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The potent metaphor proceeds from Eisenstein or Fuller, Shohei Imamura kicks it off with a sprawling reverse track down Yokosuka's teeming red-light district moments before a police raid. (Suzuki is right around the corner with Gate of Flesh.) The wannabe big shot (Hiroyuki Nagato) is nothing but a spastic flunky, a dragon on his jacket and the Confederate flag on his cap, pork business is his latest scam. When not tagging along with hoodlums or waiting for a mythical bonus, he's fumbling the disposal of a corpse and grudgingly playing fall guy for a hypochondriac boss. "That's part of a gangster's job." The local U.S. naval base supplies scraps for pigs and horny GIs for working girls, the hustler's girlfriend (Jitsuko Yoshimura) struggles to resist the degraded route. ("Why doesn't she want to be an American's mistress," wonders Mother. "She has no ambition.") The swarming sty under the imperialist shadow, quite the tapestry of venality and desire spread across the widescreen. Military parades are bread and circuses ("Live life with a smile," says a billboard), Japan is a traditional country with a knack for adaptability or so reads the little brother's history assignment. If the Yanks are gangling boors warbling "I've Been Working on the Railroad" after a gang rape (a swirling overhead view punctuates their rough play in a dingy bedroom), the thugs and hookers around them are no better for using the occupation as an excuse to wallow in nihilism. "We yakuza have to be democratic from now on." A most vehement comedy that builds to a porcine stampede precipitated by the nitwit with machine-gun in hand—men and animals are loaded onto stretchers while the girlfriend emerges as a figure of tenacious survival, an Imamura heroine to the end. With Masao Mishima, Tetsuro Tamba, Shiro Osaka, Eijiro Tono, Takeshi Kato, Shoichi Ozawa, Yoko Minamida, and Kin Sugai. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |