Remembering Yasuharu Hasebe (1932-2009)

by Kimberly Lindbergs | June 21, 2009

Categories | Movie Reviews, Directors, Japanese Cinema, Crime, Blogathons, Tokusatsu, Pinky Violence, Yasuharu Hasebe, Nikkatsu, Akira Kobayashi

Akira Kobayashi in Yasuharu Hasebe’s Black Tight Killers (1966)

While I was trying to compile a post for the Japanese Cinema Blogathon currently happening at Wildgrounds I read the news that one of my favorite Japanese directors, Yasuharu Hasebe, had died after contracting pneumonia on June 14th. Hasebe was 77 years old, but he was still an active director and his last project was the police drama The Case Files of Mamoru Yonezawa (Kanshiki: Yonezawa Mamoru no Jikenbo; 2009), which was released earlier this year.

After learning about Yasuharu Hasebe death I immediately decided to put aside my previous plans to write about one of my favorite Japanese actors (Akira Kobayashi) and focus on writing a bit about Hasebe’s films instead. In a sad coincidence, Akira Kobayashi also appeared in some of Hasebe’s best films.

Only a handful of the movies that Yasuharu Hasebe made are currently available on DVD in the US, but they showcase the work of a talented director who injected his action-packed dramas and violent pink films with pertinent social messages and lots of style. Although he’s not as revered as many of his contemporaries, Yasuharu Hasebe was able to masterfully navigate through the Japanese studio system while carving out his own distinct creative path. The director wrote or co-wrote many of his best films, which often touched on similar themes including female oppression and exploitation, as well as race relations and the American occupation of Japan. Yasuharu Hasebe’s films are frequently sited for their orchestrated action and extreme violence, but I think that many of them have maintained their power because of the director’s socially conscious scripts and keen sense of mise-en-scène.

Yasuharu Hasebe seemed to enjoy placing his camera in unexpected places and shooting his films in an intimate manner that is often surprisingly innovative. His frequent use of extreme close-ups and wide long shots is often breathtaking and although I’ve never seen it mentioned anywhere else, I firmly believe that the recurring visual motifs and framing techniques seen throughout many of Hasebe films mark his work with an individual flair that is undeniably his own. I wouldn’t hesitate to call Yasuharu Hasebe an “auteur” but I know that I’m in the minority. It’s important to point out as I’ve often done before, that western film criticism of Japanese cinema is still in its infancy and I suspect that Yasuharu Hasebe ’s films will receive much more critical attention and acclaim in the future as more critics and film scholars are exposed to his work.

Here’s a brief rundown of some of my favorite Yasuharu Hasebe films and television productions that are currently available on DVD in the US . . .

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Barbie has gone to The Birds

by Kimberly Lindbergs | November 23, 2008

Categories | Rants & Raves, Pinky Violence, Alfred Hitchcock

This might be old news to some, but it’s new news to me. I just discovered Mattel released a Tippi Hedren as Melanie Daniels in The Birds (1963) Barbie doll in October complete with attacking birds and a mini reproduction of her fabulous green dress suit. The Birds terrified me when I first saw it as a child and I don’t suspect that a lot of little girls will be asking for a Melanie Daniels’ Barbie this Christmas, but it’s definitely on my holiday wish list!

I really wish Mattel would hire me to help them design other film-themed Barbies. I’m sure I’m not the only person in the world who wants a Meiko Kaji as Sasori doll.

