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25 out of 28 people found the following comment useful :-
Powerful and melancholy, 20 December 2001

Author: henri sauvage from nashville, tn

A neglected classic of 70's film-making, this is perhaps the most "Japanese" movie ever made by a non-Japanese. The story is rich and multi-layered, featuring not one but two sets of star-crossed lovers in a brilliant and melancholy examination of contrasting themes of memory, secrets and betrayal, friendship, honor and obligation. The script is both literate and intricate; the characters' motives are almost always obscure until another layer of deception is stripped away.

Only Robert Mitchum could have done justice to the role of Harry Kilmer, a retired detective returning to Japan for the first time in many years to rescue his old Army friend Tanner's daughter, who has been kidnapped by the Yakuza in a dispute over a debt Tanner owes them. When Kilmer arrives in Japan, he seeks out Ken, the brother of his ex-lover Eiko (played by the astoundingly lovely and talented Kishi Keiko). Ken is a lone wolf, an ex-Yakuza who now runs a martial arts school, and though there is obviously no love lost between the two, Kilmer knows Ken carries an obligation to him for rescuing Eiko and her infant daughter in the early days of the Occupation.

Kilmer is still bitter about the past, deeply wounded by his love for Eiko, who would not marry him -- though she offered to live with him as long as he wished -- even though she loves him deeply. This was the reason why he left Japan and never meant to return.

Now, with Ken's reluctant help, he rescues Tanner's daughter, but this only leads to an intensifying spiral of tragic consequences, because nothing is quite what it seems. Only when Kilmer begins to understand the truth of the situation is he able to act constructively.

Everyone in this film, from Brian Keith to Herb Edelman to Richard Jordan (in one of his first starring roles) turns in a first-rate performance. James Shigeta and Christina Kobuko also deserve honorable mention. But it is Mitchum and Takakura Ken -- who does more with just his eyes and tense, almost feline body language than many who now lay claim to the title of "actor" -- that make this movie.

This is not an action film in the sense of later -- and far inferior -- efforts like "The Challenge" and "Black Rain", though there are scenes of intense and graphic violence. Nor does it have a happy ending, although some of the characters do ultimately find redemption and a hope of reconciliation.

"The Yakuza" is a work that deserves a much larger audience, one that will totally engage a thoughtful viewer with its universal themes worked out against the background of a very different culture, with its own mindset and traditions. I give it my highest recommendation.

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20 out of 22 people found the following comment useful :-
widely unrecognized gem, 9 January 2002

Author: Robert D. Ruplenas

I have to agree with the preponderance of viewers here who rate this as a neglected classic of the 70's. All aspects of the film - performances, script, and direction - raise this to the level of greatness. This is certainly among Mitchum's greatest performances - his subdued, world-weary toughness undergirds the movie. The story as has been noted, is a rich and multilayered one with a sadness that aspires to and quite nearly reaches the level of tragedy. It also must be noted that this is one of the most effective portrayals of Japanese culture on celluloid. The movie does not shrink from violence; the various scenes of assassination and slaughter could have been done by Peckinpah. The movie deserves a restoration and should be brought to tv in letterbox mode. (Are you listening, American Movie Classics?)

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20 out of 23 people found the following comment useful :-
A must see for Japanophiles, 28 October 1999
Author: chris-730 from Tokyo, Japan

Not only is this a good 70's gangster/action flick, it is also one of the few movies about Japan ever produced in the States that does not make too many mistakes about Japanese culture.

Ken Takakura puts in a great performance which is no surprise since he first became famous in Japan for acting in yakuza (gangster) movies.

Anyone who has ever tried to understand or explain the concept of "giri" should see this movie!

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10 out of 10 people found the following comment useful :-
"I have destroyed his past, and his future", 25 May 2004
Author: Earthling3888888888 from Earth

One of the best West-meets-East films made. Great dialogues, very realistic fighting scenes, even though this film has been made so long ago, without any CGI tricks at all, yet the sword fights still look really great. But in my opinion the story, which may be shortly described with one of the sentences spoken by Harry Kilmer (Robert Mitchum) at the end of this film: "I have destroyed his past, and his future" - perhaps the story is what it makes this film so unique and timeless. Outstanding performance by Ken Takakura ("Ken Tanaka")! If you haven't seen it yet - get it now! And why do I say "get it" instead of "rent it"? Because unfortunately VHS version available in US is more than 10 minutes shorter, and European VHS versions have even more *vital to the plot* cuts! (More info here: http://www.us.imdb.com/title/tt0073918/alternateversions

or if it doesn't work try the link under "Alternate versions"). Please: don't waste your time on those! I swear these edited versions must have been edited either by some blind and deaf personae, or a child who didn't understood plot at all! Currently the only good, somewhat true to the original theatrical print (just slightly more than 3 minutes shorter), are the 2hr long versions available on the not-so-legal (and not too good quality-wise) VCDs released in Hong Kong and Asia.

I rated this film very high - and I am not any big sword-actioneers fan, but nor is this movie any kind of sword fighting flicks. Its just a great story that is told (or actually shown) very well, and it deserves full 10/10.

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12 out of 15 people found the following comment useful :-
The Start Of A Great Career, 3 May 2001
Author: Raging_Bull_Movie_Review from Poughkeepsie, NY

The strongest point of this film is the writing. It's the first Paul Schrader script ever to be filmed, written with his brother Leonard (who also worked with Paul on Blue Collar & Mishima) and Robert Towne (Chinatown, Marathon Man, Bonnie & Clyde). It seems we have the best of both Schrader's here; Leonard really understands the Japanese culture and Paul is a very cerebral and thematic writer who almost always raises a number of interesting issues.

The film, which is very respectful of it's foreign culture and tries to be as true as possible to it, first and foremost shows the differences between American and Japanese culture. However, there are so many themes in this movie though that it becomes tiresome to list them. The key ones include honor, loyalty, burden, duty, friendship, love, loss, obligation, and the differences between the men of pre and post war Japan.

Although Robert Mitchum was approaching 60 when made the film, he still possessed enough of his trademark grace to be credible enough against much younger men in the action scenes. He always exudes so much casualness and weariness, but his work here shows he was obviously fired up by the material.

The other standout actor is Ken Takakura. He plays an honorable man that everyone respects, but his honor and old ways also often make him intolerable to anyone around him. He hides the deep wounds of his character behind his stone face, but that doesn't in any way prevent him from conveys that he's a miserable man from another age who lives by his code but not for anything. As he's the native that used to be in the Yakuza and Mitchum is the gaijin that doesn't have to follow their honor system (although as the movie progresses, he subscribes to their codes and honor system more and more), Takakura gets to do all the skilled swordplay. His fighting won't thrill those who want a lot of stunts, but is great if you enjoy the psychology and strategy of the craft.

The film is it has a drab, low budget kind of look, mainly as a way to maintain the mood and tone of the piece. Some of the scenes really bring the material to life, particularly through some excellent camera work, but sometimes the look is indifferent and the soundtrack seems to be trying too hard. Aside from staying true to the material and getting strong performances, I wouldn't say that Sydney Pollack has done a great job here. This is not the kind of movie you watch if you are looking for John Woo action though, and for the most part the flaws are overshadowed by the strength of the script and performances. 8/10

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11 out of 14 people found the following comment useful :-
Top Notch Gangster Movie, 21 April 2004

Author: Dane (dane11) from Loveland, CO

I stumbled across this movie, back when I was in college, on late night television. At the time, I wasn't a Robert Mitchum fan. I always thought Mitchum had a way of sauntering through film roles, not always giving his best. The Yakuza, made when Mitchum was 58 years old, utilizes his style and persona to its maximum potential. He's world-weary, he's been through the mill and he's come out wiser, but not necessarily harder for it.

