The label said it all: Nikkatsu Akushon. Nikkatsu was a studio that had been around since the silent days and Akushon was "action," written in the katakana syllabary for foreign words. During their peak, from the late 1950s to the early 1960s, Nikkatsu Action films evoked a cinematic world neither foreign nor Japanese. It was a mix of the two, where Japanese tough guys had the swagger, moves and even the long legs of Hollywood movie heroes. It was a place where the Tokyo streets, Yokohama docks and Hokkaido plains took on an exciting, exotic aura, as though they were stand-ins for Manhattan, Marseilles or the American West.
To audiences reaching adulthood in postwar Japan, that mix was not just fantasy. It reflected the Western influences that were all around them, from cowboy movies to bop jazz, from the big American cars on the city streets to the cavernous nightclubs full of hip urbanites - and yakuza. But Nikkatsu Action was less gritty realism than macho romanticism. One guy with guts, smarts and a pair of quick fists could beat a whole gang of baddies. The action took place in an internationalized space outside the usual Japanese matrix of family, community and workplace, with its myriad of obligations and rules. One young Nikkatsu Action fan, Watanabe Takenobu, later published a collection of essays on the genre called, appropriately, The Beautiful World of Nikkatsu Action (Nikkatsu Akushon no Kirei na Sekai). He found that beauty in the genre’s style, stance and freedom.
The Nikkatsu Action world was not that of Ozu or Mizoguchi, directors who had emotional roots in prewar Japan and affirmed their Japanese identity in their postwar films. It was not even the world of Oshima Nagisa, Shinoda Masahiro and Imamura Shohei, the leaders of the Japanese Nouvelle Vague. They distrusted authority, cinematic or otherwise, and viewed postwar society as a jungle where traditional values were devalued and the amorally strong flourished. But their looks through the social glass darkly were not what the general audience wanted (though several Nouvelle Vague films became box office hits). What it wanted, Nikkatsu discovered, was sun, surf, youthful rebellion - and Ishihara Yujiro, a lanky, long-legged kid with who oozed punkish charm, and could punch his way out of trouble with almost contemptuous ease. Foreigners may have admired Mifune Toshiro’s sweaty intensity as quintessential Japanese, but Japanese youth preferred Yujiro’s brand of casual, Westernized cool. Nikkatsu’s new strategy began in 1956 with Furukawa Takumi’s Taiyo no Kisetsu (Season of the Sun).
Yujiro presented an opportunity - and a dilemma - to Nikkatsu executives. They had the hottest star in Japan, but the so-called "Sun Tribe" (Taiyo Zoku) phenomenon he represented, of privileged kids indulging appetites for kicks and sex with little regard for conventional morality, was not only roundly condemned by the guardians of morality, but had no future. When the fad was over, would Yujiro’s career be history as well? Faced with a similar dilemma in Elvis Presley, Hollywood paired him with reliable hack directors (Michael Curtiz, Norman Taurog, Richard Thorpe), who ground out a series of formula films targeted strictly at fans. Instead of nurturing his career, the studios enclosed it in a strange, air-tight bubble called the Elvis Movie.
Nikkatsu took a different approach because it clearly saw, in a way that Hollywood did not, what was going on outside the studio walls. Sun Tribesmen swimming, sailing and hanging out on the Shonan Coast near Tokyo may have been relatively few in number, but their contemporaries were fascinated by what they represented: more individual freedom than was actually possible in tradition-bound, group-oriented Japan.
Yujiro epitomized that new individualism. He was a kid who said what he thought and did what he wanted, as though it were the most natural thing in the world. There was no agonizing over violating codes or offending seniors. Instead he laughed at his enemies and, if he was pushed, he pushed back. He never cringed or backed away. As an actor, he was willing to try anything, as long as he could be himself.
Nikkatsu tried in him in every genre, from musicals to melodramas - but discovered that he had a talent for action. The studio also felt its young directors could better connect with Yujiro’s young fans. So, starting in 1957, Yujiro made more action films with newcomers like Masuda Toshio and Kurahara Koreyoshi, only a few years his elder. It was as if Elvis had worked with Richard Lester (born 1932) instead of Michael Curtiz (born 1886). These films and others like them were hits and a spawned a new genre: Nikkatsu Action.
Though set in contemporary Japan, Nikkatsu Action films reflected mostly a thin, cosmopolitan slice of reality. Yokohama and the Ginza made frequent appearances, while remote villages and rice paddies hardly appeared at all. Sounds were fog horns and boat whistles, not the cries of sweet potato or laundry pole sellers.
Characters were forever ordering whiskies at fancy nightclubs, while flamenco dancers stomped and foreign couples swung and swayed. They rarely went into raucous izakaya (Japanese-style pubs) to drink sake while drunks wailed their favorite enka. They were often police detectives or pilots or boxers, and seldom salarymen. They pursued their enemies in speed boats or new-model cars - both then far beyond the reach of the average punter - not on bicycles or trains.
