The Yakuza Papers - Battles Without Honor & Humanity (Complete Box Set)
by Kinji Fukasaku
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Bunta Sugawara, Hiroki Matsukata, Nobuo Kaneko, Tatsuo Umemiya, Tsunehiko WataseDirector: Kinji Fukasaku
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Subtitled); Japanese (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono
Format: Anamorphic, Box set, DVD-Video, NTSC, Special Edition, Subtitled
Picture Format: 2.35:1
Running Time: 500 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2004-12-14
Audience Rating: Unrated
Studio: Homevision
Movie Reviews of The Yakuza Papers - Battles Without Honor & Humanity (Complete Box Set)
Movie Review: Tough Guy Classic
Summary: 5 Stars
This is a great 5-part series detailing the rise of the Yakuza in post-war Japan, more or less based upon real events. Forget about wide-shots: Director Kinji Fukasaku starts with action and keeps it going through all five chapters with hyper-kinetic camera work that was pretty much the opposite of what Kurosawa and Ozu had done in the past couple of decades. You are not observing it from a distance, you (and the camera lens) are RIGHT in the middle of it.. and it's happening all around you, for all five chapters. All this was done long before today's of better-than-real special effects and CGI.
Along with the untraditional camera work, Fukasaku parts ways with another hallmark of the previous 20-years of Yakuza movies: Forget about chivalrous men in Kimonos. The title of the first film, "Battles without Honor & Humanity" lets you know what to expect. Bunta Sugawara plays Hirono, the protagonist criminal around whom all of the action and gang-politics swirls. He's the closest thing to a 'good guy' in this tale of corruption, shifting loyalties, rapidly depleting codes of 'honor' and the constant elbowing and self-promotion that led to the way things still are today. 'Sounds like your workplace? At least your day doesn't end with a harpoon through your foot!
Around the same time in the mid-1970's, Fukasaku also directed other, similar "Cops'n'Yakuzas" movies that are not part of the "Yakuza Papers" narrative, but nevertheless make great side-stories: "Street Mobster", "Sympathy For The Underdog", "Cops Versus Thugs" (with Sugawara on the other side of the badge), "Yakuza Graveyard". Great flicks.
Fukasaku may have been influenced by what was happening in action flicks coming from Hong Kong and Hollywood, and perhaps by "Blaxploitation": He responds by draining the glory & heroism out of violence & revenge, and presenting it in gruesome, painful detail.
HIGHLY recommended!
Summary of The Yakuza Papers - Battles Without Honor & Humanity (Complete Box Set)
In the wake of the Bomb, ex-soldier Shozo Hirono [Bunta Sugawara] joins a Hiroshima yakuza gang, the Japanese equivalent of the Mafia-and then the shootings, slashings, betrayals, and scheming begin. Premiering a year after The Godfather, The Yakuza Papers also broke box office records and spawned sequels, but, in contrast, took a ruthlessly de-romanticized view of the underworld. Based on an actual gang boss's memoirs, The Yakuza Papers plunges the audience into a gritty, brutal, violent newsreel of a three-decade struggle for power of Shakespearean complexity, a nihilistic epic unlike any other.While The Godfather romanticized the American Mafia in the early 1970s, Kinji Fukasaku's five-film series known as The Yakuza Papers: Battles Without Honor & Humanity revolutionized the Japanese yakuza film with unprecedented intensity. A post-World War II epic that broke Japanese box-office records, this complex, utterly authentic cycle of gangster films replaced the popular ninkyo or "chivalry" films of the '60s with jitsuroku, an entirely new breed of gangster film that rose from the ashes of Hiroshima and post-war reconstruction, depicting a meticulously detailed "alternate history" (as Japanese film expert Tom Mes observes in the accompanying booklet) that had been ignored by the "official" factual record. Beginning with 1973's Battles Without Honor and Humanity and continuing through four hugely popular sequels, these are bracingly intricate studies in shifting loyalties and gangland chaos, tracking the yakuza career of Shozu Hirono (played by charismatic star Bunta Suguwara), who rises from lowly soldier status in 1946 to "sworn brotherhood" and respected retirement in 1970. Across this quarter-century of death, power, and betrayal, Fukasaku orchestrates nearly 50 characters in four major cities, all vying for dominance in a familial structure so complex that a helpful flow-chart is provided to follow the shifting balance of power.
Western viewers may struggle with the social context of these films, but as a gangster epic of escalating scope and power, The Yakuza Papers offers a universally energizing DVD experience. Fukasaku (who died in January 2003 while filming his 62nd film, Battle Royale II) was a master of cinematic pulp, and these films represent the pinnacle of his frenetic, deliberately chaotic hand-held camera style, which strongly influenced American urban crime films of the '70s (as French Connection director William Friedkin notes on the feature-packed supplement disc). Rough-edged and thematically rich, the five films presented here--all in pristine digital transfers and brilliantly translated by ace subtitler Linda Hoaglund--combine to form a sprawling milestone of Japanese cinema. Home Vision's packaging and comprehensive supplements pay honorable tribute to Fukasaku's achievement, with bonus features that provide all the necessary background needed to fully appreciate The Yakuza Papers as a raw, ambitious masterpiece that fully deserves its widespread acclaim. --Jeff Shannon
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