Black Tight Killers / Ore ni sawaru to abu naize (1966)

Black Tight Killers is arguably the apotheosis of the Nikkatsu “borderless action” film. Tethered to reality by only the thinnest of cords, it is a swirl of color, sexual tease, heroic derring-do, bullet bras padded with explosives, comic-book female ninjas, and action, action, action, featuring Akira Kobayashi at peak grin, complete with wink, bare-chested muscles, and Elvis hair-do.

Kobayashi is the coolest of war photographers who picks up Yoriko, a stewardess on his flight home from Vietnam. Before they can finish dinner, a man shadowing her is murdered, Kobayashi is attacked by a gang of female ninjas, and Yoriko is kidnapped by a gang conveniently identified as villains by their trenchcoats and fedoras. As Kobayashi tries to prove his innocence to the police and to rescue the girl, he is drawn into danger after new danger, with friends turning out to be enemies and enemies revealing themselves as friends. Both the gangsters and the ninja women are after a cache of gold that they believe Yoriko’s father brought back from Okinawa when the Americans invaded.* The bad guys are really bad guys only after the money, but it turns out eventually that the ninjas just want to return the money to help the people of Okinawa, their true loyalties indicated by a red lily each woman wears in her leather jacket.

The ninjas wear black tights under their leather jackets and when not trying to kill people work as go-go-dancers in a night club. While they use some traditional ninja weaponry (they keep their shuriken in their compacts), they have some unusual variants of their own: “bubble-gum bullets” they spit at opponents, sharpened 45 rpm records they throw, swords made from retractable measuring tapes, and the dreaded Octopus Pot,

Trying to escape the Octopus Pot

which was used without a name in Female Ninja Magic to trap a male in the midst of sex. The gangsters have the usual knives and guns, but they’ve also seen Goldfinger and try to paint Yoriko to death to make her talk.

Despite the black tights and leather jackets that suggest exploitation movies, the film is surprising demure about female flesh. When Yoriko is stripped to be painted, her slip is cut off, only to reveal a substantial bra and panties that come to her waist. One of the women escapes the gangsters after a brief bareback scene, only to be shot, but when Kobayashi holds her in her arms for her death scene, she covers her nipples rather than holding the wound. Otherwise, no skin is to be seen.

It’s all nonsense, of course, but this is not meant to belittle it. This is the same era as Our Man Flint, Matt Helm, Candy, Casino Royale, or Modesty Blaise, and Black Tight Killers is no worse and often better than some of those movies and their cheaper imitators. It is the sixties seen as pop art and go-go girls, a simplistic view that Hollywood was more than happy to accept as well.

A rather surprising number of the gangsters are Americans speaking (or dubbed into) Japanese; mixed race gangs were something of a rarity in Japanese films at this time but this can be explained by American ex-soldiers as well as Japanese hunting for the gold that got away. It is never suggested that the ninjas or Yoriko are native Okinawans, and I of course am not able to see any distinctions that would be (and are still) clear to many Japanese, if such distinctions existed in the casting. However, the lily badge does tie them into the same tradition as the Himeyuri girls who sacrificed themselves during the war.

Dying clutching her red lily

This was Yasuharu Hasebe’s first directing job, and he keeps it moving so quickly that you never have a chance to stop and think, or to decide if it is a spoof or just insanely over-the-top.  The real star is the production design by Akiyoshi Satani, which starts with the Nikkatsu  greys and adds an eye-popping set of reds, greens, golds, neons, and some insanely artificial backdrops that would make even Seijun Suzuki hesitate.

All in all, great fun with nothing more intended than a good time at the movies.

• * This may of course be a standard McGuffin, simply an excuse to keep the story in motion, but there were more than a few fables of Nazi gold shipped by submarine to Japan for safe keeping as the Russians approached Berlin, which plays a big part in Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, for only one example.