Yakuza Graveyard

Yakuza Graveyard was one of the stylish, morally ambivalent movies with which director Kinji Fukasaki revolutionised the Japanese gangster genre in the 1970s. These days more famous for his brilliant teen exploitation film Battle Royale, Fukasaki has a proven flair for unsettlingly violent scenes in which the camera dips and twirls as his characters throw each other down stairs and across rooms.

An honest cop (Tetsuya Watari) is stationed in Osaka and finds himself caught up in a nightmare world where his superiors launder money and carry out hits for several rival gangs. His sense of honour--already supporting the drunken, promiscuous widow of a man he killed--ties him ever closer to the principal heavy of the gang his superiors are gradually destroying and to the man's half-sister, with whom he falls passionately in love. A torrid interlude as waves beat on the shore--waves that somehow manage to be something other than a cliché--is just a break in the gloomy spiral of degradation and death. This is in some ways as corny as anything, in other ways a minor classic.

On the DVD: Yakuza Graveyard is presented in 16:9 widescreen and comes with a short text essay explaining the importance of the film in the development of Fukasaki's career and the yakuza genre. --Roz Kaveney