By 1964, Kinji Fukasaku had been working as a director for only three years, but had already directed eight works. That year, however, is an important one in the famed director’s long and illustrious career. For one, it gave him one of his early box office hits in “Jakomon and Tetsuo”, which starred Ken Takakura, then an actor freshly making his name and secondly, it also saw the release of what is now considered amongst his early career masterworks, the film noir tinted “Wolves, Pigs and Men”, a feature that may not have done well at the box-office upon release due to extenuating circumstances but would have an impact not just on his career but also his personal life.
“Wolves, Pigs and Men” is released by Eureka Entertainment and Film Movement
Set in post-war Japan, “Wolves, Pigs and Men” follows three brothers. Ichiro, the eldest, abandoned the family to join the yakuza for a life of comfort and luxury. Jiro, the middle brother, tried to follow in the elder’s footsteps but ended up being imprisoned, leaving their ailing mother in the care of the youngest brother, Sabu, in what Sabu calls a pigsty of a slum. Upon release, Jiro returns to find their mother dead and Sabu wanting nothing to do with his brothers. However, Jiro has a plan to rob the Iwasaki Family, the yakuza Ichiro works for, of twenty million yen and recruits a reluctant Sabu and his friends to help him and his untrustworthy partner Mizuhara pull the job. However, when they end up looting as much in drugs as in cash, Sabu realises his brother plans on double-crossing them and hides the loot, an action that is to have dire consequences for him and his friends, while Ichiro is tasked with finding the ones who pulled the job by the Family.
Right from the opening credits, a montage of zoom-ins and freeze frames scored with a fantastic jazz score, you know you are watching a master at work. The narrative’s playground is defined here, a slum on the outskirts of an unnamed city, a place with run-down houses and very little in the name of cleanliness, far removed from the comfortable apartments and swanky clubs that Ichiro frequents. This provides the setting for Fukasaku to comment on his favorite themes of financial disparity and youth delinquency in post-war Japan. In fact, so realistically is it realized that despite clearly being in the post-war times, it feels like it would not be remiss as a vision of a post-apocalyptic dystopian society.
Subscribe to AMP by clicking on the image below
The script, which was supposed to be a collaborative work with Fukasaku but ended up being written mostly by none other than Junya Sato, a name that would go on to be a big one in the jitsuroku sub-genre like Fukasaku’s, is a fascinating one. Pitting brother against brother, the proceedings take a rather dark turn as Jiro and Mizuhara try to wriggle out the location of the two bags with the loot from Sabu, resorting to everything from rape, torture and murder. “The world is survival of the fittest anyway”, says Jiro at one point, and the narrative does an excellent job of depicting the outright horrors of the depths of hell a human will go to for greed and the resolution of a person willing to bear anything thrown at him in order to survive. Grit and nihilism seeps through every corner, yet somehow within all of this, Fukasaku also finds some space for a couple short music numbers that shouldn’t work in a feature such as this but just do.
Further amazing is the star cast that the collective power of Fukasaku, Junya Sato and Toei producer Tatsu Yoshida has managed to pull through for this. Despite not wanting to work with each other after “Jakomon and Tetsuo”, Ken Takakura returns to star for Fukasaku in what ended up being among one of his best early works too. Just starting to make his name as a popular leading man, it would’ve been hard to imagine the suave Takakura play the very violent Jiro, but he flies in a performance that is delightfully unhinged and often frightening. Another popular leading man, Rentaro Mikuni, famously had issues with Fukasaku but stayed on thanks to his good working relationship with Sato for a role that sees him play the worldly and cool, if a bit conflicted, Ichiro. Said conflict is best portrayed very delicately in a scene when he realises that it is Jiro who pulled the heist and rather loudly and in impassioned manner in the climax.
Producer Yoshida pulled from Toei’s Kyoto studios Kinya Kitaoji, then known as the Prince of Toei, to ultimately play Sabu (he was initially envisioned as Jiro), a role that demands a lot from the actor, who puts through a very effective portrayal of a young man torn between wanting a better life for himself and his friends, and not wanting to see (or specifically, hear) his friends suffer at the hands of Jiro and Mizuhara. It is no mean feat for a young actor then in his twenties to stand toe-to-toe with Takakura and Mikuni, but Kitaoji does just that. The scene where he attempts to hurt himself for his friend’s sake is hard to watch thanks to his convincing act. Sanae Nakahara plays Jiro’s love interest Kyoko, in a role that would have a big impact on her and Fukasaku’s life, as the two found love and got married to each other shortly after working on this. Elsewhere, it is a shock to see a fully haired, mullet-less, very young Renji Ishibashi in what is among his very first film roles as one of Sabu’s friends Hiroshi.
While not having developed fully yet, Kinji Fukasaku’s now trademark camerawork appears briefly here too, most notably in the heist scene in the crowded railway station, complete with some frantic handheld camerawork and ingenious angles. Without his trademark style too, the monochrome cinematography by Ichiro Hoshijima is quite the sight, picturing the horrors not just of the slums but of the vileness of humans, as Sabu and his friends are subjected to one torture after the other, equally harrowingly. Just as important and effective is Isao Tomita’s music, with a preference for jazz, which highlights not just the aforementioned opening credits but also just as well the heist scene and more.
Utterly nihilistic, gritty and brutal, “Wolves, Pigs and Men” received a lukewarm response at the box-office not because of the quality of the work but because of the union strikes that the production was marred with. Regardless, this feature stands as a testament of the inherent qualities the director had even at the start of his career, qualities that he would only go on the hone in future works. Despite making a name in and having made a number of works that are now considered as masterpieces in the yakuza genre, this 1964 production fully deserves, or rather demands, to be spoken of in the same breath as those more popular titles.
