☆ ☆ ☆
Police
Tactics (1974) – K. Fukasaku
More of the same in the 4th
film in Kinji Fukasaku’s five film Yakuza Papers series – which isn’t
necessarily a bad thing. At this point
in the program, the narrated exposition at the start of the film is pretty long
and it only just manages to detail the characters and action from Proxy War
(the third film). It might come as no
surprise that, although some of the main yakuza bosses are back (primarily cool
Bunta Sugawara as Hirono but also his rivals Takeda, Yamamori and Uchimoto),
they sometimes get lost among the violent antics of the younger generation of
yakuza and by the end of the film they are all sidelined. It’s hard to keep the betrayals straight. One
wonders what will happen in the 5th and final film, when everyone’s
in jail. Fukasaku maintains the same punchy style here, syncopated with freeze frames
and horns. When yakuza die, we finally
find out their names and which family they belonged to in a flash of onscreen
text. If any of this is a true story,
Hiroshima couldn’t have been a safe place to live. Not the place to start the series, naturally.
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