Eureka Blu-ray Film Review

Violent Streets (1974) • Blu-ray [Eureka! Masters of Cinema]

A retired yakuza is caught in the middle of a growing conflict between two rival clans.

If you’re looking for a definitive Japanese 1970s yakuza movie, then Hideo Gosha’s Violent Streets / Bôryoku gai is a good place to start because it brings together several typical tropes of the genre. It was made during a transitional period as cinema audiences were dwindling due to the proliferation of television, which offered plenty of accessible content in the well-worn genres of chanbara (samurai swordplay), jidaigeki (period drama), and kaiju (big monsters), plus the popular terebi dorama (drama series format).

So, Japanese cinema was searching for the next big thing that could coax audiences back. The arthouse niche remained stable but wasn’t lucrative enough to keep the industry going. Offering spectacle with more lavish productions was one way, but those kinds of budgets were rare and generally too risky for a floundering studio system but it didn’t cost that much to offer content too extreme for TV. It seemed sex and violence…