The Yakuza Papers: Battles Without Honor and Humanity (1973)

BWH&H 1: The Beginning

I can't believe there are no review of this here yet.

I'm a huge Yakuza/Like A Dragon video game fan, and have been for many, many years. That's essentially how I stumbled across this series of movies, as many consider it to be a sort of blueprint for those stories. I wasn't disappointed.

I'm not going to run through all of my loves and gripes from this entry. Instead, I'm going to give tips on how to watch these. The first thing you need to know is that these are best viewed back to back, at least within a short period of time. If you don't, you'll lose track of who is who, who is sworn to who and which gang, what their backstories and relationships are, etc. This is how I watched these five films the first time around, and I did the exact same thing recently for my second viewing of them. If you like this film, the others are pretty similar, and flow really well together.

As for this particular first film, it's an amazing start. It only scratches the surface of the yakuza world the series builds, but it's a serviceable starting point with a lot going on, and possesses a great cast of characters to follow. It moves a t a really fast pace and utilizes shaky cam, complete with all the poor choreographing you'd expect from a Japanese film from this period. If you can get by all that, you'll love it. If you can't, you're gonna hate it. It's broken up with historical narrative bits too, so you have to pay careful attention all throughout. It's a very involving plot, but ultimately it proves very rewarding in the end.

I'm giving it a 9 because it was just as entertaining on my re-watch as it was the first time around. If you like mafia-esque stories then you owe it to yourself to at least give this one a try.

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Self destruction

The epitome of humanity's self-destructive nature in its raw, chaotic form all delivered via Kinji Fukasaku's ultraviolent, handheld stylistic blitzkrieg. The title says it all. There's a true sense of lawlessness at the heart of Battles Without Honor and Humanity, one that applies the electric shock treatment to lobotomise any romantic notions of gangsterdom. A dog-eat-dog world of violent, craven thugs and corrupt law enforcers, here the traditional codes of humanity and group loyalty on which Japan's postwar foundations were built are revealed to be a sham. There's some truly superb acting here from everyone involved, although Bunta Sugawara is a clear scene-stealer, a diverse cast of characters who offer a different perspective with their own viewpoints. Fukasaku demonstrates his great skill as a director, and his technique perfectly fits the movie's tone. Using a fast-paced, erratic, nearly chaotic style the action scenes offer us that taste of brutality we wouldn't have felt had the film been directed more traditionally. Fukasaku strays from the established formula of people getting killed fast and easy with one or two bullets instead he shows us an alternative to that: a slow, painful exercise, one that more accurately portrays the yakuza's violent lifestyle. Yet there are no large body counts, the battles are often predetermined with one side attacking an individual or small group from the other, by surprise and in overwhelming force. There really is no honour in the Japanese underworld. Bright, brash, violent and bloody terrific it's hard not to see how Battles Without Honor and Humanity triumphs, a brilliantly, violent tale about the dark and unforgiving nature of the Japanese crime syndicate that once it starts, never stops.

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