Graveyard of Honour (Fukasaku) (1975)

Graveyard Of Honour tells the story of Rikio Ishikawa, who is an arsehole. The film is presented in a semi-documentary style, depicting episodes from Ishikawa's life based on historical documents, using him to illustrate the crime and desperation in post-war Japan under American occupation that allowed the Yakuza to flourish. Fukasaku presents the thuggish, reckless and violent Ishikawa as a Yakuza archetype, to remind us that despite the glamourous image they often have in cinema, most of them are probably not very nice people.

I'd only seen the Takashi Miike version of this before and found it a little bland compared to other films Miike was making at the time, a bit single-note without the quirkiness or unpredictably of something like Shinjuku Triad Society. It's been a long time but I think that's probably because he was sticking very close to the source material.

That's not to fault Kinji Fukasaku's version, in 1975 this would have seemed reasonably fresh - even if it is close kin to his BATTLES WITHOUT HONOUR AND HUMANITY series. Fukasaku shoots Ishikawa's story with a chaotic visual flair that matches its subject's approach to life, with the camera swooping and diving and adopting angles as skewed as Ishikawa's moral compass. The film sometimes drops into sepia for scenes that are directly taken from records of Ishikawa's life (I think).

Rikio Ishikawa is a fascinating character, a wild card who sows chaos and destruction despite being given every opportunity to seek a stable and respectable life. With his eyes almost permanently hidden behind mirror shades he remains inscrutable and offers no reasons for his behaviour, until at the very end of the film where Fukasaku offers up an auto-epitaph scrawled on the walls of his prison cell.

What a laugh! 30 years of raising hell.