Turns out I have been missing out for over 50 years on one of the fiercest cinema classics of all time as I had never before seen Wolves, Pigs And Men, the 1964 Yakuza mob movie directed by the legendary Kinji Fukasaku, written by Fukasaku and Jun’ya Sato. Jiro (Ken Takakura) is released from jail in time for the funeral of his mother, which is being organized by his younger brother Sabu (Kin’ya Kitaoji). Their mother died in abject poverty with Sabu starving by her side, so he isn’t inviting either Jiro or their eldest brother Ichiro (Rentaro Mikuni) to the dustbin burial.
Jiro still needs Sabu’s help, as he is planning a drug heist and a greasy psycho he hangs with. Jiro needs Sabu to get his gang of teenage ruffians together to create a diversion so that the drugs and drug money can be stolen successfully. With the corpse of their mother not even cool yet, the two brothers embark on a series of dark deeds that puts them in the bullseye of the Yakuza, the local mafia whose drugs they stole. It is also the same crime gang that Ichiro works for. Soon, the eldest brother is given the task of cleaning up the whole mess with a bucket of blood.
“With the corpse of their mother not even cool yet, the two brothers embark on a series of dark deeds that puts them in the bullseye of the Yakuza.”
Wow. I have been seriously missing out on not knowing about this movie. I had heard of Fukasaku before, but the two films of his I saw left me wanting. Battle Royale had a promising premise but didn’t play all the cards that it had waiting in the deck. Message From Space is just a plain awful science fiction derivative dump. But then I saw Wolves, Pigs, And Men and was blown away.
Imagine if all you had seen of Scorsese’s work was Bringing In The Dead and The Age of Innocence, only to one day decades later watch Goodfellas and realize what all the fuss was about. That is as good a comparison as I can bring up, as this Japanese mafia classic has no comparison. The whiplash montage that opens the film summing up the events that lead to this moment unleashes like a cobra with a velocity not seen again until the surreal Natural Born Killers‘ open credit sequence three decades later.
"…truly sick perfection before perfect was born."
