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No Borders, No Limits:
1960s Nikkatsu Action Cinema

“A liberating blast of hot cigarette smoke and cool, jet-set jazz... This was Japan’s version of the French New Wave, except bleaker, more stylish, and aiming primarily to entertain rather than enlighten.”--Grady Hendrix, New York Sun

From April 5 through May 23, the Gene Siskel Film Center, in collaboration with The Japan America Society of Chicago, presents a weekly series of eight films entitled, No Borders, No Limits: 1960s Nikkatsu Action Cinema.

The label said it all: Nikkatsu akushon. Nikkatsu was a studio that had been around since the silent days, and akushon was “action,” written in the katakana alphabet for foreign words. During their peak, Nikkatsu action films evoked a cinematic world neither foreign nor Japanese. It was a mix of the two, where Japanese tough guys had the swagger, moves, and even the long legs of Hollywood movie heroes. It was a place where the Tokyo streets, Yokohama docks, and Hokkaido hills took on an exciting, exotic aura, as though they were stand-ins for Manhattan, Marseilles, or the American West.

The genre included yakuza movies, urban dramas, jazz-inflected youth pictures, Eastern “Westerns,” French New Wave-inspired emotional dramas, and crime films. The films’ action took place in an internationalized space outside the usual Ozu/Mizoguchi matrix of family, community, and workplace. Audiences responded to this reflection of their postwar, Western-influenced world with enthusiasm, making Nikkatsu’s “Diamond Line” of male leads, beginning with Yujiro Ishihara, some of the top stars of the decade.

Foreign critics long ignored Nikkatsu Action, and Japanese film histories by Donald Richie and Joan Mellen passed over the entire genre. While the works of Nikkatsu contemporary Seijun Suzuki have been given great exposure in the U.S., the films of other directors at the studio have been unfairly overlooked. The intention of this series is to present some of the studio’s best non-Suzuki films and to give North American audiences their first exposure to this often artistic, always entertaining subgenre of Japanese cinema. (Introduction courtesy of Outcast Cinema)

Never before seen in the United States, these films are being screened in prints newly struck and imported from Japan for this North American tour. Because the prints are unsubtitled, they will be presented with computerized “soft subtitles” that are projected live onto the film image. We are grateful to The Japan America Society of Chicago for providing the “subtitle-launchers” whose skill and hard work make these screenings possible: John F. Bukacek, Natsuko Imamura, Satoko Ogi, Yoko Wada, and Masayo Yamakawa.

No Borders, No Limits was curated by film historian/critic Mark Schilling. The Gene Siskel Film Center especially thanks Marc Walkow, Outcast Cinema; John F. Bukacek, The Japan America Society of Chicago; and Michael Raine, University of Chicago.

Reduced admission!
Members of The Japan America Society of Chicago admitted for $5 to any Nikkatsu Action screening.

A COLT IS MY PASSPORT
(KORUTO WA ORE NO PASUPOTO)
1967, Takashi Nomura, Japan, 84 min.
With Jo Shishido, Chitose Kobayashi

This hardboiled hit-man thriller opens the series with a bang. Jo Shishido, the distinctively puffy-cheeked anti-hero of Suzuki’s BRANDED TO KILL (which COLT preceded by several months), plays a ruthless but honorable contract-killer who holes up in a seedy waterfront hotel when his gangster employers sell him out. It all comes down to a showdown on a windswept landfill that is literally and figuratively dynamite. In Japanese with English subtitles. 35mm widescreen. (MR)

Saturday, April 5, 3:00

THE WARPED ONES
(KYONETSU NO KISETSU)
1960, Koreyoshi Kurahara, Japan, 75 min.
With Tamio Kawachi, Noriko Matsumoto

Crazy, man. An extreme example of the wayward-youth “Sun Tribe” cycle, THE WARPED ONES careens between exploitation and art film like an out-of-control hotrod. The film’s antic camerawork jives to the same bebop rhythms as its hero Akira, a jazz-crazy jaydee who makes his obvious model, Michel Poiccard of BREATHLESS, look like a Boy Scout by comparison. Boosting cars, hassling tourists, living off his prostitute girlfriend, Akira rapes a respectable middle-class girl who turns out to be as amoral as everyone else. In Japanese with English subtitles. 35mm widescreen. (MR)

Saturday, April 12, 3:15

GLASS JOHNNY: LOOKS LIKE A BEAST
(GARASU NO JONI: YAJU NO YO NI MIETE)
1962, Koreyoshi Kurahara, Japan, 108 min.
With Jo Shishido, Izumi Ashikawa

Inspired by Fellini’s LA STRADA and a sharp departure from the Nikkatsu Action norm, GLASS JOHNNY stars Shishido as a bike track tout who becomes the unwilling savior of a pure-hearted, simple-minded prostitute (Ashikawa) on the run from her pimp. Prior to GLASS JOHNNY, Ashikawa’s portrayals of cute-but-spunky girls had won her a devoted male following--animator Hayao Miyazaki even later used her as a model for his anime heroines. In this film, however, she moves brazenly from childhood to womanhood, while following Giulietta Masina’s journey in LA STRADA from victimhood to transcendence. In Japanese with English subtitles. 35mm. (Japan Society)

Sunday, April 20, 3:00

RED HANDKERCHIEF
(AKAI HANKACHI)
1964, Toshio Masuda, Japan, 98 min.
With Yujiro Ishihara, Ruriko Asaoka

Mikami (1960s superstar Ishihara), a model policeman who can also warble a tuneful ballad, is kicked off the force after gunning down an escaping witness in a dope case. When his former partner ends up rich and respected, the disgraced cop begins to smell a rat. Nobody’s motives are pure or simple in this morally complex crime drama that features a sympathetic villain (Hideaki Nitani) and a woman-in-the-middle (Asaoka). In Japanese with English subtitles. 35mm widescreen. (MR)

Saturday, April 26, 3:00

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Upcoming films in No Borders, No Limits:

VELVET HUSTLER
(KURENAI NO NAGAREBOSHI)
1967, Toshio Masuda, Japan, 97 min.
With Tetsuya Watari, Jo Shishido
Friday, May 2, 6:00

GANGSTER VIP
(BURAI YORI DAIKANBU)
1968, Toshio Masuda, Japan, 93 min.
With Tetsuya Watari, Kyosuke Machida
Friday, May 16, 6:00

ROUGHNECK
(ARAKURE)
1969, Yasuharu Hasebe, Japan, 86 min.
With Akira Kobayashi, Masako Izumi
Friday, May 23, 6:00

RESCHEDULED
PLAINS WANDERER
(DAISOGEN NO WATARIDORI)
1960, Buichi Sato, Japan, 83 min.
With Akira Kobayashi, Jo Shishido
Originally scheduled for Friday, May 9, 6:00 at the Film Center, PLAINS WANDERER will now be screened at:

University of Chicago
Film Studies Center
5811 S. Ellis Ave. C307
Chicago, IL
Saturday, May 3, 7:00 pm
Events are free and open
to the public
For information call:
773-702-8596
or visit their website.