If we were to chart Roger Corman’s engagement with socio-political issues in his work upon some kind of hypothetical scale, then at the opposite end of it from the uncomfortably effective The Intruder, we would find ‘Gas-s-s-s!, or, It Became Necessary to Destroy the World in Order to Save It’ [henceforth ‘Gas’, just for the sake of our sanity], an inexplicable, rather hare-brained movie which, over fifty years later, is difficult not to see as one of its directors greatest failures. (I mean, say what you will about Creature From The Haunted Sea, but at least it had reasons for being crap.) (1)
This is extremely regrettable, given that the project represents an important milestone in Corman’s career on a number of levels. Not only does it mark the conclusion of his cycle of ‘counter-culture’ films (following on from ‘The Wild Angels’ in ’66 and ‘The Trip’ in ’67), but also his final collaboration with American international Pictures (following fifteen years of fruitful co-dependence), and in fact his final work as a director of independent commercial cinema in the United States. (2)
So, what’s ‘Gas’ all about then? Well… it’s difficult to say really, and that very uncertainty soon becomes a pretty big part of the problem.
A pastel crayon animated prologue introduces us to some high ranking military officials (including such personages as ‘General Strike’, and ‘Dr Murder’ - and if you find that magazine cartoon level of humour uproariously funny, there’s hope you might enjoy this movie yet), who, in the process of attending a ceremonial function at a chemical research base in Alaska, accidentally uncork a beaker containing a cloud of custom-made poison gas which now promises to spread across the earth, killing everyone aged over twenty-five.
Moving into live action post-credits, we meet a long-haired, wise-crackin’ campus troublemaker (Bob Corff) and his adorable, only marginally less wide-crackin’ girlfriend (Elaine Giftos), who depart Dallas in a salmon pink Cadillac and promptly get involved in a series of tiresome comical capers, eventually joining forces with a group of other sketchily-defined, more-or-less hippie-aligned young people (including amongst their number both a young Bud Cort, and one Tally Coppola, later to become Talia Shire). Together, this merry band traverse a marginally post-apocalyptic version of the American South-West, enduring a multitude of symbolic / quixotic encounters and threats as they vaguely pursue an Oz-like quest to consult an ‘oracle’, whose billboards (including a count-down in miles) they spot along the highway.
And… that’s about it, really. I mean, I wish I could tell you what the wearying procession of factions, marauders, aggressors, cultists, herd-like victims and all-purpsoe extraverted weirdos our protagonists run into along the way were actually meant to represent, but, as the film’s attempts at satirical humour alternate wildly between blunt, eye-rolling obviousness and head-scratching, lost-in-translation obscurity, it is honestly difficult to locate anything here which we squares might term a ‘point’.
Which might have been all well and good, if only Corman and his collaborators been able to wrangle some other value from these narratively unglued proceedings, but, sadly, the kind of pupil-dilating visual excess and subversive, taboo-breaking chaos which defined the era’s more successful underground/counter-cultural filmmaking is in very short supply in ‘Gas’.
Shot in a range of uninhabited / wreckage-strewn desert locations across Texas and New Mexico, the film’s footage soon becomes fairly monotonous, in spite of the natural beauty of the surroundings and some intermittently impressive photography from DP Ron Dexter. The tone of the action meanwhile remains cloyingly light-hearted, employing a gratingly twee take on hippie-era surrealism, whilst the characters remain vacant, distant and uninteresting.
Even the garish, mid-century Americana of the costumes and production design simply remain… standard issue, for the most part. Please bear in mind that I say all this as a viewer who usually maintains an extremely high tolerance for what Kim Newman has termed ‘Weird Hippie Shit’, but in a word, ‘Gas’ simply feels tired.
Just a few short years earlier, Corman could reasonably have claimed to have had his finger on the pulse of the intersection between popular culture and the underground (after all, ‘The Wild Angels’ not only launched a whole new era-defining genre, but provided direct aesthetic inspiration for generations of proto-punk rebels in the process).
