You can get a guy off the street, but you can never get a guy out of the street. The Yakuza is an association of law-abiding individuals that knows no boundaries on its way to cashing in its dirty interests. Yokohama Seaport is one of the business havens of the gang of young Oyabun Gonji Kensaku, who became the fourth head of the Hamayasu criminal and business family, who received succession at the request of the former, as well as at the direction of the interim head Hiroki Tetsuya, locked up and spending an internship in prison.
The world is ruled by money, and more recently by corporations. The goals of insatiable conglomerates are as follows: they need territories for subsequent profit, and for the development of significant lands they are ready to pay large prizes and promise impressive shares in business and profit sharing. Chief Kensak received a temptingly fat offer that is difficult to refuse. It is necessary to clean out the local fragrant slums and evict their stubborn inhabitants from the stuffed shacks, giving the poor fellows only a few gold ones. On the one hand, Kensaku is difficult to make a decision, because for him, a native of the hole there, it is a sensitive blow. On the other hand, the bandit group Daemon of Tokyo, having laid down its hunting eye, plotted to intercept the proposed deal; and gradually, creeping in, is ready to colonize and break into the personal fiefdom of the Hamayasu family, subjugating everything and everything, in the end. But Gonji Kensaku has a debt to the clan. At stake is the honor of the Yakuza blood family, which is above all else. For her, he is ready to do anything - and to the last drop of blood.
Kinji Fukasaku indulges in films about the illegal existence and the need to survive in the sunken land of the Yakuza. This tape turned out to be thoroughly fastened, with the usual lifelong collision of yakuza eiga films and its extreme features. Fukasaku still polished his cinematic style, exercising before further, more brutal and aggressive odes to violence. Branded presence of stop frames, frame composition, upper plans, long camera drives, objective hits, sharp corners, shooting from the bottom up 180 degrees. But there is still a traditional camera solution, rather than the subsequent finally unfolded, manual expressive-chaotic form that gave jazz in “Street Bandit” Gendai yakuza: hito-kiri yota, with a sprawling solo of the Riot Sugawara. But all this after the Sugawarov image of Gonji Kensaku, played expressively, is characteristic of the skin of this type with a criminal reputation, having its own yakuza code, its fervor, its claws. Notice what a cat's look he has in the scene of the appearance to the enemy behind a friend in a wild gang.
The appearance with a symbolic breeze of the former temporary boss, the experienced yakuza Hiroki Tetsuya from the Bastille of Sinners (played in the theme by the incomparable Koji Tsuruta), reveals his image of an old authority whose times have gone into circulation. Tsuruta, who embodied the heroes of the films “ninke” (let’s say, pre-war romanticized stories about the yakuza), here falls into the apple of the archaic yakujishchi of the old guard obsolete, in whose place came modern mafiosi adapted to the harsh reality. Tsuruta’s exemplary melee proves its viability in the new world.
Fukasaku in his work, yet between boiling fist fights and through revolvers, emphasizes sharp sparkling-blinking blades, expressively using the dashing cutting-leaking-shinking process of stabbing. To the end, turning the final visit of settling scores into a choreographic battle on knives, where without ceremony and not having time to sweat, the heroes in a gusty fight cut each other’s blood, actively disabling one after another fighters in elite black suits. With the music of order, Chiuji Kinoshita in each passage is interesting in the parts of flute, guitar, accordion, jazz and that amazing whistling melody.