Blackmail is my Life / Business // Kyokatsu koso waga jinsei (1968)

Blackmail is My Life gives us an early look at Kinji Fukasaku in the kinetic, some might say frenetic, mode of his seventies yakuza pictures. At least for the first two-thirds of the movie, its playful energy and unpredictable stylistic choices suggests a Richard Lester movie with the Beatles playing gangsters, assuming of course that you could imagine John Lennon or Paul McCartney being beaten to a pulp or raping one of the blackmail victims. The flashbacks and -forwards, the freeze frames, the switch from b & w to color and back, sometimes in mid scene, and the loopy guitar band soundtrack all swing between the exhilarating and the off-putting. All that’s missing are songs. But there is something quite serious going on as well.

As in Fukasaku’s early masterpiece Wolves, Pigs, and People, we have a group of young nobodies with nowhere to go but up. Shun is badly beaten when he overhears a plan to steal liquor from the nightclub where he is a toilet cleaner cum waiter and decides to take revenge. When the liquor store owner pays the gang off to stop them from exposing his scam, they decide to go into the blackmail business, raiding another gang that has been making secret films in an exclusive brothel. Shun uses the photos for cash from the businessmen involved and even gets a movie star girlfriend out of the stack (after he rapes her instead of taking money for her photos). Zero, a former boxer, finds his father has been killed and the gang decide to take revenge on the drug dealers involved, which leads to a Molotov Cocktail attack that wipes out the murderers but also burns the money that would have been their big score. Shun turns his attention to a secret memorandum from the government that another very rich blackmailer has, but things go sour quickly. Zero is beaten to death and Seki, the happy-go-lucky ex-yakuza, decides the stakes are getting too high and leaves the final caper to Shun and Otoki, the one female in the gang. This being a Japanese movie, things do not end well. In other words, you can mess with the yakuza or prominent individuals, even drug gangs, but they are nothing compared to politicians.

While Sabu in the earlier film had been surly and angry, relaxed only around his close friends, Shun as played by Hiroki Matsukata* is a cocky fellow, acting as if life is a game, and the others pick up that attitude from him, even when violence occurs. That playfulness allows him to just walk away from the burning money without any visible regret, but it doesn’t allow him to gauge real danger when it appears. As the politician, Tetsura Tanba in a practically non-speaking role exudes such authority and menace that Shun should have recognized immediately this is not a man to be crossed.

This is a new generation  being depicted on screen, all young people born during or after the war who never knew the “old ways.” They are rootless, without any family but the family they make for themselves. In a crude sense, they represent the first generation of the “Americanized” Japanese, reaching their teen years in the economic boom of the later fifties and  early sixties, without any memories of the war or the Occupation. They have no class, no culture; money is their only marker of success and only youthful high spirits can hold them together, signified by the car race on the beach and playing in the surf, now a cliché of youth and romance but in 1968 something still new and freeing in movies. Earlier young adults on Japanese screens were often rootless, but they were aware of that and often desperately in search of roots or living on the verge of insanity. Neither of those apply to Shun and his friends.

The movie has such pure energy that it is almost overwhelming. Much of this may be due to the editor, Keiichi Uraoka, who was the editor for almost all of Oshima’s movies and thus conversant with, and the inventor of, most of the Japanese “New Wave” approaches pioneered by and usually credited to Oshima.** I’ve seen many movies that alternated black and white with color, but I don’t recall seeing any movie anywhere in which the color gradually bled into the black and white in the course of the same shot.

There are oddities in its production as well. It was a Shochiku movie, made at a time when Shochiku had sworn off the New Wave and was not much interested in crime or yakuza movies. Fukasaku and Matsukata were under contract to Toei, Uraoka was free-lance, the production designer has no other movies credited to him, and the music is by Hajime Kaburagi, who not only mostly worked for Nikkatsu but even steals one of his own songs from Tokyo Drifter, hauntingly whistled here. (If you look at the trailer on YouTube, there is a completely different “Mission: Impossible” sound track that sounds nothing at all like Kaburagi’s final result, which is closer to Jimi Hendrix than Lalo Schifrin.)

It is a movie that is easy to like but hard to love, not just because the hero is a young punk blackmailer. After a while, it becomes an exercise in style, but it is an exercise that is absolutely fascinating to watch as it unfolds. Unlike Wolves, Pigs, and Men, it just evaporates after you have seen it.

*This was apparently something of a break-out role for Matsukata, who had previously been a busy but supporting player in Toei’s jidai-geki, like the Yagyu Chronicles series, or period yakuza films headlined by Ken Takakura or Koji Tsuruta. Daiei apparently thought they saw real star power that Toei had not seen and shortly hired him away to replace Raizo Ichikawa, with less than successful results, though Matsukata had a long career afterward.

** Of all the people in the creative team of a movie, the two most consistently ignored are the production designer/art director, who usually story-boards a movie before shooting begins, and the editor, who puts the pieces of film together after they are shot. Sometimes the director has a great deal of input on both these stages, especially now when the studio system is gone; in a studio system, it’s hard to know if the director was even aware of either of these stages of the process. Certainly, Oshima and Uraoka were genuine collaborators, since they continued to work together after Oshima was forced to produce independently, but movies like this one suggest that Oshima was not necessarily the originator of many of the unusual techniques.