Rare is the cinematic saga that maintains consistency. For every Lord of the Rings, there’s ten Star Warses (pick any of the trilogies) or Jurassic Parks (ditto), veering wildly from side to side as they try to work out just what put millions of bums in seats to see the first one. Rarer still is the trilogy where the approach varies from entry to entry…with each chapter being made in the same year. Japan seems to have that down: take The Street Fighter trilogy, Sonny Chiba’s iconic triple-header from 1974, each chapter helmed by Shigehiro Ozawa and each possessing its very own spin on the material, complete with varying levels of cartoonishness. That selection seems positively straightforward in comparison to Teruo Ishii’s unconventional and risk-taking Abashiri Prison I-III (all made in 1965, and being the first cycle of an unbelievable SEVENTEEN separate films), restored and assembled by Eureka under the Prison Walls moniker in a brilliant spotlight moment on the beginning of the yakuza sub-genre.
This strange tale opens with a melancholy song sung by the star of the franchise, Ken Takakura, practically narrating his own story through music. Establishing shots of the icy tundra reinforce Takakura’s words: the eponymous slammer really is “the place that is nowhere”. Located as north as humanly possible, Abashiri Prison is as bleak as it gets, a zone of incarceration for the worst of the worst or whichever unlucky sap is getting the harshest sentence a judge can give. Takakura’s Shinichi Tachibana is somewhere in between the two, being a streetwise yakuza hoodlum and protective mummy’s boy in equal measure. His stint behind bars sees him become a pillar of the prisoner community, and one of the main forces behind a messy prison break as soon as he hears news of his mother dying of cancer. Escape is forever on his mind over the next two films as well, but the way emancipation manifests itself is something that Ishii is forever toying with in different, surprising ways.
Fans of Ishii’s work will find his grasp of black-and-white photography refreshing, creating a stark world of blinding whites and obscuring shadows in the harsh winter of northern Japan. Anyone expecting the lurid colour palette of Orgies of Edo (a film bursting with vibrancy and complete with flaming bulls!) will be rubbing their eyes and questioning if this is the same filmmaker, but Ishii’s prolific and varied career is summed up nicely in the first entry of this saga. His knack for set-pieces here is as terrific as ever; a downhill railcar chase between guard and prisoner is taught and exciting, and a brutal handcuff removal involving a steam train is positively hard to watch. Yet his grasp on the humanity of author Hajime Itō’s characters is what really lays the groundwork for investment in this long-running story, and the motley crew of thieves, murderers and other assorted bastards is what makes this work. Tōru Abe turns in a great performance as grinning yakuza boss Heizo Yoda, and Kôji Nanbara’s loathsome sexual predator Gonzo Gonda picks up the skin-crawling duties, but it’s Kanjūrō Arashi’s Torakichi Akuda who makes the biggest impression as a prison lifer with a disturbing past. His blend of doddery innocence, wounded feeling and disarming authority is a well-utilised tool in the drama throughout all three films, and sets a gauntlet for all of his younger performers to follow.
Where the Abashiri Prison story goes from here is knowledge that few possess. With Takakura playing Shinichi a grand total of fourteen more times after this, it’s astonishing that Ishii and co. were able to get more material out of this when the opening three films take such creative risks so quickly.
The second chapter takes a sharp left turn towards something a little lighter. Catching up with Shinichi some time after his sentence, a run-in with a suspicious nun and a light-fingered pickpocket Yumi (Michiko Saga) sees an algae ball full of diamonds fall into his lap, and his efforts to go clean being thwarted by a web of criminals, some whom are familiar in increasingly uncomfortable ways. This also sees Ishii embrace his signature lush colours, and the outside world of nightclubs and gambling dens feels even more stark against the biting cold of the first film. Alas, this is a less compelling affair, whimsical and fun-loving often to its detriment and undercutting the hard-edged original at alternating turns. There is nevertheless a vibrant final set-piece at a fire festival that fans of Michael Mann’s Blackhat may get a kick out of; although it’s unlikely Mann took inspiration directly from this obscure Ishii film, it’s a nice link that should probably be subject to a video essay one day.
The end of the boxset sees Shinichi once again trying to go straight along with the rest of his old former yakuza pals in the city of Nagasaki, bouncing back a mere twenty years after its devastation through the atomic bomb. This is a decidedly more serious chapter that reckons with the impossibility of truly leaving a life of crime, but still overstuffed with labyrinthine yakuza politics and overbearing metaphors about the real Abashiri Prison being the ties that bind. It still manages to build to a powerful ending, despite being consistently hobbled by a subplot involving an Asian girl in blackface that attempts to add some racial commentary to the proceedings and ends up falling flat on its witless face in the process. It’s a rare clanger for an otherwise fascinating and layered exploration of the complexity of a criminal, but at least Eureka were wise enough to open the film with a content warning about it.
Where the Abashiri Prison story goes from here is knowledge that few possess. With Takakura playing Shinichi a grand total of fourteen more times after this, it’s astonishing that Ishii and co. were able to get more material out of this when the opening three films take such creative risks so quickly. Ishii was to do this later with his Sonny Chiba double-feature of The Executioner and The Executioner II: Karate Inferno in 1974 (another win for Chiba that year), experimenting with a brutal first chapter before lightening the mood to misguided ends with the sequel. Chalk it up as another interesting page in the immense history of Japanese exploitation cinema, and pray that another restored set of these comes along before too long.
Abashiri Prison I-III is out now on Eureka Blu-Ray
