Two famous screenwriters lent their talents to the gritty ’70s crime thriller The Yakuza
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Watch This offers movie recommendations inspired by new releases, premieres, current events, or occasionally just our own inscrutable whims. This week: David Fincher’s Mank, about Herman J. Mankiewicz’s work on Citizen Kane, is coming soon to Netflix. Before it drops, check out these earlier films penned by some of Hollywood’s most famous screenwriters.
The Yakuza (1974)
Sydney Pollack’s directorial style has never inspired an auteur cult. Yet in the violent climax of The Yakuza, it’s hard to think of anything else. As the retired American private eye Harry (Robert Mitchum) and the Japanese ex-gangster Ken (Ken Takakura) fight their way into a mob compound, we are treated to a form of action choreography that hadn’t really been seen in an American film at this point—a clash of shotgun blasts, room dividers, and blades, the odds tracked in god’s-eye-view overhead shots.
This showdown of death drives feels inevitable but also unexpected, given that Pollack spends most of The Yakuza applying restraint to the fatalism of a pulpy and eventually lurid script credited to the screenwriters Paul Schrader (Taxi Driver) and Robert Towne (Chinatown). To call this a collaboration between these major talents would be inaccurate. It was Schrader’s first produced screenplay, which Towne, the most celebrated script doctor in Hollywood, was brought in to rewrite. Nonetheless, such unlikely pairings define the film.
Among these is the combination of the alcoholic aura of Mitchum (the only ’40s and ’50s star who looked at home in a downbeat ’70s movie) and the stoic presence of Takakura, a staple of the Toei yakuza movies that Schrader and his brother, Leonard, frequented in the theaters of L.A.’s Little Tokyo. Mitchum’s Harry, who was once stationed in Japan as an MP, has returned to rescue the daughter of an old friend, who has been kidnapped by the yakuza. Schrader began his career as a film critic, so it isn’t surprising that the premise is conceived, in academic noir terms, as a post-war story.
The war, however, is a distant memory. While the world of Japanese organized crime was at the time completely unknown to the wider American audience, The Yakuza avoids some of the expected exoticism. The Japan presented here has modernized, and it’s Harry that looks like a relic as he seeks out the assistance of Ken, the brother of Harry’s old flame, Eiko (Keiko Kishi). Ultimately, it’s a story of different morbid codes of honor and unlikely partnerships between tough guys who are basically walking antiques.
Directed by the stolid Pollack with a largely Japanese crew, The Yakuza is awash with the appealing textures of a ’70s American crime film (urban location photography, moody music, actors who don’t look like they act for a living); in stretches, it also looks credibly like a Japanese studio programmer. That it seems to find a common ground between the two in noir—a French coinage that was invented to describe a category of American movies of which Americans were not themselves aware—speaks to the often tricky cultural exchange of movie genres. A major flop in its time, it now feels like a unique artifact of an era that elevated the self-aware auteur but was also in many ways a golden age of idiosyncratic scripts.
Availability: The Yakuza is available for rental or purchase on Amazon, Google Play, Fandango Now, DirectTV, and VUDU.
42 Comments
I remember having enjoyed that film a lot, and considered it quite similar to my beloved Black Rain. Both gave me a nice impression of cultural interaction between Americans and Japaneses, a nice window on different cultural outlooks and expectations.I’m phrasing it very subjectively, because I’m very much not Japanese at all (while all of Europe is pretty much american), so I cannot evaluate very objectively how horribly cliché and misleading these cultural depictions were. I can only speak of the impression they had left, which, naively or not, felt sober, respectful and endearing, far enough from the cheesy orientalism they could indulge in. I’m ready and anxious of having these impressions corrected.
I haven’t seen The Yakuza, but my impression of Black Rain was that it seemed more like a Tony Scott movie than a Ridley Scott one.
The ambiguity is addressed and lifted in that scene near the end where the Michael Douglas character holds the baddie over a wooden stick, with both briefly wondering whether they’re in a Tony Scott or a Ridley Scott movie.
I saw Black Rain in the theater. It also willingly co-stars Kate Capshaw.
I managed to miss The Yakuza, though this article has piqued my interest. And yes, this seems to be very much in the same vein as Black Rain to me. It definitely looks like Scott drew inspiration from Pollack’s earlier work. There’s also Ken Takakura’s presence in both films, in which he seems to be playing variations of the same role. And I see similarities between Mitchum’s and Douglas’ characters—it seems like Douglas is intentionally dressed in a wardrobe that recalls Mitchum’s, with turtlenecks and long coats. It also seems both have a preference for scatter-guns when it comes to doing close work, like raiding gangster hideouts.
