The 1970s Crime Season!

It seems amazing to me that The Killer Elite, which I reviewed last night and thought was an absolutely ridiculous film, was made a year after The Yakuza.

I would have liked to have thought that Sam Peckinpah would have watched this splendid film and actually gained something about how you can marry together the west and the east, not just in terms of culture but in terms of bringing together a highly impressive action film. There are no ninja assassins or stupidly sketched stereotypes here and any of the culture clash narrative that does result is respectful, interesting and even educational.

Then again, from what I've seen of their respective work, I would personally say…

"Ken is a relic, a leftover of another age, of another country."

Robert Mitchum vs. the Yakuza. When I heard that I thought it would be this action packed good time. Instead The Yakuza is a thoughtful, somber tale with some quick scenes of brutal violence. If it had turned out to that action packed movie in my mind, I don’t think it would have been as powerful as a film.

Robert Mitchum returns to the land of the rising sun after being stationed there during Japan’s occupation to rescue the daughter of an old war buddy. Once there he reunites with his old flame and more importantly, her brother, Ken (played terrifically by Ken Takakura). Ken holds a strange…

The burden hardest to bear.

Always interesting to see where one of your favorites got their start. Though the script was later rewritten by Robert Towne, the screenplay for The Yakuza is what got Paul Schrader into the business. (At the time of its release, it was the most a studio had ever payed for a script.) Though the story and the overall characters did little for me, as I mentioned, I get some enjoyment from seeing the origins of an admirable artist. And, admittedly, there are aspects about The Yakuza that I enjoyed where even if I can't say I liked it as a whole, I can still leave a like for the movie itself. It's really pretty to…

the absolute torture of honour//
consumption of a life, bound by arcane ties//
every resolution is a new pain

understated, intelligent, respectful, emotional, delicate, bloody.

Ive never seen something deal with the real true burden of honour codes and it also address how the system these men live by is all but obsolete and dead. falling deafly on their ears.

///that is your life ~~~ this is mine

taking place in a limited amount of spaces:: a house, a few clubs, mostly tight streets, a paper-walled gambling house :: makes this feel really small and hyperfocused on character relationships and complex internal simmerings. even the fights, both sword and gun, are scrappy, real and metered. Until the finale where theres…

Movie club - just pop by and say hello - we're all very friendly

I didn't really know what to expect going into Yakuza. A cursory glance at Google quickly showed it wasn't particularly well received on release. I was also under the preconceived notion that this would be one of those American in Japan films that would be less than flattering to the people of its setting. Fortunately I found the film to be far more enjoyable than its reputation and loved the lead character who had a real reverence for Japanese culture and its people.

Robert Mitchum’s Harry Kilmer by any rights should have be an iconic character who appeared in a string of movies. A turtleneck sweater,…

No doubt Paul Schrader's screenplay came into being off the back of America's growing fascination with Asia's martial arts, with Bruce Lee building himself into the icon of the scene. The film was shot mostly on location in Japan and the story builds itself around samurai tradition without weighing itself down with too much history.

Working with Schrader was Robert Towne, who had just written Chinatown and this film goes to show that consistency is just as hard to find holding the pen as anywhere else. This is certainly no classic but it does contain some solid action scenes built around a fully believable friendship between Robert Mitchum and Ken Takakura who steals the show from the Hollywood veteran.

Mitchum…

¸.•*¨*✧*♡CLUB FRIENDSHIP♡*✧*¨*•.¸

When an American cracks up, he opens up the window and shoots up a bunch of strangers. When a Japanese cracks up, he closes the window and kills himself. Everything is in reverse.

Classic new hollywood stuff, taking an old genre, showing it through a different lens and adding more R rated content! Great angle here taking one of the most American genres and giving it an eastern spin.

Many noir films feature a tragic protagonist who refuses to compromise their rigid and perhaps naive moral code to fit the increasingly depraved and valueless world around them. One where everyone is out for themselves. Or it's about someone who selfishly allows their greed and lust to cloud their…

The Wolverine movie we really deserved.

All jokes aside Robert Mitchum made two of the best crime movies of all time with "The Friends of Eddie Coyle" in '73 and this the very next year (both feature Richard Jordan and scores by Dave Grusin) and both use Robert Mitchum about as well as he's ever been used in a movie. As a result both films have, at the center, a performance that is hard nosed, exhausted and earnest, but at the same time introspective and thoughtful. And the movies adopt those same qualities. They're the types of movie you watch and say they don't make 'em like that anymore, only to realize they never really did. But back to the…

I like The Yakuza more every time I see it. When I first saw it in my late-teens I thought it was too well-mannered. I thought Sydney Pollack had taken a Leonard Schrader story and a Paul Schrader script (with a re-write from Robert Towne) and turned it into a Sydney Pollack film. It never had the requisite punch that I wanted. I couldn't fault the action, nor how it was filmed, but I thought it was too restrained, without the aggression and hardboiled dialogue I was looking for.

Obviously, I was wrong.

Every rewatch of The Yakuza makes me appreciate its melancholy, its deliberate pacing, it neo-noir trappings all the more. I really like its style, and the undemonstrative…

"The Yakuza" von Sydney Pollack ist definitiv ein Produkt seiner Zeit, und vermittelt eine unverwechselbar den frühen 70ern entsprungene Stimmung, ist vielleicht handlungstechnisch etwas antiquiert, aber cinematographisch und inszenatorisch immer noch eindrucksvoll nach 45 Jahren.
Als einer der ersten größeren Drehbuch-Jobs des jungen aufstrebenden Paul Schrader, dem die kreative Kontrolle über das Script jedoch schnell weggekommen wurde, um es unter Robert Towne mehr Pollacks Vision anzupassen, erzählt der noir-Tropes referenzierende, langsame und eher an Atmosphäre denn an Exzess interessierte Gangster-Thriller seine transkulturelle Geschichte, die größtenteils in Japan spielt, sehr viel die japanische Kultur und die dortigen gesellschaftlichen Auffassungen von Verpflichtung, Treue und Ehre (vor allem im Kontext mit den Kriminellen der Yakuza) implementiert, und auch ernsthafte Untertöne eines Liebesdramas enthält.…