Sympathy For The Underdog — Sympathy For The Underdog (Blu Ray)

Sympathy For The Underdog (1971), a popular yakuza crime movie from Battle Royale (2000) director Kinji Fukasaku here receives a handsome restored Blu-ray release from Radiance as part of their series of disks dedicated to Japan’s Toei studio’s crime films.

The film concerns the efforts of just being released from jail after ten years senior gang member Masuo Gunji (Koji Tsaruta)-  he is reuniting surviving loyal members and relocating the gang to fresh turf.  Gunji decides to settle in Okinawa.  His successful capture of a whiskey bootlegging operation causes the local mob bosses to unite with Gunji’s old enemies on the Japanese mainland.  These conflicts are only resolved amid escalating violence.

Sympathy For The Underdog is an interestingly transitional film for several reasons.  Graphically brutal to an extent this Japanese film parallels similar developments in mainstream American films of the time.  The most visible titles are Bonnie and Clyde (1967), The Wild Bunch (1969), Soldier Blue (1970) and Straw Dogs (1971).

Yakuza-based movies had been a staple of Japanese cinema since the silent period with the criminals often portrayed as Robin Hood-like outlaws embodying the spirit of the samurai code; at the time of ‘Underdog’s production the most recent form of this tradition, beginning in the early 1960s were collectively known as ‘Ninkyo Eiga’, or ‘Chivalry films.  These films, set in the late 19th and early 20th centuries depict their kimono-wearing outlaw heroes as honourable men torn between duty and personal feelings.  The most popular stars of this genre were Ken Takakura and Koji Tsuruta, the star of Sympathy For The Underdog.  Tsuruta plays Gunji as honourable and stoic, his perpetual self-containment symbolized by his ever-present sunglasses.  However, this honourable quality only extends so far.  Gunji and his men are no less brutal or greedy than the local Okinawa thugs.  They are identification figures only because the film is generally presented from their point of view.  Also, the most lauded virtue in this environment is “guts” and Gunji’s small gang who acquit themselves against far greater numbers certainly embody this quality.

Sympathy For The Underdog with its realistic and unsentimental portrayal of gangster politics and bouts of ultraviolence also helped pave the way for a new form of Yakuza movie.  These were called ‘actual record films’ or ‘Jitsuroku Eiga’ in which Yakuza of the post-World War II period were portrayed not as honourable heirs of the samurai code but as aggressive street thugs with purely materialistic motivations.  One of the key films of this new genre, often called “The Japanese ‘Godfather’” was Battles Without Honour and Humanity directed in 1973 by Fukasaku.

As a film. Underdog is good looking with vibrant colours shown to their best effect on this Blu-ray release.  The score is eclectic and often exciting.  The red titles over monochrome backgrounds in the opening credits sequence is a frequent Fukasaku motif.  Although the shoot-‘em-ups are more restrained than the famous ‘heroic bloodshed’ of Hong Kong’s John Woo and Ringo Lam beginning in the 1980s, they are still considerably stylized.  Action scenes give way to freeze frames which accommodate voiceovers providing exposition until the action kicks in again.  Hand-to-hand combat is very much in the spirit of kung fu films with the foley artists working overtime on the sound effects.  An avowed influence on this movie was Gillo Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers (1966).  From Pontecorvo Fukasaku took the relatively balanced, ‘objective’ approach to the feuding groups.  There are also the stylistic borrowings; the semi-documentary trappings of frequent hand-held photography and real-life locations.  Performances are solid with Gunji’s gang members such as Kudo (Noboru Ando), Gunshot (Harumi Sone) and Old Man (Toru Yuri) carefully delineated.  The most enjoyable character work comes from the chiefs of Gunji’s eventual Okinawan allies; Mad Dog Jiro and his brother Yonabal.  Unlike his Robert De Niro namesake in Mad Dog and Glory Jiro’s sobriquet is not meant ironically and Kenji Imai gives an enjoyably demented performance.  As Yonabal Tomisaburo Wakayama makes one of the best entrances I’ve seen recently, crashing through a shoji paper wall during a formal ceremony while sporting a belt packed with pistols and grenades.

Fukasaku doesn’t make any great cases for his heroes morally or even logically.  The actual motivations for Gunji and his men are rather opaque.  Given that he has been chased out of his hometown on the mainland and is now muscling in on new territory with only six men Gunji may be less motivated to make a killing than returning to the only life he knows and dying gloriously.

Sympathy For The Underdog is a well-acted, tightly edited and despite its stress on emotional reticence it never lags or loses the viewer’s attention.

Radiance’s Blu-ray is supplemented by three excellent extras. The first is an audio commentary by English South East Asian action cinema specialist Nathan Stuart which provides a thorough contextualisation of the film’s production, its location in Japanese genre cinema and the careers of the various stars and supporting players within Toei studio and beyond.  The second is a convincing case for Kinji Fukasaku, generally seen as an expert genre director, as an auteur given by French critic Olivier Hadouchi in a direct-to-camera video essay.  The final extra, ‘That Distant Territory’ features academic Aaron Gerow looking at various approaches to portraying the prefecture island of Okinawa in Japanese cinema, its specific handling in Sympathy for the Underdog and the way this movie anticipates yakuza activity in the prefecture in the years shortly following the island’s release from the US and back to mainland Japanese control.

Radiance has created an excellent package for the release of this key film in the work of an increasingly hailed director and an increasingly internationally popular genre.