The main difference, from what I’ve seen of Black Rain (I stopped it early), is that Douglas’ character was aggressively douchy and very much the Ugly American type (and ridiculously, a badass rebel cop who totally kicked ass at illegal street racing), whereas Mitchum was more of a worldy, but also world-weary type.
Douglas’ character is most definitely a dirty cop, though he probably didn’t start out that way. He’s also a fine example of the Ugly American—he has no respect for the culture he’s a guest in. A major plot element is how he comes to terms with his past and then ultimately finds a measure of redemption through Takakura’s straight-as-an-arrow character’s influence.
I’ve seen a lot of American movies set in Japan or with a Japanese theme, and I’d say that while it does have some unnecessary cliches, it’s not nearly as bad in that regard as most of those. That said, Toei producer Koji Shundo, who was the main force behind the entire ninkyo eiga genre this movie partly emulates as well as collaborator on this movie, was critical of it. He called the love story at the center of it nonsense (let’s not forget that lots of American soldiers were raping Japanese women or strictly using their services as prostitutes during the Occupation, not, you know, courting them romantically) and called Sydney Pollack arrogant. He praised Robert Mitchum, though.
“HIIIYYYAAAAAA!”“Aw. . . . “
As 70s Robert Mitchum crime movies go, I will take The Friends of Eddie Coyle and the two movies where he played Philip Marlowe
I sorta hated Mitchum as an actor before I saw The Friends of Eddie Coyle.I like him a lot after. Somehow, it all made sense after that movie.
Mitchum did a lot of unmemorable work in a lot of second rate films but he could be great even early on in his career. The movie that changed my opinion of him was “Crossfire” (1947) where he actually plays a good guy with surprising depth and quiet authority, stealing the movie from Robert Ryan (no small feat.)
Yeah. I’ve been watching Noir Alley on TCM on Saturdays, so I’ve been seeing him a lot.
Hate to disagree with you, EL, and rarely do on the subject of films, but while I loved Mitchum’s take on the character in Dick Richards’ Farewell My Lovely, Michael Winner’s version of The Big Sleep was terrible, and Mitchum looked uncomfortable. Agree on Eddie Coyle though, makes a case for Peter Yates being a very underrated director.
Farewell My Lovely was definitely much better than the follow up
It doesn’t help that Michael Winner was always a hack.
Big Mitchum fan, his 70s stuff is underrated. The Big Sleep is a dud, you can’t move a Raymond Chandler story to the UK.One of his best performances is Jon Huston’s Heaven Knows, Mr Allison
Heaven Knows, Mr Allison I think is one of the most underrated WW2 movies (and John Huston movies)
Nothing can beat his turn in Night of the Hunter.
I haven’t seen the film in decades but I recall being deeply impressed by it. At the time I was into those hard-to-find foreign films (1974 was before movie rentals!) and it seemed this film had borrowed all of the most satisfying aspects of foreign films and incorporated them into the production. I got the impression if it had not had an American lead from an American studio it would be considered a Japanese noir classic. Three years later we’d get ‘Rolling Thunder’ another noir drama that ends in a blood bath.
It would definitely not be considered a “Japanese noir classic”. It’s an Hollywood take on the ninkyo yakuza genre, of which literally hundreds were made in the previous decade, and while it’s not bad, there are many dozens of better ninkyo movies. All of those movies end in a similar bloodbath at the villains’ hideout, by the way. By 1974, Japanese audiences were tired of that convention, and the documentary-style ‘70s yakuza movies avoided it completely.
The original screenplay was written by the Paul Schrader and his brother Leonard, who had dreamed up the core idea after living for a number of years in Japan, where he spent a lot of time in Yakuza bars and watching Yakuza movies. Leonard Schrader would even go on to write a number of Japanese movies (in Japanese, obviously), so I think he’s somewhat insulated from the usual charges of cultural adventurism. And both brothers fully immersed themselves in the Toei output of Yakuza movies, which Paul would later write a critical piece on for Film Comment.However, Sydney Pollack and the Schraders didn’t really see eye-to-eye on the film, so Robert Towne is largely responsible for the version that ended up on screen. Cinephilia & Beyond has pdfs of both the original draft and Towne’s rewrite if anybody is curious how it changed.
A tremendous pic, unjustly forgotten, and with great performances from both Mitchum and Ken. As well as a great poster design by Bob Peak which, as far as I know, only used in Japan.
That is a great poster. IMDB has a version of it with English credits and taglines, though, so it seems like it wasn’t only used there, though there’s also a much more sober one with the dumbass “100 years ago they were called samurai” tagline. Yakuza were never samurai – they ran gambling, ports, and labor rackets even in the feudal era – and 100 years before 1974, the samurai class was already being gradually abolished.