The shadow-haunted autumn/winter of ’69 though found Corman and screenwriter George Armitage (future director of ‘Grosse Pointe Blank’ and the fantastic Miami Blues) beginning work on ‘Gas’ at precisely the moment in which the optimism of the 1960s evaporated, leaving something darker and more fragmented behind it, ready to curdle as the decade turned… and ensuring that the film’s happy-go-lucky, flower-child hipster-isms must have felt painfully irrelevant by the time their film finally opened in September 1970. (3)
In this context, scenes which may have passed as wild, Godardian po-mo provocations back in the mid-‘60s (such as the film’s lampoon of a western shoot-out, in which characters point their fingers at each other whilst shouting the names of famous cowboy actors) simply play out as eye-rolling tedium - self-satisfied acting class wheezes dragged out for far longer than is really necessary.
Indeed, for a Corman production, ‘Gas’ feels uncharacteristically bloated and excessive. Shot across multiple locations in several states (and dogged by inevitable weather-related delays along the way), he seems to have become fixated here on mounting vast public spectacles of one kind of another.
The finished film is stuffed full of marching bands and parades, crowds of extras fleeing through the streets of Western town sets pursued by gangs of stuntmen on brightly painted bikes and sidecars, convoys of golf carts, JCBs and tooled up dune buggies (triggering entirely accidental flashes of Mansonoid paranoia), cheerleaders, football teams and hundreds of people crammed onto a remote mountaintop for the film’s conclusion… all, ultimately, to very little effect.
Amidst all this sound and fury, it becomes difficult to avoid the conclusion that the man who once shot a film as beautifully crafted as ‘Little Shoppe of Horrors’ on a single set in two and a half days has lost his way very badly somewhere along the line.
Perhaps the sole quantifiable pleasure I took from ‘Gas’ in fact came from the music - and this is entirely due to the fact that I’m a big fan of the perennially underrated Country Joe & The Fish, and in particular of their gifted lead guitarist Barry ‘The Fish’ Melton, who was charged with composing ‘Gas’s songs and incidental cues (as heard in the rare moments when the brass marching bands, cheerleading chants and honking car horns shut up for a few minutes). (4)
It’s nice to hear the various bits and pieces Melton came up with (recordings never otherwise released, insofar as I’m aware), and we also get to enjoy some choice footage of the band in full flow at some kind of outdoor festival held at a drive-in theatre, backed up by a bitchin’ psychedelic light show, inter-cut with footage of two of the young hippie characters making out during an acid trip, and accompanied by subliminal flashes of underground movie-style abstract imagery.
Arguably the film’s strongest sequence, the overall effect here is only partially spoiled by the presence of Country Joe McDonald (who I’m fairly sure would not have made the twenty-five year old cut-off point required for this movie’s plot, incidentally) doing some kind of terminally unamusing skit about how he’s an omnipotent, god-like figure named ‘A.M. Radio’, or somesuch. (My god, this obnoxiously performative, satire-lite fucking hippie ‘humour’, I swear… it’s enough to make me want to shave my head and enlist in the nearest para-military organisation post-haste.)
Aside perhaps from hardcore C.J. Fish fans though, it’s difficult to imagine that anyone at the time of ‘Gas’s original release was actually digging what Corman was laying down here. Whilst ‘straight’ audiences must have simply been confused and alienated by all this mystifying hullaballoo, the campus radicals and garage band suburban punks the movie was presumably supposed to appeal to would surely by this point have felt patronised and turned off by its parade of quirky, central casting hippies mouthing half-baked flower power witticisms, long past their sell-by date in the hyper-accelerated climate of mid-century pop culture.
Even within the sphere of disastrous, released-too-late hippie movies, ‘Gas’ ranks low, lacking the lo-fi earnestness of the Firesign Theatre’s “electric western” ‘Zachariah’, the wild artistic vision of Dennis Hopper’s ‘The Last Movie’ or the magisterial visual gimmickry of Antonioni’s ‘Zabriskie Point’.
But the saddest thing of all is that, despite all this, ‘Gas’ seems to have been a project which mattered to Corman a great deal.