Written by Paul Schrader and Robert Towne, The Yakuza shows us a different side of the Gangster world than we have been privy to before. This is not a movie of good vs. bad; it's a movie about loyalty and honor to friends and family. We follow Mitchum as Harry Kilmer on a mission to save a friends daughter. For most movies made these days, that premise would be enough, but The Yakuza is deeply layered and far more interesting than that. It turns out that Harry had been in Japan after WWII and had fallen in love with a beautiful woman, Eiko. 30 years later Harry is back in Japan, much has changed, but his feelings haven't.

Harry teams up with Ken Tanaka, Eiko's brother, to find the kidnapped girl. Samurai swords slash and guns blaze, adding intense, well-choreographed action as the plot thickens and Harry realizes that this is no ordinary rescue. We learn a lot about the characters in the movie, from Harry and Eiko to Ken Tanaka and Harry's buddy George, but more than that we learn about Japan and its infamous and historic gangster world. This is a classic movie in every sense of the word and should be viewed as such. And if you're not a fan of Robert Mitchum before seeing this movie, you will be afterwards.

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11 out of 16 people found the following comment useful :-
One of the great films of the 70s, 28 November 2006

Author: TrevorAclea from London, England

The Yakuza is one of the great films of the seventies. Although this didn't make much noise in the seventies (despite a truly surreal promotional gimmick, 'Join the Yakuza Set' tattoo transfers!), it has held up a lot better than he plethora of seventies thrillers that swamped it at the time.

Belonging to that subgenre of Americans-in-Japan thrillers (Fuller's House of Bamboo, Scott's Black Rain, Frankenheimer's The Challenge), The Yakuza is a film about the price of honor and about people who face their responsibilities. The film could almost be called 'giri' - Japanese for obligation or the burden hardest to bear. Richard Jordan's bodyguard may start out wiseguy ("That can work both ways. If you ain't alive tomorrow, he don't owe you s***.") but even he lives up to his moral obligations when discharged from them by Mitchum. All of the plot developments are a result of obligations, with the characters following through as per their personal codes of honor, taken to the ultimate extreme in Mitchum's final apology to Takakura Ken for destroying both his past and his future.

The hook might be that Mitchum returns to Japan to help secure the release of an old army friend's daughter from a Yakuza clan and in the process reopening old wounds with former lover Kishi Keiko and her brother Takakura Ken, but the emotional undercurrents are as important as the plot developments, with the film's criminal double-dealing mirrored in the myriad personal betrayals he is as he is forced to face the fact that he has always confused his friends with his enemies.

It is not a film that wears its emotions on its sleeve, and is all the more affecting for that the awkwardness of Mitchum's meeting with Ken and the hesitancy of his reunion with Keiko (and the subtle re-enactment of the old photos in her album) - everything is in the pauses and between the lines. It's these emotional undercurrents that make it stand up to repeated viewings.

The early seventies was a last golden age for the eternally under-rated Mitchum, with outstanding performances in The Friends of Eddie Coyle, Farewell My Lovely and Ryan's Daughter, and this is one of his best. His 'strange stranger' and Takakura Ken's 'man who never smiles' ("He's been unhappy ever since he lost the war. I keep trying to tell him it's not his fault but he won't take my word for it") is a match made in casting heaven. Their screen presence is remarkably similar, exuding a lifetime of world-weariness and personal loss that attracts both empathy and respect for their characters. Both give superbly understated performances, with the great Takakura Ken getting his best English-language role to date.

Jordan gives a nicely unassuming performance in the juvenile lead, making the most of his romantic subplot by showing the least, and there's an added poignancy to his fate since the actor's death. Indeed, all the performances are superb, with the emphasis on being rather than acting.

