BIG TIME GAMBLING BOSS / Bakuchiuci: Sôchô Tobaku
(Kôsaku Yamashita, 1968, Japan, 95 minutes)
PALE FLOWER /
Kawaita Hana
(Masahiro Shinoda, 1964, Japan, 96 minutes)
Since its 1968 release, Kôsaku Yamashita's 23rd motion picture Big Time Gambling Boss, has garnered praise from everyone from Japanese novelist and playwright Yukio Mishima ("a masterpiece") to American writer-director Paul Schrader ("the most complex and introspective of all the yakuza films").
Their mutual admiration has a neat symmetry in light of Schrader's script, written with his older brother Leonard, for Sydney Pollack's 1974 crime drama The Yakuza, in addition to his masterful 1985 cinematic portrait Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters. The multi-talented Mishima also appears in Yasuzô Masumura's 1960 yakuza film, Afraid to Die.
Only one of these men grew up in Japan, though Leonard Schrader taught English there from 1968-1973 in a bid to avoid the Draft. According to his biography at the New Netherland Institute, the experience would pay even broader dividends, since he "was able to penetrate the Japanese subculture of the Yamaguchi-gumi, the dominant yakuza gangster family in Kyoto," thus providing him with the kind of personal experience that sets him apart from most Western writers exploring yakuza culture.
In 1974, Paul Schrader also published the yakuza film primer "Yakuza-Eiga" in Film Comment. As Elaine Lennon puts it in her Senses of Cinema essay on The Yakuza, "It traces the genre's history from the samurai film and elucidates its themes, conventions, and stylistic elements." Schrader reserves his highest praise for Big Time Gambling Boss and its leading man, Kôji Tsuruta (he also mentions Pale Flower in passing).
Masahiro Shinoda's ninth motion picture, 1964's Pale Flower, has almost nothing in common with Big Time Gambling Boss other than the yakuza milieu and the focus on card-playing. Whereas the former is in full color and populated by a large cast of characters--played primarily by veteran yakuza-film performers--the latter is in inky black and white and revolves primarily, though not exclusively, around two characters.
In essence, the yakuza film, like the gangster film and the western, contains multitudes. As Schrader notes in his primer, there were variations on a theme owing to changing times and tastes, and Big Time Gambling Boss, fourth in Toei's 10-film Gambling Den series, serves as a prime example of the ninkyo eiga or chivalry film. The noirish Pale Flower, on the other hand, feels like an outlier--closer in look and feel to Godard's doomed romance Breathless than to a yakuza film--just as Ryô Ikebe's loner, Muraki, is less of a team player, as it were, than Tsuruta's Nakai.