs’, suggesting that one may often be mistaken for another. The police are unable or unwilling to take action against the yakuza, who supply them with food and drink in exchange for a lack of interference in their affairs. The ties between the police and the yakuza run deep. Following Hirotani’s clan’s assault on one of Kawade’s clubs, Hirotani hands over one of his underlings and suggests the violence was simply as a result of this particular underling’s obsession with a hostess, Mariko, who had switched allegiances to work as a hostess for Kawade. ‘Who’d believe that story?’, a disbelieving Chief Ikeda asks. ‘Chief, if this is a war, we’d have to report it to headquarters’, Kuno says, ‘and they’d find out about the old Miyake incidents too. That’ll put you in a spot’. Later, when Hirotani hands over one of his low-ranking yakuza to the police, framing the boy for the attack on the club, the young yakuza wets his pants during interrogation. ‘You’d be better off working as a clerk at city hall’, Kuno tells the young yakuza dryly, underscoring the interchangeability of yakuza with employees of the municipality. In another sequence, two old friends – Kawamoto, a police officer, and Tsukahara, a yakuza – bump into one another and are surprised to discover that each is on the opposite side of the law. Kuno, Kawamoto and some other detectives go drinking with Hirotani, Tsukahara and other members of the Ohara family. ‘Cops and yakuza are the same’, one of the men says during this sojourn, ‘We’re the dropouts who couldn’t get good jobs’. ![]() For all intents and purposes, in terms of how it outlines the methods and fearlessness of this ‘rogue’ cop, this opening sequence is strikingly similar to the opening sequence of Don Siegel’s Dirty Harry (1971), in which Eastwood’s ‘Dirty’ Harry Callahan displays a propensity for violence and calm under pressure when his lunchtime hot dog is interrupted by a necessity to intervene in an armed robbery. Callahan seems more concerned with the fact that his lunch has been interrupted than with the possibility that he may be killed by the shotgun-wielding robbers. Likewise, Kuno is unfazed by the street thugs’ promises of violence, the sequence building to Kuno’s blackly comic assertion that he’s uninterested in what the street thugs are planning – which will surely lead to their deaths, he reasons, which he sees no value in preventing – but he simply will not allow them to steal food from a street vendor. (‘But first, pay for your sushi. I won’t let you skip out on your restaurant bills’, Kuno asserts.) ![]() However, Kuno is a more complex character than this opening sequence might suggest. As the film progresses, Kuno is shown trying to encourage Hirotani to rein in his behaviour. In one sequence, in reference to the hostess Mariko, Hirotani comments sleazily, ‘I’d like to have her go down on me’, whilst stroking his crotch. Kuno gently chastises Hirotani for this. When Hirotani helps Kuno return to his home following their drunken night out with Kawamoto and Tsukahara, Kuno collapses in a heap on the floor after remembering the time he saved Hirotani from being arrested for the murder of Boss Miyake. ‘A man who can’t help people has no right to judge others’, Kuno asserts. As Kuno passes out, Hirotani looks at a photography of a woman and child – Kuno’s wife and son, from whom Kuno is separated. Later in the film, Kuno is confronted at work by his wife, who demands a divorce that Kuno is unwilling to give her, humiliating Kuno in front of his colleagues by asserting loudly that ‘He’s [Kuno is] practically a yakuza puppet. He takes bribes and accepts drinks from them’. ![]() The film uses some sophisticated techniques, including mixing colour and monochrome photography, employing a roving semidocumentary style of photography, and the incorporation of both still photography (depicted via a montage) and newspaper headlines. The opening titles sequence features newspaper headlines summarising the events in Kurashima City which have led to the current set of circumstances: Boss Miyake’s murder in 1957 (later revealed to have been committed by Hirotani), the arrest of Boss Ohara in 1958, and the disbanding of the Tomayasu faction in 1960 and election of Tomayasu to local government in 1962. The film also makes counterpunctive use of music: one particularly memorable sequence features a brutal killing which takes place to the aural accompaniment of a children’s lullaby that is playing on a television set. As in any number of Japanese films of this period, there are also some visual allusions to Japanese experimental photography of the kind found in the pages of the short-lived but groundbreaking experimental Japanese photography magazine Purovōku: shisō no tame no chōhatsuteki shiryō/Provoke: Provocative Documents for the Sake of Social Thought (1968-70). These sophisticated techniques are offset by the film’s frequently deeply earthy content. ![]() ![]() ![]()
Video
![]() Nevertheless, regardless of how rough-around-the-edges the original photography was (entirely in keeping with the aesthetic of the jitsuroku pictures generally), Arrow’s Blu-ray presentation is very pleasing. The level of detail throughout the presentation is rich, and the structure of 35mm film is retained by both the transfer and the solid encode to disc. Contrast levels are equally good: defined midtones and balanced highlights are present, though blacks sometimes seem a little ‘crushed’. The colour palette seems true to source, featuring the muddy colour tones of 1970s street gangster films; it’s a gritty, grimy aesthetic. No distracting damage is present, and there is no evidence of harmful digital tinkering. ![]() ![]() ![]()
Audio
Audio is presented via LPCM 2.0 stereo track, with optional English subtitles. The audio track is fine: it is clean and clear throughout. The subtitles are easy to read and free from glaring errors.
Extras
![]() - ‘Beyond the Film: Cops Vs Thugs’ (9:13). In a new introduction to the film, Fukasaku’s biographer Yamane Sadao reflects on Cops Vs Thugs in the context of Fukasaku’s other films. Yamane discusses the origins of the script in the research conducted by scriptwriter Kasahara Kazuo, and its relationship with the Battles Without Honor and Humanity series. The interview is in Japanese with optional English subtitles. - ‘All Under the Gun’ (13:38). Tom Mes, in a new video essay, discusses the relationships between police and yakuza throughout Fukasaku’s body of work. Mes discusses some of the visual symbolism in the films and the casting, and he reflects on the films’ commentary on post-war Japanese society. - Behind the scenes footage (4:59). This footage, shot on set during the making of Cops Vs Thugs, provides the viewer with the opportunity to see Fukasaku in action. Fukasaku is interviewed about the film’s themes and the use of violence in his films, and a glimpse is offered of Fukasaku directing the interrogation scene. - Trailer (3:16).
Overall
![]() Arrow’s Blu-ray presentation is very good, as pleasing as their other releases of Fukasaku pictures. The presentation is solid, and the contextual material is equally good. This is a tip-top release of an essential film. References: Sharp, Jasper, 2011: Historical Dictionary of Japanese Cinema. Maryland: Scarecrow Press Taylor-Jones, Kate E (2013): Rising Sun, Divided Land: Japanese and South Korean Filmmakers. London: Wallflower Press ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]()
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