Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #33944 in DVD
• Released on: 2007-01-23
• Aspect ratio: 2.40:1
• Formats: Closed-captioned, Colour, Dubbed, DVD-Video, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English, Japanese, Spanish
• Subtitled in: English, Portuguese
• Dubbed in: French
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: 1.00 pounds
• Running time: 112 minutes

Customer Reviews

One of the great films of the Seventies
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' (Leonard and Paul) 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. Only a very dialog-heavy bit of exposition about the backstory between Mitchum and Keiko feels a tad clumsy.

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, a disciplined mixture of stillness and sudden violence and a complete departure in style for the director.

Warners' new DVD is long overdue, and very welcome indeed. Extras are a little thin - a very good 19-minute promotional featurette from 1974, Promises to Keep, and an audio commentary from Sydney Pollack - and it's disappointing that the deleted scenes from the longer 123-minute version of the film are not included.

Violence, obligation and a bittersweet ending...a fine movie with Robert Mitchum and Takakura Ken
Despite (or maybe because of) the gusts of mayhem which blow regularly through this film, the underlying tone of The Yakuza is of a kind of thoughtful sadness. The movie isn't about simple revenge or betrayal, but about obligations and responsibilities that just about everyone in the movie has to deal with. The swords and shotguns are almost incidental to the inevitable assumption of those obligations by people we learn to understand and respect. Even Harry Kilmer (Robert Mitchum), who honors his obligations in an American way, finally understands how to honor them in a Japanese way. The Yakuza, even with the violence and the personal, intertwined stories of the main characters, is a surprisingly calm movie without an ounce of melodrama.

Harry is a retired detective in Los Angeles who is called on by an old friend, George Tanner (Brian Keith), to rescue his daughter. Tanner did Harry a big favor when they both served in occupied Japan. George is an opportunist with business dealings in Japan and the States. He took money from Tono, a yakuza clan leader, to buy arms, then failed to deliver. In retaliation, Tono simply kidnapped Tanner's daughter in Tokyo and told Tanner to deliver the weapons or his daughter will wind up in four pieces. Harry agrees to fly to Japan and see what can be done. He calls for assistance on Tanaka Ken (Takakura Ken), a man Harry knows owes him a debt. It was Harry who rescued Tanaka's sister, Eiko Tanaka (Keiko Kishi), while Tanaka was hidden in the Philippines, refusing after the war to surrender. He is a former yakuza, unsmiling and severe, who resents Harry and the obligation he is under to help him. It's apparent, too, that Harry still loves Eiko. It is equally apparent she reciprocates, but she will not marry him, either now or when they were living together during the occupation. Sydney Pollack, the director, sets all this up carefully at the beginning of the film. The set-up is important to understand because it is these obligations that drive the movie, lead to the violence and provide a resolution which is distinctly bittersweet, especially for Harry.

The course of the movie, after Harry and Tanaka rescue Tanner's daughter, kill two of Tono's men doing so and cause Tono to lose face, alternates between violence directed at Tanaka by Tono and then with our growing knowledge of the stories of Harry, Tanaka and Eiko. But suddenly violence is directed at Harry, himself, from a surprising source. Tanaka and Harry take steps to resolve the situation with equally violent means, and then must come to grips with a much deeper understanding of each other than simple obligation can provide.

One of the things that makes this movie so effective is that the violence is graphic but not over the top. Yes, an arm goes flying, a knife goes into a belly underwater, fingers get lopped off and there are a lot of sword thrusts and shotgun blasts. All this is startlingly effective, but, with two brief exceptions, there is little of the lingering love for blood. And those two exceptions, both involving little fingers, are wince-inducing because of what we don't see. Another of the film's quality points, mentioned earlier, is that this is a movie that exists to examine obligations, the "burden hardest to bear" as a Japanese word has it. Pollack gives us a well-constructed story in which to help us make our own examination. For those who enjoy things Japanese, another plus is the care Pollack took to capture the look of Japan. The Yakuza never becomes a travelogue, but there is much of Japan to see in the movie, from a game of hanafuda to all those pachinko players, from a quiet temple to a narrow Tokyo downtown street, from a hostess nightclub to a bathhouse. It all looks right. And finally, the movie works so well because Mitchum gives an excellent performance. At 57 when he made this movie, he brings the authority of experience to the part. He is matched by Takakura Ken. The two actors both are heavy-weights. Mitchum doesn't dominate the movie so much as he shares it equally with Takakura. The secondary characters all do fine jobs, too.

The Yakuza is a fine and unusual action movie. The DVD transfer looks very good. There are two extras, a short feature about Japan called Promises to Keep and a commentary by Pollack.

Great film
This is a great film, Robert Mitchum is at his best in this kind of offbeat thriller, Ken Takakura is also well cast which all goes to make a great revenge flik.
But the sellers must be out of their tiny minds if they think anyone is going to pay £29.99 for a VHS video in age of DVD. Thy might have better luck if this was on DVD but to expect this money for a VHS is just silly.