#Mikio Narita

[fuckyeahmeikokaji]

Meiko Kaji (梶芽衣子) and Mikio Narita (成田三樹夫) in Female Convict Scorpion: Beast Stable (女囚さそり　けもの部屋), 1973, directed by Shunya Ito (伊藤俊也). Scanned by me.

[chernobog13]

Zatoichi (Shintaro Katsu) and Jumonji (Mikio Narita) engage in a friendly game of shogi (Japanese chess) in Zatoichi and the Chess Expert (1965).

[shinkleitus]

Policiais vs. Bandidos (1975), dir. Kinji Fukasaku.

Review originalmente postada: 01/Mar/2023 no Letterboxd.

O diretor Fukasaku manteve seu estilo de direção e quase todo o elenco de Yakuza Papers em seu próximo filme, criando uma conexão quase como se fosse da mesma franquia. Inspirado por eventos reais, o filme utiliza imagens de jornais que dão uma sensação de documentário, agregando ainda mais profundidade à história. Além disso, O estilo de direção de Fukasaku é bem característico, com a utilização de câmera na mão e cortes rápidos, criando um ambiente de tensão e urgência nas cenas de ação. Aqui Fukasaku chega com uma forte crítica social, este filme aborda de forma mais aprofundada a ideia de como o Japão se tornou corrupto no pós-guerra, mostrando como a violência se tornou uma justificativa para os problemas sociais que surgiram na época. Nenhum personagem policial ou político segue a lei, tornando-os ainda menos honrados do que os próprios membros da Yakuza. É curioso notar que um dos personagens policiais é mais preocupado em perseguir comunistas do que em prender criminosos, o que é visto como um fator de ironia e humor no filme. Uma algo que me chamou atenção no protagonista, interpretado novamente por Bunta Sugawara, é a mudança de seu papel em relação ao filme anterior Yakuza Papers. Se antes ele era um bandido honrado, agora ele é um policial corrupto que trabalha em conluio com a Yakuza. Essa transformação revela a versatilidade do ator e sua habilidade em interpretar personagens complexos e distintos, mesmo dentro do mesmo gênero cinematográfico.

[redeadfish]

Mikio Narita & Bunta Sugawara

[blackryan53]

千葉真一さん、 ありがとうございます。

千葉真一   Sonny Chiba

1939年1月22日 - 2021年8月19日

宇宙からのメッセージ   Message from Space   1978

[anhed-nia]

BLOGTOBER 10/23/2019: FEMALE PRISONER SCORPION - BEAST STABLE

I’m not sure that I made the right choice by including this film in my blogtober program. A fugitive thriller with women’s prison and yakuza elements, BEAST STABLE doesn’t seem very horrific on its face. However, this third installation in the Female Prisoner Scorpion series (and the last by visionary director Shunya Ito) is also the most visceral and intimate. Its relative lack of action movie bravado shifts the focus from matters of the spirit to those of the body, the appalling details of which made me ask myself whether I didn’t consider this a horror movie after all. My conclusions are not very firm, but the debate is worth having.

During notorious convict Sasori (”Scorpion”)/Nami Matsushida’s latest escape, she runs afoul of the relentless Detective Kondo (Mikio Narita) on the subway, who no sooner cuffs her than loses his arm to her blade. This produces some of my favorite images from the whole hallucinatory series, with Matsu racing through the streets with the severed limb flailing behind her to the unforgettable sounds of star Meiko Kaji’s theme song “Urami Bushi”. In her flight to a shanty town on the outskirts of the city, she meets a young prostitute named Yuki (Yayoi Watanabe) in a most outrageous fashion. Yuki lies on her back in a cemetery, clutching bills from the john who left her there, and gazing vacantly at the stars. When a strange sound draws her attention, she finds herself locking eyes with the feral Matsu, who crouches behind a tombstone with the severed arm in her mouth, scraping away at the handcuff chain. The strange gothic horror of this scene only scratches the surface of how weird BEAST STABLE will become.

