In Ishii Teruo’s Women Of Whirlpool Island (Jotai Uzumaki-to, 1960) the action unfolds on an island that is an Asian Casablanca, a mix of nationalities and a hotbed of wartime intrigue, where bodies are sold and life is cheap.
A cabaret on the island, the Doto (“Surging Waves”), is a base for a Hong Kong drug gang, with Yuri (Mihara Yoko), the moll of the boss (Amachi Shigeru), helping the gang force island women into prostitution.
One day a tall, lanky gang gunman, Okami Nobuhiko (Yoshida Teruo), walks into the club, back from Hong Kong to reunite with Yuri, the lover he left behind. But the boss has enslaved Yuri with drugs - until she longs for death as a release.
Meanwhile, the club manager schemes to entrap, a feisty girl (Masayo Banri) working at fishing port - and she seems likely to join all the other island women shipped abroad as sex slaves.
Once Nobuhiko learns the truth about Yuri and the gang’s dirty dealing in the flesh trade, he vows to not only free Yuri - but break the gang.
With his look of boyish sincerity, Yoshida Teruo hardly looks the tough-guy type, but he throws himself into his first lead role with a surprising confidence and authority.
Mihara Yoko plays her familiar role as the wised-up woman who took the wrong path, but still has good in her heart. In her scenes with Yoshida, though, we also see that the good is not going to be enough. Yuri is noir personified: lost and alone - but going to her doom stoically, passionately.
Ishii films this starred-crossed relationship, and the violent action swirling around it, with atmospherics that verge on the over-ripe, but perfectly express its dark, dangerous undercurrents.
Mark Schilling