This selective, glamorized view of national life was modelled on Hollywood strategy, but Nikkatsu Action directors also took their cues from Duvivier, Fellini, Godard, and other European directors, just as their young fans were listening to chanson and canzone as well as jazz and rock’n’roll. This style was carried to an extreme in the Eastern Westerns of another young Nikkatsu star, Kobayashi Akira. The real Hokkaido of his nine Wataridori (Wanderer, 1959-1962) series films resembled, in its wilder reaches, the mountains and plains of the Old West, if not its deserts. But his character, a drifter who clip-clopped along mountain roads on a horse with bullwhip and guitar, was pure invention, as were his adventures on ranches or in mining towns that looked as though they been imported lock, stock and hitching post from Colorado.
In making these and other so-called mukokuseki akushon ("borderless action") films, Nikkatsu directors and stars borrowed heavily from foreign models. But the results were less copies than reinventions - like a Japanese pizzeria that uses an "authentic" Sicilian crust, but tops it with squid and mayonnaise. Shishido Jo, the most comically outrageous nihonjin-banare ("un-Japanese") of Nikkatsu’s stable of stars, may have learned to twirl a pistol by watching Kirk Douglas in Man without a Star, but his leering, grinning, motor-mouth bad guy persona was strictly his own.
In the mid-1960s, as its stars, directors and audiences aged, Nikkatsu Action films began to take on a darker, more adult tone. Ishihara was no longer a carefree youth on screen, but a complex, conflicted man with a past. His films from this period were called muudo akushon ("mood action") - and the mood was usually down. Instead of dancing the night away with frequent co-star Asaoka Ruriko, he was often alone at the bar, nursing a drink - and remembering.
By this time, the entire film industry was in a funk, with its audiences at home, glued to the tube, while theaters all over the country were closing their doors. The Nikkatsu Action dream was dying - or rather becoming middle-aged. New stars, including Watari Tetsuya, Fuji Tatsuya and Kaji Meiko, revived it in the mid-to-late-sixties, while directors like Suzuki Seijun and Hasebe Yoshiharu brought a new, anarchic, unfettered sensibility. (Too anarchic and unfettered in the case of Suzuki, who found himself fired by the studio after the 1967 release of Koroshi no Rakuin / Branded to Kill.)
The Nikkatsu films of this period still looked Westward - Hasebe’s 1996 debut Ore ni Sawaru to Abunai ze (Black Tights Killers, 1966) had the look of a James Bond spoof, though the hero, played by Kobayashi, was a photojournalist just back from Vietnam, not a spy. At the same time, many of them reflected an industry trend toward home-grown forms. For instance, the popular yakuza movies, set in the prewar period, whose heroes were torn between their obligation to the gang and personal feelings (or survival) and made their cool moves with swords instead of pistols.
From 1968 to 1971 yet another sub-genre arose, Nyu Akushon ("New Action"), that resisted this trend. It upheld individualism, even if it meant making the hero a cad and his world chaotic and violent. This reflected the city streets and campuses where activists engaged in pitched battles with riot police, and the highways where biker gangs roared through the night, horns blasting sleeping citizens into wide-eyed fury.
New Action films about the latter types often had plenty of energy, but compared with the Sun Tribe films of a decade and a half earlier, the vibe was angrier, harsher, and stranger. It was like the contrast between The Stooges and early Elvis. But just as Iggy Pop sold far fewer records than Elvis had, New Action stars drew far fewer fans than Ishihara at his peak. Nikkatsu’s box office shrank - until the end came in 1971.
Foreign critics long ignored Nikkatsu Action. Donald Richie and Joseph Anderson’s seminal 1959 history The Japanese Film Art and Industry passed over the entire genre, even its 1982 revised edition. So did Joan Mellen’s 1976 study The Waves at Genji’s Door: Japan Through Its Cinema. The rise of Suzuki Seijun to Western cult fame in the 1980s brought the genre more attention abroad, but often in a negative way. Critics hailed Suzuki as an overlooked and discarded master, and dismissed most of the films of his colleagues as studio hack work, despite having seen so few of them.
The aim of the Nikkatsu Action retrospective at the 2005 Udine Far East Film Festival is not to challenge the critical consensus - Suzuki was a master, after all - but to broaden the discussion. Given that Suzuki’s Nikkatsu films have been widely screened and distributed abroad for two decades, we did not feel that, given our limited funds and program slots, we needed to screen masterpieces like Koroshi no Rakuin and Nikutai no Mon (Gate of Flesh, 1963) again, even though they are among the best work of our guest, Shishido Jo.
Instead, we are presenting a representative non-Suzuki selection from all periods of Nikkatsu Action, featuring top stars.These include Ishihara Yujiro, Kobayashi Akira, Akagi Keiichiro, Shishido Jo and Watari Tetsuya, and directors Kurahara Koreyoshi, Hasebe Yasuharu and Masuda Toshio, who is also attending as a guest.
Many of the sixteen films in the selection are considered genre classics in Japan, but have never been screened abroad. We could have chosen many more, but the lack of good subtitled prints and programming slots prevented it. Another year, perhaps?