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DVD of the Week: Delinquent Girl Boss - Blossoming Night Dreams (1970)

by Kimberly Lindbergs | February 4, 2008

Categories | Movie Reviews, Japanese Cinema, DVD of the Week, Pinky Violence, Yasuharu Hasebe, Nikkatsu

One of my favorite films from Panik House’s 2005 Pinky Violence DVD Collection was Delinquent Girl Boss: Worthless To Confess (Zubekô banchô: zange no neuchi mo nai, 1971), which was directed by Kazuhiko Yamaguchi for Toei and starred the strikingly cute Japanese actress and occasional pop idol Reiko Oshida. Not only was Delinquent Girl Boss: Worthless To Confess one of the best looking films in the collection, featuring some truly impressive cinematography and direction, but I also really liked Reiko Oshida’s take on playing a bad girl trying to make good in the world. Unlike the other lovely and talented ladies that have starred in numerous pinky violence films such as Reiko Ike and Miki Sugimoto, Reiko Oshida seemed to have a sense of humor about her roles and she always wore a sly grin on her face. Besides an occasional gratuitous panty shot, she also managed to keep her clothes on in all her films even when her co-stars were baring all.

This week Media Blasters released the first film in the Delinquent Girl Boss movie series called Delinquent Girl Boss: Blossoming Night Dreams (Zubeko Bancho: Yumei Wa Yoru Hiraku, 1970) on DVD and it’s my DVD Pick of the Week. Due to a rather loose script, the film doesn’t exactly pack the same powerful dramatic punch that Delinquent Girl Boss: Worthless To Confess had, but the movie still features some really impressive visuals and great musical numbers that more than make up for the writing. Overall it’s a terrific addition to the slowly growing stable of pinky violence films now available on DVD in the U.S. and it’s sure to impress anyone who enjoys the work of the talented Japanese director Kazuhiko Yamaguchi.

Delinquent Girl Boss: Blossoming Night Dreams was Kazuhiko Yamaguchi’s directorial debut and he also co-wrote the script for the film. Yamaguchi would go on to make other films in the Delinquent Girl Boss series and many other Japanese action films featuring tough female stars including the Wandering Ginza Butterfly series with Meiko Kaji and the Sister Street Fighter series with Etsuko Shihomi. I enjoy all of his his films, but I personally prefer the director’s Delinquent Girl Boss efforts, because I tend to favor the plots, as well as popular Japanese music, modern design and period fashions, which are often on display in these films.

Much like Delinquent Girl Boss: Worthless To Confess, which was the fourth film in the series, Delinquent Girl Boss: Blossoming Night Dream opens with a small riot breaking out at a juvenile faculty for troubled young women. In the series Reiko Oshida plays an orphan named Rika who grew up in Yokohama. Rika is a rebellious 19 year-old struggling with her aversion to authority figures and her obvious urge to set things right whenever she feels injustices are taking place. After she’s released from the juvenile faculty she gets a job at a hostess club in Shinjuku where many of her fellow delinquents now work. The owner of the hostess club was once a delinquent herself, but she’s become a sort of surrogate mother to the girls who work at her club, as well as the lone male host who services gay clients there. Unfortunately things get complicated when some local yakuza start shoving their weight around and trying to gain control over her club. The yakuza are also selling drugs and managing their own group of tough ladies who act as drug pushers in the neighborhood. Throughout the course of the film Rika becomes somewhat of a vigilante in an effort to help her friends and her boss, but her conflicting emotions and hardened criminal background are often at odds. She’s a tough girl who knows how to take care of herself and put others in their place, but she’s also got a warm heart and clearly cares about her friends and their futures.

As I mentioned above, Delinquent Girl Boss: Blossoming Night Dreams seems to suffer a little thanks to the script, which was probably due to Kazuhiko Yamaguchi inexperience as a writer at the time. But the film also has some truly impressive moments, including a beautiful romantic beach scene between Reiko Oshida and her male co-star (Hayato Tani). It takes place among a bunch of huge cement structures resting on the sand and adds a dream-like quality to the film. The talented cinematographer Hanjiro Nakazawa should be co-credited for the amazing look of the Delinquent Girl Boss movies. Nakazawa worked with the acclaimed director Kinji Fukasaku on many of his best crime films including Sympathy for the Underdog (1971), Street Mobster (1972) and Graveyard of Honor (1975). He’s also partially responsible for the fantastic look of the Female Prisoner Scorpion films and he brings the same creativity to the Delinquent Girl Boss series. These films are a great showcase for Nakazawa’s dynamic color photography and director Kazuhiko Yamaguchi’s imaginative compositions. Both men had the ability to turn what could easily be considered a simple exploitive genre film into art.

