Like Sex and Fury, Cops vs. Thugs is about as clear a title as you’re likely to find for a movie from any country, not just Japan. However, things are not quite as clear as the title indicates in Kinji Fukasaku’s follow-up to his famous five-part Battles Without Honor or Humanity films.
Bunta Sugawara
The big change is that Bunta Sugawara is now a cop, though his methods are not all that different from his methods when he plays a yakuza, and the setting has moved from Hiroshima to a fictional town in western Japan in 1965. A gang from Osaka is trying to move in, and the immediate cause of conflict is a piece of property that a major oil company wants for a refinery and storage. The Osaka gang wants it at a bargain price, to resell, as does the local gang, but the local politicians are in favor of the bigger kickbacks from the Osaka gang. Various other conflicts arise until an all-out gang war begins and the Prefecture Police (similar to the State Police in an American situation) are brought in, with Lt. Kaida in charge, a strict officer who can also be honest because he is a complete outsider. His goal is to simply clean out all the yakuza. Sugawara and his local cops believe the way to control things is to work with the local gang against the outsiders, both yakuza and outside police, which makes them seem corrupt but also keeps down the body count and the damage to civilians. Further complications arise because Sugawara is friends with Hirotani (Hiroki Matsukata), the #2 in the local gang, and six years earlier had actually hidden him after a murder.
As with Fukasaku’s Battles series, the film moves like lightning, so fast it is not always easy to keep up with who is beating up whom or why. Dollies, cranes, hand-held cameras, and odd angles mix together to provide a sense of documentary-like cinema veritê, with the addition of flashbacks in b&w and freeze frames with dialogue continuing under them.
A Friendship is formed in flashback
Mostly it’s fists or guns, but one casual beheading passes so quickly you might miss it if you blink. The fights are brutal and tight, so that at times there does not seem to have been a fight arranger with the actors simply left to go at it. This encourages the “true story” aspect of the film and at the same time removes it from the “violence as titillation” that had been so strong in late sixties and seventies Japanese (and American) movies. Even Reiko Ike’s nude scene is played as a purely conversational moment with Sugawara, not as a sex scene. There are times when I think Fukasaku was not only born to make movies but was perhaps born making movies, so obvious is both his skill and his pleasure in the work. Even so, there are times I wish he would slow down a bit, and this is one of those times.
Within the movie is a complex examination of post-war Japan and of the corruption that accompanied its rebuilding. For the average person, this corruption grew out of the necessities of the Occupation years: as Sugawara tells Kaida, who is only 31, “You were too young to know the rice you were eating was black-market rice.” When asked why he became a cop rather than a yakuza, Sugawara says only that cops could carry a gun legally. The local cops are in cahoots with the local yakuza not because they have been bought but because they share the same past of a hard world that is only now beginning to be prosperous again. The movie is not really about cops versus thugs but cops and thugs with very little to separate the two; each has its very similar code, each has its violence, each has its bosses, and each understands that there are limits. The true corruption comes from the politicians and the new businessmen who live only for personal advancement and gain and lie to the general public they claim to serve, don’t believe in limits, and who make the cops do their dirty work.
Politician, Yakuza, and Cop party together
As the movie progresses, we see three different kinds of honorable men. Matsukata has the traditional Koji Tsuruta role of the #2 trying to hold the gang together while the boss is in prison (and at times even looks a lot like Tsuruta) and eventually chooses to die with honor to settle some form of peace. Lt. Kaida seems utterly honorable as a cop, but after the affair is over he resigns and takes a position with the oil company whose greed started everything. Sugawara is the man between, loyal to the police, loyal to a friend, with a code of honor that does not match anyone else’s, which will eventually find him killing his friend, being demoted, and later murdered.
Sugawara and his men believe that the best way to keep the peace for everyone is to also keep the peace between the yakuza and the police. All of this is pre-figured before the credits when Sugawara threatens to arrest four young punks. As far as he is concerned, they can go off to fight and kill each other, but they can’t run out without paying the sushi vendor. (Odd social note: Three of the four wear caps with their bills turned sideways or behind, a decade before the fad caught on in the US.)
Curiously, even after the crackdown comes, the yakuza never target Lt. Kaida in the way the Italian Mafia would target judges who began to seriously prosecute cases. There are lines that are not to be crossed. You can give cops “gifts” or provide women at parties or you can blackmail them, but you don’t kill them.
As with all of Fukasaku’s “true story” yakuza movies, it is hard to call Cops vs. Thugs “entertaining.” Humor is in short supply, as is depth of characterization. Anyone looking for inventive violence will be disappointed. There are no cabaret songs, little nudity, and no flights into theatricality. There is an awful lot of incoherent shouting, and the real villains rarely if ever appear on screen. Yet there is no doubt of the movie’s drive, and no doubt that, like Fukasaku’s similar movies of the time, it redefined the yakuza movie for a new audience that was eager to buy tickets to watch it.*
- * My copy was made from a VHS version, which I have tried to sharpen up a bit in the captures. A much clearer DVD is now commercially available.
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