GAMBLERS AND RACKETEERS (1964)

The Kikuya Group, run by Boss Kijima (Chiezō Kataoka), controls a large share of the street vendor business in Asakusa but is beginning to feel the squeeze, both from a rival yakuza gang trying to muscle in on their turf as well as a supermarket that's due to be constructed in the neighborhood. Kijima's older son Ryutaro (Koji Tsuruta) has been disowned for killing another Kikuya member in a drunken rage and is now eking out a living as a bodyguard while staying on good terms with his immature younger brother Katsuo (Hiroki Matsukata) and school chum Mizuno (Minoru Oki), now Kikuya's second-in-command. Tetsurō Tamba plays another childhood pal, an understanding cop trying to keep Ryutaro and Katsuo out of jail. Director Shigehiro Ozawa is dismissed as "mediocre" in Paul Schrader's 1974 Film Comment article "Yakuza-Eiga: A Primer" but he was a better than average studio craftsman, as adept at handling the humor and pathos as he was at staging dynamic action sequences. This feels a lot more confined to studio sets than the other films of his I've seen, most likely a budgetary decision but one that also works thematically given the constricted lives of its characters. Tsuruta is excellent, particularly in the scene in which he reveals the true reasons for his banishment to Matsukata. When this opened in Honolulu in March 1965 the title was CRIME STREET, TOKYO.