The Yakuza

Harry Kilmer, a retired American detective, goes back to Japan when the daughter of an old friend is taken by the yakuza. His only lever is a debt from the war years: a man named Tanaka Ken owes him giri, an obligation with no way to repay it. Calling in that debt will get the girl back and open a story Kilmer has spent thirty years covering over. Sydney Pollack directed. Robert Mitchum plays Kilmer and Ken Takakura plays Tanaka Ken. The idea started with a letter. Leonard Schrader, living in Japan, wrote to his brother Paul about the yakuza world he was seeing there; the two wrote the script together and it sold for 300,000 dollars, a striking figure at the time. When Pollack came aboard as director and asked for rewrites, Paul Schrader left and Robert Towne was hired for 150,000 dollars to revise it. Shooting began on 19 March 1974 in Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto and Los Angeles. It opened in Japan on 28 December 1974 and in the United States on 19 March 1975. The box office was a rout: roughly 1.5 million dollars against a 5 million budget. Schrader later said the failure surprised him. Reviews were mixed and the film became a cult item over time, with Quentin Tarantino among its defenders, praising Mitchum's performance and the ending. The finger-cutting scene at the end decided the film's fate. Pollack made Mitchum do it ten times, on the grounds that he was not showing enough pain. American audiences could not take it, and Pollack later said that saddened him because he found the scene moving. Schrader put the blame for the failure on the direction: it turned out to be neither the dark crime film about duty he had designed nor the cross-cultural romance Pollack's audience wanted, and what was left belonged to nobody. Who it is for: viewers who like the melancholy crime films of the seventies and stories set where two cultures meet. Who it is not for: anyone wanting fast action. The film is built on debt, shame and obligation, and it stays heavy even once the fighting starts.