Flower, Storm, and Gang / Hana to arashi to gyangu (1961)

Koji Tsuruta

Now at Toei studios after Shintoho’s collapse, Teruo Ishii continued his knack of piecing together piles of derivative script pages into standout B movies. Like his “Line” pictures before and his Abashiri Prison films later, this one would lead to a series of “sequels.” They had nothing in common but the use of “gang” in the title, many of the same principal actors, and a basic situation of a robbery of some kind.*

This is a pretty standard heist movie such as was sweeping the world in the sixties. With his girlfriend’s encouragement, Masao joins a gang planning a bank robbery. Rather as in Reservoir Dogs, most of the gang have absurd names, like Smiley, Band, Pants, etc., though they seem to be real nicknames rather than Tarantino’s aliases. Smiley plots out the robbery, complete with a model of the bank and toy gangsters, but after the robbery, things don’t go as planned.

Planning the robbery

A yakuza gang wants the money, the partners double-cross each other, even Masao’s mother tries to steal the money, and Masao keeps switching the money bag around so no one really knows where it is, until we reach a final shoot-out that takes place at a dude ranch (!!!). Breaking the rules of heist movies in general, the money actually ends up with Masao.

The extra twist is Koji Tsuruta as Masao’s brother, an old-fashioned yakuza who gets caught in the middle. He wants nothing to do with the robbery, tells his boss he has no responsibility for his brother, yet eventually gets caught between the two sides in the shootout where he chooses family over gang.

The American influence can be seen from the title itself; apparently, Japanese did not have a word for “gang” in the modern sense, so they simply incorporated the American term into Japanese pronunciation as “gyangu,” a practice used for many other English terms. Like the Nikkatsu borderless action films, this is a very Americanized plot line, with a cast that, most of the time, dresses like they were in an American movie. The primary influence on costume design seems to have been mid-fifties Frank Sinatra,

Note Frank Sinatra dominating the setting

whose gigantic picture covers the wall of the obligatory bar they frequent.* While this often makes the men look silly, in the way one year’s cool look is the next’s absurdity, the women look terrific in the 1960 fashions, often better than American movies stars did, though the black & white is a big factor in the success of the look. Aside from the men’s clothes, nothing else is even vaguely related to Sinatra’s rat-pack Ocean’s 11. The music, however, makes no nod to Sinatra, but rather is that kind of phony rock-n-roll played by a jazz combo that was heard only in movies. Even in America, the studios never figured out rock-n-roll, so this is no slur on the composer here; if anything, it makes the movie even more American in its feel.

Possibly a first in Japanese movies (and underlining the American feel), Tsuruta has a blonde American girlfriend/mistress, whom we see when they go sailing, just to throw in a bit of the Sun Tribe vibe as well.

Like so many of Ishii’s movies in this era, it is clean, quick, and livened with bits of humor, the essence of a good B movie. The set pieces, such as the robbery and the shoot-out on location in the mountain country, are handled with flair, and the dialogue scenes are always efficient at the very least, though the actors seem to have been left on their own as far as performance was concerned. Tsuruta turns in his usual professional performance, but most of the others tend to go in for scenery chewing,

Masao gloats over the money

especially Masao whom I think was Mamoru Ogawa (the credits do not list character names) in the first movie of a very brief career. The other casting interest is a young Ken Takakura in one of his first principal roles as Smiley, years before he became the stone-faced, restrained model for all yakuza heroes of the late sixties and seventies, when a smile was almost the last expression you would expect to find on his face.

It is not an undiscovered gem, but it does demonstrate how Ishii could make the best of his material. But it is also an excellent example of the ways in which Japanese studios tried to use American ideas and looks to attract a younger Japanese audience.

* Ishii did not direct all nine of the series; Kenji Fukasaku began his remarkable gangster/yakuza career with some of the later films.

** The bar also boasts the same poster for an Andre Kostelanetz album that is on the wall of so many Nikkatsu bars; I had to double-check the studio just to make sure they weren’t shooting on the sets from another movie to save money.