Sunday, October 03, 2021

Tôkyô nagaremono (1966)

 English titles: Tokyo Drifter; The Man from Tokyo

A former gang member goes straight after his boss disbands their gang. He not only refuses a job with a rival gang but keeps getting in the way of their evil plans. After a while, he decides to leave Tokyo so as to stop causing trouble for himself and others, but his enemies send a hitman after him.

Both the Italians and the Japanese were heavily influenced by American culture (by a strange coincidence, both were in the losing side in World War 2), and their cultural industries are not all that dissimilar in that respect, except that Japan seemed to prefer the urban criminal genre, and Italy had a taste for Westerns. While very sloppily edited, and perhaps even occasionally sloppily filmed, and as a consequence excrutiatingly hard to make sense of at some points, this film shows a flair for uncanny imagery, and I guess that makes it watchable despite its flaws.

Rating: 35

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