Sympathy For The Underdog

I think that Kinji Fukasaku's Sympathy For The Underdog (1971) is one of the director's finest. In this film we see Koji Tsuruta as the under boss of a Yokohama family that gets out of prison after doing a 10 year stint for killing the boss of a rival family in retribution. The family he left behind has now scattered, realizing there's no more room for them in Yokohama, they'll travel down south to Okinawa to set up their turf. And it's this element that really appeals to me, as the local footage of Okinawa feel like a documentary style. The depictions of the local scene complete with 70s attired military personnel hanging out on the streets and in the clubs, jet planes scream by flying overhead then as they do now, and the bars, clubs, and cabarets that cater to them. There's a great scene in a club with an American soul bad tearing it up. However, this film isn't about them, even though they squeeze the local suppliers for a cut into the black-market base scheme and get attacked by a hired gang of African Americans soon after their arrival. They have to battle the local yakuza as well as mainland enemies who try to move in on the turf in Okinawa. Fukasaku even manages to get in some local music and dancing as the local boss Haldema (Rinshi Yamamoto) is wining and dinning a visiting yakuza from the mainland. As a result there are many a bloody battle and it ends in a particularity burst of bloody glory as do most yakuza films. One of the other heads of the yakuza, Yonabaru from the Koza family is played by the legendary Tomisaburo Wakayama. Fukasaku uses his usual array of cinematic techniques such as hand held cameras for fight scenes, flashbacks that end with freeze frames, and voice-over played over montages with his usual jazzy score. It is an excellent display of the yakuza genre by a master of action films.