Yellow Line

In Yellow Line (1960), the third installment in Ishii Teruo’s noir Line series, the main action unfolds in the “Casbah” section of Kobe, its narrow, twisty alleys filled with foreigners, criminals and other marginal types. (Though the “Casbah” was a set and Yokohama otherwise stood in for Kobe)
A hitman (Amachi Shigeru) is betrayed by his employer to the police. At Tokyo Station he grabs Emi (Mihara Yoko), a dancer on her way to a new job, to serve as a hostage/cover and hops a train to Kobe. Soon after her reporter boyfriend Mayama (Yoshida Teruo), finds Emi’s shoe, dropped on the platform. Suspecting that she may have walked into a trap set by a Kobe-based prostitution ring, he hurries to the port city on Japan’s Inland Sea.
Once in Kobe, Emi scrawls a cry for help in a 100 yen note and slips it to a shoe store employee - but no one notices it until a young office worker, Yumiko (Sanjo Mako), happens to get it in her change. But then Yumiko herself is kidnapped by two foreign flesh peddlers. Is all lost?
Mayama, however, is not a hard-nosed reporter for nothing. He soon gathers clues that lead him to the dangerous denizens of the Casbah.
In this film, more than any in his Shintoho period, Ishii was able to create his own special atmosphere, somewhere on the borderland between dream and reality, where the forbidden and unlawful thrill and threaten in equal measure.