Two good scriptwriters and a filmmaker whose highest achievement was perhaps the comedy "Tootsie", add to a rather flat and artificial film that is neither a thriller nor a yakuza film, but a complex drama about ethics (with historical resonance, not only of Japan, but of the US-Japan relations) that could have been much better in capable hands. Writer Paul Schrader followed this with his script for Martin Scorsese's "Taxi Driver", while Robert Towne had already written Hal Ashby's "The Last Detail" and --also in 1974-- Roman Polanski's "Chinatown": "The Yakuza" proves how good Scorsese, Ashby and Polanski were, and that Sydney Pollack was a standard filmmaker. I admit that I never liked his films. I even walked out of "Bobby Deerfield". But after all these years, reading or hearing good things about "The Yakuza", I decided to give it a try. In the opening credits, Dave Grusin's supposedly hip score starts the distortion of a tale that, in essence, unravels as it goes through an intricately sinuous labyrinth to reflect on dignity, love, ethics, tradition, betrayal, resentment, death; and furthermore, as I previously suggested, it insinuates, perhaps inadvertently, the bad conscience of a few American citizens who witnessed the assault on Japanese culture by American politicians and military men after the end of Second World War (a subject intelligently dealt by Shohei Imamura in "Vengeance Is Mine"), not to mention the barbaric physical harm done with nuclear bombs. Some persons have also suggested a graver cultural distortion in Pollack's romanticized vision of the Japanese gangsters (for a more reliable portrait of the seedy yakuzas, see "Minbo no onna", the film for which its director Juzo Itami supposedly lost his life), but as the time ran, I could not care less. "The Yakuza" became worse, and when a night club scene arrived in which a singer performed a ballad about the yakuza code, I knew I only had two options. I saw it until the end... unfortunately a few days after watching Masaki Kobayashi's masterpiece "Harakiri".
Review of The Yakuza