Yuki is an especially desperate character whose pitiful lot justifies the trouble that she makes for Matsu. A poor prostitute who is virtually enslaved to her brain damaged brother, she must keep his base instincts in check only by submitting to his every sexual whim. When Yuki chases after Matsu, begging to be freed from this nightmare, she unwittingly attracts the attention of the local mob, including a female pimp with a penchant for back alley abortions. The crow-obsessed crook Katsu, who might as well be a Batman villain (played by Reisen Ri, who has powerful Karen Black vibes) hatches a plot to take out Matsu, but this falls apart when Matsu starts slashing her way through the gang’s ranks. Rather than confront her, Katsu foolishly opts for the safety of prison--Matsu’s home turf, where she is able to exact a diabolical revenge that belongs more in a giallo than a standard issue women’s prison movie. 

BEAST STABLE is often as beautiful as either of its two predecessors, which are generally considered to be superior; the dreamy rain of fire produced when Yuki searches for Matsu by dropping matches into the sewer is not to be missed. Admittedly the other films have a more ethereal, allegorical quality, but BEAST STABLE holds its own in terms of being potently disturbing. Where we previously found female criminality presented in a sort of heroic light, aimed at the dissolution of the corrupt prison system and the punishment of hypocrites, here women are metaphorically imprisoned in maddeningly hopeless situations. Yuki is unable to emotionally separate herself from her rapist brother, as she is carrying his baby to term--even after being raped with a golf club by Katsu for intruding on the pimp’s territory. When one of Katsu’s colleagues sets his sights on Matsu, the thug’s distraught girlfriend kills him by virtually boiling him alive. Trapped in Katsu’s bird cage, Matsu escapes by retrieving a scalpel from the cold grip of a prostitute who died as a result of a horrifying abortion. Nowhere are the courageous, castrating antiheroes of FEMALE PRISONER 701: SCORPION or JAILHOUSE 4. In BEAST STABLE, we have only Matsu grimly following a trail of victims to the film’s hard won conclusion.

I am left trying to figure out if I can create a reasonable distinction between horror and pure exploitation, at least in this case. My first clue lies in the film’s profound sadness, which first appears in the image of the recently befouled Yuki, lying fully clothed in a cemetery like a discarded corpse. Apparently, I think that despair is an important element in horror. It would be pretty difficult for anyone other than the most serious degenerates to get it up for this movie, with its relentless agonies and heavy focus on abortion. There is no token lesbianism or nude calisthenics to brighten the mood now and again, and at that, the violence is rarely political. In the former films, Matsu and her defacto acolytes rage against authorities who would break their spirits, but in BEAST STABLE the violence is personal and intimate rather than institutional, and few characters are afforded a majestic martyrdom as a way out. SCORPION and JAILHOUSE 41 pit the anonymizing degradation of jail against the glories of anarchy and vengeance, but BEAST STABLE reaffirms that not much good awaits women beyond prison bars.

This line of thinking leads me to indulge in a personal note. I was introduced to this series while still in college, by a person who I would later categorize as a total abuser. Though he was highly intelligent and charismatic in an offbeat way, he dated exclusively much younger women--a sure sign of someone avoiding the sound judgment of his peers--and there was some evidence of his having that iffy white guy preference for asian girls. He lured in women who were too young or inexperienced to know better by flaunting his inner sensitivity and trauma, and then once he had someone (or more than one person) on the hook, he rewarded her by being relentlessly dishonest and unfaithful, as if to teach her a lesson for sympathizing with him. To my knowledge, he had not been a women’s studies major in his school days, but he might as well have been, as most of his film discussion came through a feminist filter. He analyzed sleazy genre fare to within an inch of its life, and seemed to delight in making remarks like that the infamous borderline pornographic slasher movie THE TOOLBOX MURDERS “is dangerous and should not be seen.” This all might sound like the typical calculation of a basic predator, but having been his unfortunate friend for several years, I truly believe that he believed his own bullshit. His manic depressive behavior belied little self-reflection, and he would sometimes make tearful statements that bordered on magical thinking, about how “something” unnameable about him drove women insane. He seemed genuinely affronted by his long suffering girlfriend’s suggestion that he might be a misogynist, even though he admitted to hitting her during at least one argument. (A fact that he naturally presented as something that should make me feel sorry for him, in his epic turmoil) He showed no awareness of how suspicious it might be to some people, that he voraciously took in any movie starring teenage girls or childlike women; even though I held his opinion in the highest regard for years, I had to learn to start ignoring him when he recommended these movies, because whether he was right about their actual quality was a complete crap shoot. 

