(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.
Though I have no idea what Schrader thought about Shinoda's film, he would go on to cast Ikebe as the Interrogator in Mishima. It's possible he also knew him from non-yakuza work, like Ozu's 1956 Early Spring.
There's another odd difference between the two, which has more to do with their afterlife than their characteristics. The Criterion Collection released Pale Flower on Blu-ray and DVD in 2011--an upgrade from Home Vision's 2003 DVD--whereas Big Time Gambling Boss wouldn't arrive on Blu-ray until 2023, thanks to upstart UK distributor Radiance. That may be why one film is better known in the West, despite abundant praise from yakuza scholars, including Chris D., Mark Schilling, Stuart Galbraith IV, and Hayley Scanlon, who all contribute visual/written essays to the Radiance release (Pale Flower's equally valuable extras include contributions from Chuck Stephens and Peter Grilli and an insightful interview with Shinoda).
Written by Battles without Honor and Humanity's Kazuo Kasahara, the 1934-set Big Time Gambling Boss begins as Arakawa, the leader or oyabun of the Tenryu clan, suffers a stroke (composer Toshiaki Tsushima also worked on Battles without Honor and Humanity). Confined to his bed, he can no longer lead, so the clan unanimously elects the well respected Nakai to take his place, except he refuses, because he transferred to Tokyo from Osaka. Instead, he proposes original member and "sworn brother" Matsuda (Lone Wolf and Cub's burly Tomisaburô Wakayama).
Nakai's inability to become a full-fledged member recalls Irish-American mobster Jimmy Conway (Robert De Niro) in Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas who can never become a made man, because he isn't Italian. Matsuda, unfortunately, is serving a five-year bid for a murder committed on Arakawa's orders, so shady advisor Senba (Nobuo Kaneko, complete with Hitler mustache and squirrely gestures) proposes the oyabun's malleable son-in-law Ishido (Hiroshi Nawa), a decision that will leave everyone unhappy, and once Matsuda is released on parole--all hell breaks loose.
Just as Big Time Gambling Boss features characters who have served--or will serve--time for murder, the Masaru Baba-penned Shochiku release Pale Flower (from the novel by Crazed Fruit author Shintarô Ishihara) opens in 1963 with Funada gang member Muraki's release after a three-year bid (which doesn't seem very long for murder). Like Matsuda, he killed a rival on his obayun's orders. Unlike the stolid Nakai or even the hotheaded Matsuda, though, he has no evident leadership qualities.
As Muraki walks around Tokyo in the opening sequence, which predicts Travis Bickle's Paul Schrader-penned Taxi Driver speech--Scorsese and De Niro again--about the scum-filled streets of New York, he notes that people are "such strange animals," adding, "What are they living for? Their faces are lifeless, dead. They're desperately pretending to be alive. Why make such a big deal about slaughtering one of these dumb beasts?"
Later, when telling a new friend about the man he killed he evokes a line in Johnny Cash's "Folsom Prison Blues": "I really hated him right then. But when I stabbed him, I felt more alive than I ever had before."
Other than his lover (Chisako Hara) and a junior colleague (Isao Sasaki), no one seems to care that Muraki has returned. He proceeds to pass his days by gambling, stating, "I play cards. What else is there?"
Muraki gets his answer when he meets the beautiful, mysterious Saeko (19-year-old Mariko Kaga), who becomes his gambling partner and romantic obsession. If she looks like a femme fatale in her modish outfits and sleek Renault convertible, she turns out to be more of a danger to herself than to Muraki, a characteristic that aligns her with Tang Wei's murder suspect in Park Chan-wook's Decision to Leave.
If Big Time Gambling Boss, which revolves around a high-stakes gambling party to celebrate the new obayun, becomes saturated with blood in the final reel as brother fights against brother, Pale Flower is comparatively bloodless. "In our world," Nakai offers by way of explanation, "loyalty to the clan is all we have." When his attempts at diplomacy fail, he turns to murder. Though Muraki, who makes his entrance as a murderer, will kill again--largely to impress the thrill-seeking Saeko--Shinoda's film is more about intimate, sexually-charged encounters than gun or sword play.
As a whole, women make less of an impression in Big Time Gambling Boss, but it isn't because Yamashita ignores them. It's rather that his focus is on men who have settled down. They have homes, wives, and children; some are even business owners. By contrast, Muraki is a single man living in a dimly-lit rental. The women in the former share their husbands’ loyalty to the clan to the extent that Nakai's wife (Hiroko Sakuramachi) does something shocking when she feels she's let the side down. She may not be a major character, but her actions contribute to the outcome.
Differences aside, neither film ends on a happy note, though Nakai and Muraki remain among the living. Their stories are still tragic. And it's possible that their lives won't improve once they've served their time, since they no longer have as much to live for as they once had.
In his unusually frank interview on the Criterion release, the Pale Flower director admits that he sought "an actor who had fallen on hard times." Once a hot property, Ikebe's difficulty in memorizing dialogue had shaken the industry's faith in him--and his faith in himself--but Shinoda knew he could get the job done in light of his "erotic and graceful presence," and Ikebe fully rewards the filmmaker's faith in him. His lived-in performance also suggests that Muraki's cynicism isn't completely an act.
Instead of abundant dialogue or fight sequences, Shinoda leans harder on score than Yamashita, and it's one of the most striking aspects of the film, next to Masao Kosugi's shadowy cinematography, since Ran composer Tôru Takemitsu bypasses the moody orchestral scores associated with Western noirs for something more dissonant and abstract, even integrating audio of the Nakano Brothers' percussive tap-dancing to represent the rapid-fire click-click-click of flower cards being shuffled at the gambling dens. It's all tension and no release--much like the film itself.
Though neither picture glamorizes yakuza life, neither is a strict morality tale either. By the end, Nakai feels that circumstances have turned him into a "thug," whereas Muraki feels that way from the start, telling Saeko, "Ask anyone: I'm no good. Even I think so. I'm the scum of the earth." Nakai's problems don't result from his yakuza identity, but because he's surrounded by members who aren't as honorable. After all, treacherous colleagues aren't exclusive to the underworld, but I'd still rather watch yakuzas go head to head than, say, stock brokers or attorneys.
Big Time Gambling Boss is available on a limited-edition Blu-ray from Radiance (distributed in the US by MVD) and Pale Flower is available on Blu-ray and DVD from the Criterion Collection. Images: Ryô Ikebe with Mariko Kaga and Kôji Tsuruta with Tomisaburô Wakayama (Far East Film Festival), Tsuruta in Early Spring (the IMDb), Nobuo Kaneko as Senba (Mondo Digital), Kaga with Ikebe (Janus Films), Ikebe (The Criterion Collection), and Tsuruta with Wakayama (Eastern Kicks).
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