He spends over five pages of his 1990 memoir ‘How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime’ discussing the film, acknowledging the gruelling nature of the production, and regretting his decision to begin filming without a finished script. But, he also speaks enthusiastically of his success in creating “an apocalyptic, Strangelovian satire,” - one which, sadly, sounds a lot more exciting in Corman’s recollection than any of the footage which actually ended up on the screen;
“My films and my politics were getting more radical, more “liberated,” as the 1960s were coming to a close. I was truly beginning to believe I could do anything, which is why the picture ran a little out of control. Any idea that came to us, we would put in.”
[…]
“We ended up with some pretty wild and surreal images. We had a group of Hell’s Angels riding in their colors in golf carts instead of their choppers. The Texas A&M football team became a band of marauders on dune buggies, terrorizing the Southwest. We had Edgar Allan Poe speeding through the frame on a Hell’s Angels chopper with a raven on his shoulder, making comments from time to time. […] We re-created the Kennedy assassination while it was sleeting. Then we finally got to the Acoma mesa, which is virtually cut off from civilization, accessible only by a steep and winding dirt road.”
Although everything Corman describes can kind of be seen in the movie if you squint hard enough, I think the failure of any of it to actually make much of an impression on the viewer simply goes to prove that, much as I love him, Roger Corman was no Alejandro Jodorowsky. Logic, working within fixed limits and careful advance planning were the engines which powered his best cinema, and the mellow ideals of middle class So Cal suburbia remained his aesthetic base-camp, even as the wily tendrils of psychedelia and European decadence repeatedly threatened to drag him further afield. At the end of the day, maximalist cosmic wig-flipping was simply not his bag, man.
Nonetheless, Corman remained extremely unhappy about a number of cuts he claimed were made to ‘Gas’ in post-production, and which he blamed primarily on AIP’s James H. Nicholson, whom he felt had become increasingly conservative and intolerant of risk-taking in the films his company released, citing these arbitrary cuts as reasons for the film’s incoherence and commercial failure.
Strong words perhaps from a man who in later years would become famous for insisting his protégés’ films came in at under 88 minutes in order to save on film canisters, but above all, AIPs decision to cut the film’s intended final shot remained a source of great bitterness to Corman, ending one of the longest and most productive relationships in the history of independent cinema on an extremely sour note;
“The unkindest cut of all was the last scene. I ended the film with a spectacular shot from on top of the mesa, with a view sixty, seventy miles to the horizon. We had the entire tribe there and everyone else who had been in the film. It was a celebration. The leading man kisses the woman and I zoom back. It was a cliché I had never used to end a film. I did it precisely because it was a cliché. I had the entire marching band of the local high school. I had a whole group of Hell’s Angels. I had a bunch of guys on dune buggies. I had a football team. I had our whole cast in this wild celebration as the camera zoomed back and over the shot. God, who was a running character throughout the film, made his final comments on what went on.
There must have been three hundred people on top of that mesa. It was one of the greatest shots I ever achieved *in my life*. And AIP cut the entire shot. They ended the picture on the couple’s clichéd kiss - because they didn’t like what God was saying. The Picture ended and made no sense.”
For a more revealing take on Corman’s state of mind during the production of ‘Gas’ though, I think the last word must go to production manager Paul Rapp, quoted in the same book;
“The ‘Gas-s-s-s!’ shoot was the toughest one I ever saw Roger go through. I had never seen Roger in a nasty, bad mood like that. He seemed very down, snarling and weary. The Dallas sequences were around Thanksgiving and they had all-time record cold and blizzard conditions. It was miserable. Roger was shivering the whole time, wearing the same parka he had for ‘Ski Troop Attack’.
[…]
The day we set up the last sequence at the mesa Roger seemed really adrift. The Indians were terrible to work with. He seemed isolated, almost directing like a robot. The last scene was a big action shot with the entire cast, dune buggies, motorcycles, and the whole Indian tribe coming together. The first take was a complete mess. Roger just sat there. I got everybody back in their positions for a second take and looked over at Roger. He just nodded. I called action for him, and surprisingly, this time it went perfectly. Roger got up from his chair slowly, thanked everybody, and said very quietly, “Let’s go home.” (5)
---
(1)According to IMDB trivia, ‘Gas’s lengthy sub-title was inspired by an unnamed Major in the U.S. Army, who is alleged to have justified the total destruction of a Vietnamese town and its inhabitants on the basis that, “it became necessary to destroy the town in order to save it” - a reference which would have stood as the darkest and most effective piece of satire in the entire picture, if only an effort had been made to draw the audience’s attention to it.