The screenplay as filmed is a terrific mixture of the commercial and the cerebral. Where most modern American thrillers are driven by indiscriminate violence ("In America, a guy cracks up he opens a window and kills a few strangers. Here, a guy cracks up, he closes the window and kills himself," observes Jordan), here events and participants are interconnected. All of the main characters are friends or surrogate family, and although Robert Towne was brought in to up the gangster element from the Shraders' more philosophical approach (the differences can be found in Leonard Schrader's novelization), he knows enough to keep it personal. It's witty too, without being condescending or resorting to the pre-kill one-liners so prevalent today that divorce the audience from the consequences and ramifications of violence.

Sydney Pollack's sensitivity to the material is remarkable. There's an unshowy adventurousness to his direction that he hasn't displayed since. In particular, the action scenes are extraordinary without ever straying from the credible, and a complete departure in style for the director.

(A version of this review appeared in Movie Collector magazine)

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8 out of 11 people found the following comment useful :-
The Godfather Japanese Style, 10 November 2006

Author: bkoganbing from Buffalo, New York

The Yakuza introduced we occidentals to the term the Japanese use for their various crime families. Probably after the wide acceptance of both the Godfather films, the American public was ready to see what organized crime looked like in another culture.

La Cosa Nostra, the Mafia, all those phrases we use for Italian organized crime certainly had their rituals and traditions. But as we learn in watching this film they have nothing on the Yakuza.

Robert Mitchum plays a private detective who works both sides of the law back in the states and he's hired by crime boss Brian Keith to rescue his daughter who was kidnapped by one of the Yakuza crime families in lieu of a shipment of weapons Keith was supposed to deliver. Coming along with him is young Richard Jordan whose father was a friend of both Mitchum and Keith as backup.

The mission is accomplished, but Mitchum and Jordan find the situation is a whole lot more complex than they were led to believe. In addition Mitchum gets involved with an old girl friend from the days when he was a military policeman during the postwar American occupation. She's the key to getting help from a former Yakuza member in their quest.

The American actors perform well here and oriental players James Shigeta and Japanese film star Takakura Ken are well cast as feuding Yakuza brothers. You will not question why Takakura Ken is known as the Japanese Clint Eastwood after seeing The Yakuza.

Director Sydney Pollack shows a real reverence and respect for the traditions of another culture. The Yakuza is both entertaining and informative and should not be missed.

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7 out of 10 people found the following comment useful :-
The best East-meets-West movie you can see, 10 July 2004
Author: yakuza61 (wyakuza@aol.com) from England

Superb East-meets-West movie, I suspect largely due to Schrader's insight. Takakura Ken's performance really steals the show, though all actors are more than capable; Mitchum gives a great performance again. Not a martial arts movie, but contains a katana showdown that I can watch over and over again without finding fault [more believable than anything you'll see in 'Kill Bill'].

The story is gorgeously convoluted, keeping it's secrets to the very end, in a fitting Japanese manner. Action scenes are relatively restrained, and the story tells how Mitchum's character finally comes to understand Takakura Ken's character, and his apparently icy antagonism. When can we see a DVD copy?!

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2 out of 3 people found the following comment useful :-
THE YAKUZA (Sydney Pollack, 1974) ***, 14 April 2008

Author: MARIO GAUCI (marrod@melita.com) from Naxxar, Malta

During the 1980s, our national TV channel used to show vintage Hollywood movies every weekend and Saturday night fare generally consisted of 1970s action flicks. This had been one of them and, although my father did tape it, I didn't catch the film back then and no tangible opportunity to watch it had presented itself over the years until now (the film is included in Warners' "Robert Mitchum: The Signature Collection" 6-Disc Box Set). For this reason alone, therefore – but also in view of Mitchum's involvement, the noir trappings of the plot and the exotic locale – THE YAKUZA is a title which has long intrigued me.