The point that I’m coming to is that he was absolutely obsessed with the character of Sasori. He believed that the JAILHOUSE 41 was one of, if not The greatest movie of all time, and both his email address and user image related to her. The FEMALE PRISONER SCORPION series represented the pinnacle of his absolute favorite thing, which was raped virgins returning for revenge. Back when I knew him, I took this to be plain old good taste; today, I associate it obliquely with an attitude I sense a lot on the political right. Without giving this remotely the space that it would take more me to fully prove my point, I’ll just say that part of what motivates conservatives and bigots is the profound, primal, unconscious fear that those they have repressed will come back to avenge themselves. There’s a subaural signal in right wing rhetoric that I always hear beyond their empty circuitous logic, that simply says “We’ve done a lot of bad things to you, and by virtue of that, now we have reason to fear that you will do those same things to us, given the slightest chance.” Since that time, I have become acquainted with more men like this than I would have preferred to. Not the scheming women’s studies serial rapists, but  the sulking intellectuals whose unshakable belief in their own nobility--their certainty that they are too smart to be bigots--prevents them from fully acknowledging their abusive, misogynist, and frankly sometimes pedophilic attitudes toward women. These guys vocally obsess over the likes of Lydia Lunch and Kim Gordon and Sasha Grey and Asia Argento et al, and boast about their literacy in matters of gender and sexuality, only to routinely accumulate the most submissive and virginal partners they can find, and blame these girls for all of their personal problems for as long as they stick around. The FEMALE CONVICT SCORPION movies are great, both in terms of formal artistry and metaphor for the female experience. I would love to believe in the specialness of men who relate so openly to characters like Matsu, but because of my majority experience, I’m afraid I tend to find them all guilty until proven innocent.

[jailhouse41]

Poster for The Woman Killer (Showa Onna Jingi, 昭和おんな仁義) also known as Showa Woman’s Duty or Showa Woman’s Gambling Code, 1969, directed by Taro Yuge (弓削太郎) and starring Kyoko Enami (江波杏子), Mikio Narita (成田三樹夫), Asao Koike (小池朝雄) and Mari Atsumi (渥美マリ).

[ozu-teapot]

Zatoichi and the Chess Expert | Kenji Misumi | 1965

Mikio Narita, Shintarô Katsu

Zatoichi wins again!

[may8chan]

Message from Space

[twilightronin]

Hiroshima Death Match (1973)

[fuckyeahmeikokaji]

Meiko Kaji (梶芽衣子) and Mikio Narita (成田三樹夫) in Female Convict Scorpion: Beast Stable (女囚さそり　けもの部屋), 1973, directed by Shunya Ito (伊藤 俊也).

[brody75]

Female Prisoner Scorpion: Beast Stable (1973)

[catastrophicarts]

Maxie portrait study based on this tweet where Satoshi Mayamoto attributes Mikio Narita (as Ukon Saegusa in Sleepy Eyes of Death) as the inspiration for how he drew Maxie in pokemon special :]

[blackryan53]

Message from Space -  宇宙からのメッセージ

千葉真一   志穂美悦子    真田広之    成田三樹夫

Vic Morrow   Peggy Lee Brennan

[mariocki]

Kenkei Tai Soshiki Boryoku (Cops Vs. Thugs, 1975)

“Can you promise me you won’t run?” “Look into my eyes.”

[argumentl]

The Freedom of Expression Ep 61 - Going to Hardcore Chocolate!

Part 2 ( Part 1 can be found here)

J: Yes, it is...Ah, The Great Kabuki...Kabuki san too.

(*Cut to Kaoru*)

M: This is a Dave Spector shirt. 

K: Ehh?

T: Dave san? Oh, yes, its photos of his younger self.

K: Ehhh? Hahaha

M: Dave sent me a lot of his photos, and told me to use all of them.