I think the sober one was chosen over the more vivid ones. A shame.
Gorgeous poster. Do you have this one?
Sadly no, but always on the lookout. Fabulous user name BTW.
Thanks. I am looking for a Le Samourai.
This one? Absolutely beautiful. Hope you find one. https://i.pinimg.com/originals/42/c5/3f/42c53f9d6043a0c2539b6d2197e68843
I could not make that link work. This one, smaller, sharper:
I think that was also the cover to the VHS box but was tinted blue/green instead of yellow/orange. Still in my parents attic somewhere.
In the very dubious world of American movies about Japan, Yakuza is definitely one of the better / least cringy ones. It can’t resist a few cliches and a little bit of outsider pontificating on cultural differences, but at least I don’t remember any dumb gags about Japanese people being small and wacky or whatever, and it avoids calling kung-fu “bushido” like that Dolph Lundgren/Brandon Lee movie. Some of the dialogue is even pretty clever, and the Dave Grusin score is nice.That said, it was a little dated by 1974; it’s mostly patterned after the ninkyo yakuza movies (of which Ken Takakura had been the biggest star, all in all), which had fallen out of favor in Japan by then, replaced by the more realistic (and more often modern-set) jitsuroku yakuza movies made popular by Battles Without Honor & Humanity. As the review alludes to Toei, it’s worth mentioning that they collaborated in the production of this movie.
In an odd way, Mitchum excelled at playing washed-up has-beens, and he was playing those roles shortly after the sea-change in Hollywood which turned a lot of big old-time stars into has-beens. In this film he plays a guy past his prime who doesn’t quite understand the world he’s operating in. He had played an even more pathetic version of that role the year before in ‘The Friend of Eddie Coyle. In his two Philip Marlow roles he played and oldschool detective who was considered a dinosaur by those around him.
In the same vein, I’m curious what you’d have to say about The Challenge. It’s not great, and it’s guilty of some of the sins Yakuza mostly avoids (there’s a weird scene where Toshiro Mifune and his pretend-samurai boys eat live fish like that’s just totally ordinary Japanese food, for example), but it’s kind of interesting in that the American protagonist is a grimy racist early ‘80s New York fuckup who only sorts of stumbles onto heroism cause Mifune wants to prove a point. In that way, it’s very much the “third-rate Chuck Norris flick” it was accused of being (it’s also much more watchable than The Octagon or whatever). Also, it was Steven Seagal’s entry into film (as an action choreographer), and Kinji Fukasaku’s son Kenta (who directed all of Battle Royale 2 except for the one scene where Kitano appears) has a role in the movie for some reason I don’t understand (he’s the child befriended by the protagonist).
“Very much NOT”, dammit. It’s the opposite of every movie where the random white guy who learns karate or the secret ninja arts quickly becomes the best that ever was at it or whatever.
Saw The Challenge for the first time last year. Found some of it embarrassing to watch (unlike this movie), but it’s got some quirkier touches, the finale is a lot of fun, and I really dug the secondary bad guy played by Calvin Jung. (Also, upon rewatching The Yakuza for this piece, I discovered that the futuristic-fortress-looking building that’s used for that film’s climax, the Kyoto International Conference Center, is also used in this movie.)
Watched the Yakuza after reading this last weekend and greatly enjoyed it. During the scene where Mitchum confers with Ken’s brother, I found myself having deja vu until I realized … wait, didn’t they just mention he tracked him down at a meeting? In Kyoto? Beautiful conference venue. Still has the koi ponds.
I loved this one, and I think it was the first time that I realised how good Sidney Pollack was. And yeah, pretty much a predecessor of Black Rain.
I can’t believe I’ve missed a movie with this pedigree from one of the more fascinating decades of Mitchum’s career. There have been earlier postwar crime films with Americans in Japan (Humphrey Bogart and Robert Ryan each did one) but the timing of this one seems uniquely compelling. America was steadily losing its luster at home and globally while Japan was in fast ascendance (and had been making steady inroads into our popular culture even by this point.) Mitchum was the perfect actor to embody this. He still projected shades of faded glory and toughness but the edges were visibly fraying and their was a weariness about him that gives his work in the seventies extra depth (if you haven’t seen “The Friends of Eddie Coyle,” for gods sake sit down with it as soon as you can.) Thanks for the great appreciation, Ignatiy.
I’m a big fan of the Robert Ryan one, House of Bamboo. And of Samuel Fuller movies in general.
I’d smoke a flesh pole for an Eddie Coyle TV series