Full Disclosure: Due to a programming error, I was forced to watch eleven minutes of this film without subtitles.
The bread and butter of the noir genre are characters who try to escape their past but are forced to confront them. Films like Out of the Past, Crime Wave, and In a Lonely Place are prime examples of this central noir dynamic. In Toshio Masuda's Rusty Knife, we hear one of the most popular variations on this theme: the reformed criminal being pulled back into the underworld. Yukihiko Tachibana is a bar owner who is trying to go straight after finishing a prison sentence for killing a man over a woman. He was once hired by the yakuza as a body guard where he witnessed a brutal assassination and was paid to keep quiet. However, he soon learns that the old gang is bumping off the other men hired that same night as guards. In addition, he discovers that his girlfriend was gang-raped and driven to suicide at the hands of the very men who hired him. So Yukihiko dives back into the world of crime to discover who killed his girlfriend and who is trying to shut him up permanently. It's a fine plot with some competent performances, particularly from Yujiro Ishihara as Yukihiko. But it lacks the energy and stylistic wit of its Nikkatsu contemporaries. Several times, the movie will come to a complete halt as the characters engage in 10+ minute scenes of expository dialogue. It doesn't have the same enthusiasm and spirit that distinguished other Japanese crime films of the late 50s and early 60s. Much like Yukihiko's trusty knife, this film is covered in rust when it should be sharp and deadly.
6/10
No comments:
Post a Comment