K: Haha, brilliant!

(*Cut to J*)

J: This is really good. What kind of customers do you get in here?

M: Uh, mostly men in their 40s..

J: Ah, I see..But there must be a few young people having a look around too?

M: Yes, they do. Young women even..

T: Ok, should we focus and decide our favourites?

J: Yeah..Oh, it's Aho no Sakata.

T: Aho no Sakata?

K: Oh, there is a Hanshin-Giants one. Aghh.

J: Haha, he said 'Aghh'.

T: If you wore this in Shinsaibaahi...Is your other store in Namba, in Osaka?

M: Sennichi-mae.

T: Oh, there is a branch in Sennichi-mae.

J: Ok, should we each choose our faves?

T: Yeah, lets announce our favourites in 5 mins.

J: Kaoru, where are you choosing from?

K: Heh, why are you asking me?

*On screen note: At last, they announce their selection!*

T: Ok, its my turn. I've decided my theme. I have a friend who is about to become a parent, and I want to give this person a tshirt as a present. Its this...Ta da! A Dave Spector tshirt, haha. There is a reason for this. This friend of mine is a TV director, and is always working with Dave. I think if my friend wore this, Dave would also be really happy, and their work would go smoothly, haha. So, I've decided to go with this tshirt.

J: Ok, well I chose my favourite, but it was difficult! Its like I've never had this much trouble deciding on something in my whole life. Well, its 'The Shining'. You've probably all seen 'The Shining' tshirts all over the place, but the brillant thing about this Harcore Chocolate version is the backprint. I can't get enough of this. You usually can't ever get anything like this. Its really hardcore to say 'Wear this gory scene on your back', so I chose this 'The Shining' tshirt as my favourite. Thank you.

T: Next, Kaoru.

K: Yep, I chose this. Its Narita Mikio.

J: Ah, so good.

T: Narita Mikio?

K: Yeah, well, I like him. Also, I was thinking about coming here and buying this anyway.

J, T: Hahaha

K: I'd already decided that.

J: Before you came?! You searched online?

K: Yeah. And I was wondering if they would have any left..and they did.

J: I see.

K: I was also looking at that one of Masa san, but I went for Narita Mikio.

T: Does it have a backprint?

K: It doesn't, no.

T: You'd already decided on this?

K: Yeah. But that Masa san parker is good too.

J: Can we just get a look at this parker?

K:???*3

T: Ohh, cool.

K: It leaves a nice impression...and the back...

T: Whoa! Cool!

J: Ah, great! Who is the opponent?

M: Its Larry Zbyszko. It was the match where he became a champion at Tokyo Dome.

J: Masa san's expression is great, isn't it?

T: Yeah.

M: Its that move '監獄固め/kangokugatame'*4

J: Oh, thats so nostalgic...So the result is..

K: Narita Mikio.

J: Narita Mikio, he was an actor, wasn't he?

K: Yeah, I love him.

T: Well, Kaoru, as a birthday present, myself and Joe will buy that tshirt for you.

J: Happy Birthday! *clapping*

K: Oh, great, thank you very much!

J: Please wear it.

K: Thank you.

J: Is the size ok?

K: There is only size XL for this, but thats fine.

T: Well, Happy Birthday Kaoru!

K: Thank you. I'm so happy....Well, we got three different types.

J: Yeah. It was really hard to choose just one though.

K: But im gonna buy some more before we go.

J: Really?

T: Haha

J: How much? How many do you plan to buy?

K: There are two or three more that I want.

J: Are there? You are quite serious about it, aren't you?

K: Yes.

J: I wonder if I should buy some more?

T: You should. I'm going to aswell.

J: Well, the location is about 5 mins from Higashi Nakano station.

T: Yeah, 5 mins.

J: So you can get here really quickly. You sell online too?

M: Yes, just search for Core Choco and you'll find us.

K: Im always checking online to see if they have new stuff.

J: Really? That much? Haha....Ok, so after this, lets do some private shopping.

K: Yes. Well, see you next week. Thank you very much.

J, T: Thank youu!

*1,2,3 Couldn't catc

*4 No idea how to translate this pro-wrestling move.

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