Yamaguchi and Nakazawa also do an amazing job of capturing Shinjuko nightlife in the early seventies. The exterior shots of the city are really impressive and the psychedelic club scenes and musical acts featured in the film are stylishly shot and full of energy. I was thrilled to discover that the Japanese girl group Golden Half appears in Delinquent Girl Boss: Blossoming Night Dreams along with folk pop idol Keiko Fuji. Since I love Japanese pop music from this period, I really enjoyed the musical numbers even though Golden Half only performs their popular song Yellow Cherry (Kiroii Sakurambo), which happens to be the same song the group sang in Yasuharu Hasebe’s pinky violence film Stray Cat Rock: Sex Hunter. Both of the films were released in 1970, but they were made by different studios. Toei was responsible for the Delinquent Girl Boss series and Nikkatsu produced the Stray Cat Rock films, but both studios obviously wanted to cash in on the popularity of Golden Half at the time and their hit song.

Keiko Fuji sings the film’s memorable opening theme song and she has an interesting, but extremely small role in the film. Keiko Fuji was popular among some radical student groups in Japan, probably due to her ability to mix traditional enka style ballads with modern popular music. In the film she strums a guitar while singing a very traditional sounding song that seems to deeply touch the women working at the hostess bar. It’s a nice moment in the film and Keiko does a good with her brief part, but I wish she had been given a little more to do in the movie. I hope to write a bit more about the music featured in pinky violence films soon.

Besides the appearance of Keiko Fuji, the social and political commentary that can sometimes be found in pinky violence films seems rather lowkey here, but there are a few moments in Delinquent Girl Boss: Blossoming Night Dreams that I felt reflected the complicated power struggles going on between criminal men who liked to flex their muscles in postwar Japan and the independent women who were often forced to have business dealings with them. In an odd twist, the young female junkie in the film suffering horribly from drug dependency also has dyed blond hair and wears a dress emblazoned with the American flag. I have no idea if the director was trying to hint at America’ involvement in the underground drug market in Japan after WW2 or implying something even more subversive, but it’s possible. I also found it amusing that Reiko Oshida wears a kind of mod miniskirt version of a Native American Indian costume when she helps take down the bad guys at the end of the movie. It’s hard to overlook the possible anti-occupation sentiments in that small gesture.

The Delinquent Girl Boss series is really one of the highlights of the recent wave of pinky violence films being released on DVD. If you’re new to the genre or just curious about these types of Japanese films, the Delinquent Girl Boss movies make a great introduction to the genre since they’re creatively shot and tend to feature mild violence and eroticism.

Delinquent Girl Boss: Blossoming Night Dreams is available on DVD from Media Blasters on their Exploitation Digital label for $29.99 and it’s currently selling at Amazon for $26.99. The DVD features a nice looking anamorphic widescreen print of the film, as well as a photo gallery and the original trailer. As I mentioned above, the fourth film in the Delinquent Girl Boss series was released on DVD in 2005 from Panik House and it’s available as part of their terrific Pinky Violence Collection. Hopefully the second and thirdDelinquent Girl Boss films will find their way onto DVD soon. Thankfully the films in the series can be enjoyed individually and they don’t have to be watched in any kind of order, but I would recommend seeing Delinquent Girl Boss: Blossoming Night Dreams before Delinquent Girl Boss: Worthless To Confess if you’re new to the series.

If you’d like to see more images from the film please see my Delinquent Girl Boss: Blossoming Night Dreams Flickr Gallery.

