Retaliation

Coming out of prison, the yakuza lieutenant Sumukawa finds that his own family has fallen apart. Wanting to rise, he makes an arrangement with another gang who promise him a good position in return for dealing with a rival family. But the promises are not kept; oaths of loyalty give way first to competition and then to betrayal, and the matter ends in a reckoning. The story watches how friendships change direction as interests change. Running in the hard vein of Japanese gang films of the sixties, it builds its violence without presenting it as heroism. Akira Kobayashi and Joe Shishido appear in Yasuharu Hasebe’s ninety four minute Japanese production, completed in 1968.