Sydney Pollack may seem a very odd choice for director here, especially considering how in the last 30 years or so, he has become more than anything else renowned as a director of glossy, conventional dramas; as a matter of fact, Robert Aldrich was first intended to direct Lee Marvin in it and, at some point, even Martin Scorsese's name was banded about. Even so, Pollack was much more adventurous as he was starting out – never more so than when making the eccentric, existentialist war movie CASTLE KEEP (1969; another film I caught up with fairly recently), with THE YAKUZA itself coming pretty close in terms of stretching his talent. For the record, he quickly followed the latter with his finest movie of the decade, the superb espionage thriller THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR (1975) – which I really ought to acquire on DVD despite its being a bare-bones disc.

The enthusiastic DVD Savant review of THE YAKUZA mentions how co-writer Paul Schrader was inspired by the latter-day John Ford Western masterpiece THE SEARCHERS (1956) dealing as it does with a similar kidnapping of a girl and the perilous odyssey to retrieve her. The hand of Robert Towne, the other scriptwriter, is most evident in the final revelation (which is as jaw-dropping as the one for his previous work – coincidentally also a noir with allusions to the Orient, CHINATOWN [1974], and which eventually won him an Oscar). By this time, Western audiences had become well-versed in the Samurai and their code – but The Yakuza was a novel concept, which was perhaps seen as topical vis-a'-vis the re-emergence of gangland dramas in the wake of THE GODFATHER (1972). The film, in fact, has profound things to say about Honor, Obligation and Family (with a remarkably harsh way of demonstrating one's penance). On top of it all, then, is a magnificent lyrical score by Dave Grusin.

For an action movie, it is very deliberately paced but this only serves to make the handful of fight sequences all the more electrifying. Pollack's direction is admirably stylish throughout the film's 112 minutes (though the Japanese version is said to be even longer and, in fact, the promotional featurette which is part of the DVD supplements does depict the shooting of a couple of scenes which aren't in the finished film as presented here!) and remarkably balances superbly choreographed action sequences with thoughtful passages – particularly concerning Mitchum's place in this environment (while typically understated, the performance by the star in this case allows emotion to seep through his bulky exterior and tough persona). It's worth mentioning here that Mitchum's career was going through a renaissance itself around thus time, primarily through such films as THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE (1973) and FAREWELL, MY LOVELY (1975), but subsequently he also got to kick some ass in Hong Kong for THE AMSTERDAM KILL (1977; which I'd love to get a chance to watch now).

The rest of the American cast is compact but carefully chosen: Brian Keith (as an opportunistic businessman, the father of the girl abducted for his having slighted The Yakuza, as well as Mitchum's best friend and old war buddy), Richard Jordan (quite good as Keith's young underling who tags along with Mitchum to Japan, ostensibly to keep an eye on him, but who didn't count on the pull of the Orient and, more specifically, the presence of a beguiling young girl – daughter of Mitchum's old flame) and Herb Edelman (as another war veteran who has stayed on and cultivated his knowledge of weaponry, extending to a fascination for Japanese swords). The 'native' actors are equally impressive, especially Ken Takakura (as the enigmatic but proficient ex-Yakuza drawn back into the underworld as a favor to Mitchum – the actor was apparently a fixture of this type of violent entertainment) and Eiji Okada (suitably authoritative and menacing as the unscrupulous Yakuza boss – he's best-known for playing Emmanuelle Riva's Japanese lover in Alain Resnais' landmark film Hiroshima MON AMOUR [1959] and the entomologist hero of the award-winning erotic drama WOMAN IN THE DUNES [1964]).

Finally, it's worth noting that I recently acquired on VHS Kinji Fukasaku's BATTLES WITHOUT HONOR AND HUMANITY (1973) – the first of several entries in a series of films collectively known as THE YAKUZA PAPERS, though I doubt I'll have time to check it out presently. Ironically enough, over the Christmas period an Italian TV channel presented a rare screening of "the ultimate in Japanese Yakuza movies" according to Paul Schrader himself – RED PEONY GAMBLER: FLOWER CARDS MATCH (1969) – but given that my mother broke a leg that very night, I was decidedly in no mood to watch subtitled fare...

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