Hardest Men in Town: Yakuza Chronicles of Sin, Sex & Violence

March 9-19, 2011

This season, the Globus Film Series presents the Japanese gangster
movie genre through its various avatars, transformations and
contradictions, from 1960s productions featuring chivalrous
kimono-clad, sword-wielding gangsters and gamblers to today's ruthless
gun-toting villains dealing in debt, hustling hardcore porn and
scheming and scamming in dark trades and deeds. Over the past 50 years,
they've remained snarling, swaggering, tattooed and inexplicably sexy.
In the line-up, there will be blood and broken bones, hookers and
hopheads, and plenty of juicy political blackmail… in 15 films that
rack up the stiffs like Jacobean tragedies and show grand visions of
manly amity and betrayal: classics and lesser known titles by Kinji
Fukasaku, Takashi Miike (Dead or Alive), Hideo Gosha (The Wolves), Takeshi Kitano (Outrage), Rokuro Mochizuki (A Yakuza In Love, Onibi: The Fire Within) and Sydney Pollack (The Yakuza), among other offerings you can't refuse.

The violent romantic world of the yakuza (the Japanese mafia) steeped
in cryptic ritual and customs involving full-body tattoos and missing
digits, has long excited the imagination, decades before viewers
started existing on a diet of Sopranos and Boardwalk Empire
melodrama, and has been one of the mainstays of the Japanese film
industry since the 1960s. Harking back to the days when samurai still
embodied traditionalist values of honor, selfless duty (giri) and the noble warrior spirit (ninkyo)
on the silver screen, the shadowy demimonde of organized crime (which
included wandering gamblers and lowly peddlers) rivaled with the noble
swordsmen as the representatives of honor and heroism, in the context
of a rapidly changing society trying to come to terms with a shameful
defeat. In the darkness of movie theaters, they became the very picture
of superhuman macho cool and reptilian menace.