Battles Without Honor and Humanity

 

I heard about Battles Without Honor and Humanity, a series of Japanese gangster cinema directed by Kinji Fukasaku, when I first encountered Anurag Kashyap's The Gangs of Wasseypur. Once I watched the first series of 5 movies (all made in 1973 and 1974), it is clear that Fukasaku's plotless/plot-light realism and handheld visual style inspired not only Kashyap but also Hong Kong gangster cinema, particularly The Young and Dangerous (古惑仔) series, directed by Andrew Lau, who went on to create the Inferno Affairs (无间道) trilogy that were "borrowed" by Martin Scorsese for The Departed. Welcome to the World Gangster Cinema, where borders do not exist. 

Even today, the Battles series look wonderfully fresh, innovative, and irresistible. Based on the memoir of a real-life yakuza, the movies are relentlessly unsentimental and journalistic. The style of choreographing and shooting street brawls and assassinations is still far more effective and visceral than the "shaky-cam" stuff by modern imitators. 

Any gangster movie made after 1972 owes something to Coppola's The Godfather. Fukasaku is no exception. The assassination scene in the fifth and last entry of the series, aptly titled Final Episode, clearly references the classic death of Sonny Corleone, with a twist. (Kashyap also paid homage to this scene in Wasseypur.) Meanwhile, the series eschew the lush family drama, Italian American style, of The Godfather and parades a large cast of characters who scheme and battle each other with nearly incomprehensible complexity. Fukasaku is much colder and more cynical about the nature of gangsters and, perhaps, humanity. The only ounce, no, gram of sympathy is reserved for a young thug or two at the bottom of the food chain, who gets himself killed pointlessly; the bosses get none. Each movie ends with a funeral. 

After the enormous success of Battles, both with critics and at the box office, Fukasaku made three more similar movies and quickly abandoned the genre to pursue other interests, no matter how much money the studio threw at him. I love him so much.