Also worth mentioning is the recent DVD release of Jess Franco’s Eugenie de Sade (1970) from Blue Underground, which was reviewed by Robert Monell over at I’m in a Jess Franco State of Mind. I haven’t had the opportunity to view it yet myself, but I’m looking forward to it.

I’m still compiling my Best DVDs of 2007 List and it’s taking me a bit longer to finish then I had expected, but I promise that I’ll be posting it here soon so keep an eye out for it!

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Rica is Coming - Pinky Violence is Here!

by Kimberly Lindbergs | August 15, 2007

Categories | News, Japanese Cinema, Actresses, Pinky Violence

Rica (Rika Aoki) 1972

In recent years US DVD companies like Media Blasters, Panik House and Discotek Media have introduced American audiences to the amazing and controversial world of Japanese “Pinky Violence” (or “pink violence”) cinema. Before these companies started subtitling films and making them easily available to American audiences on DVD, Japanese cinema obsessives like myself had to make due with bad VHS bootlegs bought in Chinatown or on eBay that often had no subtitles. If you couldn’t understand Japanese you were often completely clueless about the plots and characters of these films and the prints were sometimes barely watchable.

Thankfully there were fanzines like Thomas Weisser’s Asian Trash Cinema and Asian Cult Cinema available in the early ’90s which made it a little easier for non-speaking Japanese film fans to find some information about unusual Asian cinema. But for the most part Japanese genre films were often ignored and completely neglected by American film critics. This has slowly started to change in the last 10 years as critics and film audiences discover that many early Japanese genre films were created by talented and creative filmmakers who clearly enjoyed exploiting innovative ideas and film techniques that had been established by the Japanese New Wave (Nuberu Bagu).

Even though early Japanese genre films are finally getting some much deserved attention and respect, I still come across their detractors. Unfortunately there are still many foreign film fans who think directors like Akira Kurosawa, Yasujiro Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi are the only Japanese directors whose work should be considered seriously. This kind of limited understanding and lack of appreciation of more modern Japanese cinema might be partly due to the fact that so many Japanese directors from the period such as Seijun Suzuki and Kinji Fukasaku were forced to work inside the Japanese film studio system so it’s assumed that their work could not possibly be all that thought provoking or inventive but frankly nothing could be further from the truth. It can also be argued that Japanese film criticism in the West is still in its infancy and there are many great directors still waiting to be discovered and countless films and filmmakers that need to be reconsidered.

Top: Delinquent Girl Boss: Worthless to Confess (1971)
Bottom: Girl Boss Guerilla (1972)

Pinky Violence is a genre that developed out of the Japanese New Wave in the late sixties and blossomed into it’s own during the early seventies. The term came from the way the films mixed the erotic elements found in Pink Films (a.k.a. Roman Porno) with the action and violence found in Yakuza crime films. Here’s a brief introduction borrowed from Panik House’s own Pinky Violence website that attempts to sum the genre up:

“What is Pinky Violence? It’s a line of sexy, action-exploitation thrillers begun in the late sixties in Japan. These films featured female yakuzas and girl boss guerillas duking it out for their freedom, their pride and their own piece of the pie. This electrifying genre mixed titillation with social commentary, predating its closest American and European counterparts by several years.”

Its American and European counterparts could include films such as Russ Meyer’s Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965), Jack Hill’s Coffy (1973), and Bo Arne Vibenius’s Thriller: They Call Her One Eye (a.k.a. Thriller - En Grym Film, 1974), but Pinky Violence cinema has its own charm and an amazing style that is particular to the genre’s country of origin and cinematic roots. What fascinates me about Pinky Violence cinema is that even though the movies were clearly made to titillate male audiences and in turn feature plenty of eroticism, nudity and stylized violence, many of the films also manage to flaunt their New Wave and avant-garde sensibilities while exploring topics like race relations, poverty and sexual discrimination. The best Pinky Violence movies are often critical of post-war Japan and littered with references to the war and the American Occupation. Unfortunately the genre’s noteworthy qualities are often completely overlooked by film critics and fans.

It’s nearly impossible to imagine what life was like in Japan after WWII. People were living in a country destroyed by war and occupied by Americans who brought their own rule of law and culture to the “Land of the Rising Sun.” Between 1946-1947 women in Japan were finally given the right to vote and a new Constitution was constructed by the occupation authorities, which included an equal rights clause and a revised Civil Code that gave women the right to chose their own spouses, retain their property rights, receive equal pay and get equal education opportunities. It must have been a complicated and extremely difficult period for Japanese women who were no doubt suffering the effects of the war, while also benefiting from the changes that these horrible events had brought. I’m positive that the women of Japan would have preferred to have made their own progress on their own terms without any American interference but it’s important to keep in mind when watching Pinky Violence cinema that the beautiful and tough female stars of these films such as Meiko Kaji, Reiko Oshida, Miki Sugimoto and Reiko Ike were all born and raised in the aftermath of this significant and critical time in Japanese history. These actresses represented a new generation of Japanese women who were determined to live life on their own terms in post-war Japan.

The bad and beautiful Reiko Ike, Meiko Kaji, Miki Sugimoto and Reiko Oshida

It can be argued that Pinky Violence is a result as well as a reaction to WWII. Genre defining films such as Stray Cat Rock: Sex Hunter (a.k.a. Nora-neko Rokku: Sekkusu Hanta, 1970), Delinquent Girl Boss: Worthless To Confess (Zubeko bancho: zange no neuchi mo nai, 1971) Female Prisoner #701 Scorpion (a.k.a. Joshuu 701-gô: Sasori , 1972), Girl Boss Guerilla (Sukeban Gerira, 1972), Sex and Fury (a.k.a. Furyô Anego Den: Inoshika Ochô , 1973) and Zero Woman: Red Handcuffs (a.k.a. Zeroka No Onna: Akai Wappa, 1974) could have never been made in the pre-WWII Japan found in Ozu’s early films.

The latest Pinky Violence film being released in the U.S. is Kô Nakahira’s Rica (a.k.a. Konketsuji Rika, 1972) which was produced by Toho Studios. Kô Nakahira is a talented director who is often considered one of the leading filmmakers of the Japanese New Wave. His early films helped usher in an important new era in Japanese cinema but very little is known about him in America. Unfortunately Nakahira’s films are criminally unavailable here in the US. The only Nakahira film you can currently find on DVD is his critically acclaimed modern masterpiece Crazed Fruit (1956) which was released by Criterion in 2005. Kô Nakahira’s Crazed Fruit is a pivotal Japanese film that influenced French directors like Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut so it’s unfortunate that more of Nakahira’s films are not readily available. Thankfully that will change a bit with the release of Rica from Exploitation Digital (a new subdivision of Media Blasters) this week.

Original Rica poster art (1972-1973)

According to various sources I’ve read, Kô Nakahira’s 1972 film tells the story of a “half-breed” (mixed race) woman named Rica (played by Rika Aoki) who was the product of a Japanese mother raped by American G.I.s. After Rica is later raped herself as a young girl, she develops a deep hatred for men and sets out to take revenge for the horrible and violent events that have shaped her life. Rica seems typical of many Pinky Violence heroines who run with gangs and spend time in jail while becoming dangerous female figures in the Japanese underworld.

Rica is the first film in a trilogy and Media Blasters (Exploitation Digital) has plans to release all three of the Rica films in the future. Kô Nakahira only directed the first and second film in the trilogy called Rica 2: Lonely Wanderer (1973) and it will be available on DVD in October. As far as I know these movies are not even available on DVD in Japan so Media Blasters should be commended for making an effort to release these hard to find films. According to Toho Kingdom the new Rica DVD from Media Blasters will contain the original Japanese dialogue with English subtitles and extras include a photo gallery and trailers for all three of the Rica films.

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