Wolves / Prison Release Celebration / Shussho iwai (1971)

Hideo Gosha’s Wolves is one of those rare movies that is extremely difficult to write about. Gosha had burst on the theatrical scene with six chanbara masterpieces, plus arguably Japan’s greatest film noir. Then he followed with Hitokiri, a period jidai-geki that ranks with the finest of all Japanese historical films. After such a run, you would expect a drop-off in quality, particularly as he turned to the more restrictive yakuza genre. The sixties yakuza film had almost no flexibility, soon developing not only certain standard tropes but, for the most part, the same plot – an honorable yakuza returns, usually from prison, in some time period before WWII, and tries to fit in while still retaining his Code although the new world only gives lip-service to the Code, until eventually something snaps and there is a bloodbath at the end. You can try to hide the repetitiousness in a lot of different ways – set it in Manchuria or Osaka or Tokyo or in a small town in the back of beyond, give the hero a lover or a best friend, make him the son who does not want to be a yakuza, even on occasion make him a her – or you can accept that fundamental core and treat it as if it is absolutely new and never seen before. That is what Hideo Gosha does with Wolves, producing an austere, sparse, and pure yakuza film of a kind and quality that would not be seen again for decades, perhaps ever.

As the genre required, the plot is simple and clichéd. After killing the boss of an enemy group, Iwahashi (Tatsuya Nakadai) is released from prison early in 1928 as one of a series of pardons celebrating the coronation of the new Emperor. When he returns home, his old boss has died and the number three man has become the new boss. Iwahashi was the old number two, but the during the time in prison he has changed and relinquishes all claim on the leadership of the gang. Meanwhile, the gang is now unifying with their old enemy, a unification promoted by a politician (Tetsuro Tanba). To cement the alliance, the daughter of the old boss is supposed to marry the boss of the enemy group. She is in love with another gangster, who has promised Iwasashi to disappear but breaks his promise. His return leads eventually to the traditional great battle with bodies everywhere and Iwahashi sentenced to life in prison. The one unusual variant is a pair of female assassins lurking in the background and trying to eliminate anyone who would stand in the way of the girl’s marriage, a pair we ultimately learn are working for the politician.

As with some other yakuza films, we learn that while yakuza might be dangerous,  nothing is as truly dangerous as a politician, for the bodies lie scattered and Nakadai goes to prison for life, but the politician goes on to ever greater success. Though it takes us a while to get to the obligatory fight, when it comes, it is one-on-one rather than the traditional one against twenty — real, brutal, and unglorified,

Iwahashi’s emptiness and his position as an outsider is signified by long scenes at the ocean. Here is where vocabulary begins to fail us. The scenes are immensely sad without any attempt to make us feel sorry for Iwahashi’s situation, beautiful without any prettiness, slow without any sense of dragging. Similar descriptions could be applied to almost all of Nakadai’s scenes in the movie. All of the “chivalrous yakuza” movies set in pre-war years were elegaic in the sense that they glorified a time when there was a different world, though things often turned out badly for the heroes. That world never really existed, but audiences wanted it to have existed, just as American audiences wanted the Western to be true.

Wolves is elegaic in a different way, putting no haze or glow around its story or its characters and utterly without nostalgia, but somehow saying farewell to the chivalrous yakuza film itself, rather than to the romantic legend embodied by it. It is not an attempt to introduce “reality” to the yakuza film in the way that Kinji Fukasaku’s and Noboru Ando’s “true story” yakuza movies would soon do, any more than Goyokin is an attempt to introduce “reality” to the ronin chanbara. It says to us, “Here is the genre in its essence, expanded in length yet reduced to its purest core, without extraneous complications or any attempts to disguise its clichés.” And yet, rather than a collection or repetition of clichés, it feels like a genre invented from scratch. Once you have seen Wolves, you can not ever see any of the other films of its particular genre in the same way.