(2)The WWI aerial combat epic ‘Von Richtofen and Brown’, which Corman shot in Ireland for United Artists, saw release in 1971, and subsequent to that he did not return to the director’s chair until 1990’s ‘Frankenstein Unbound’ - a film which I would argue stands more as a one-off vanity project produced by his own studio (albeit, a very worthwhile and interesting one) than as a strictly commercial proposition.
(3)Ironically in view of how badly the film falls victim to it, it’s interesting to note that Armitage’s script for ‘Gas’ is both aware of the hyper-accelerated fashion cycle of the ‘60s, and indeed pokes fun at it via the character played by Cindy Williams, a devotee of ‘old timey’ pop music who hangs around the jukebox listening to “golden oldies” by the likes of Jefferson Airplane and The Grateful Dead; a familiar motif found in near-future fiction written at the time by slightly bamboozled older geezers, and in Thomas Pynchon novels all the way up to 2009.
(4)It seems that Corman had originally planned to make ‘Gas’ with The Grateful Dead appearing on-screen and providing the soundtrack, only to end up - in characteristic Corman fashion - telling them to get lost when they turned up demanding more money than had been agreed upon, and immediately getting Country Joe on the line instead.
(5)All quotes in this review are taken from ‘How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime’, by Roger Corman with Jim Jerome (De Capo press edition, 1998), pp. 162-167.
“Tex then told Sadie to scout the house for other people. She evidently climbed up the redwood ladder to look in the loft. And then she walked to the south, toward the hallway off which were the two main bedrooms of the house. In the room on the left, Abigail Folger lay reading alone. She looked up, she saw Sadie, and Abigail waved! Waved and smiled, and Sadie smiled back and walked away. Hi death.”
- p.233
Long ago, in my late teenage years, I decided it was time for me to overcome my natural distaste for ‘true crime’ subject matter and get the full dope on this whole Manson Family business, which I kept finding fearful references to in the ‘60s counter-culture books and rock biogs that composed the bulk of my non-fiction reading at the time.
A remaindered copy of Los Angeles County Assistant D.A. & Chief Prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi’s exhaustive 1974 book ‘Helter Skelter: The True Story of The Manson Murders’ certainly did the trick with regard to nailing down the essential facts of the matter (or, the officially recorded versions thereof, at least), but at the same time, the book’s mountain of dry, forensic detail raised as many questions as it answered, particularly with regard to the aspect of the whole business that most interested me – that being, the wider cultural and sociological circumstances that allowed these insane events to transpire in the first place.
When I learned of the existence of Ed Sanders’ ‘The Family’, I naturally supposed that an investigation undertaken by a member of The Fugs might shed a slightly different light on things, but sourcing a copy of Sanders’ book proved difficult at the time, and besides, I didn’t really have the stomach for reading two massive Manson tomes in quick succession.
Fast forward to 2019 however, and I’ve actually ended up with two paperback copies of ‘The Family’ (boring story not worth recounting here), so, with Charlie himself now finally six feet under and the ever-classy Quentin Tarantino apparently revving up his new, Manson-related movie for release to coincide the 50th anniversary of the Tate-LaBianca murders… the time finally seemed nigh to actually read the damned thing. (1)
Before continuing, I should issue a disclaimer to clarify that I generally take a dim view anything which seeks to glorify and/or obsess over the activities of real life serial killers. In and of himself, Charles Manson was little more than a psychotic confidence trickster and pimp, worthy of no more interest or respect than any other creep who has ever made a career out of exploiting human misery.
What fascinates me rather is the frequently extraordinary nature of the marginal – and otherwise largely undocumented - worlds in which Manson moved, and the unique socio-cultural circumstances that allowed him to achieve such remarkable success (in psycho cult leader terms, at least) within them.
Manson’s followers have often been likened to locusts in terms of their tendency to hoover up cash, drugs, vehicles, food, crash-space and favours from anyone who gave them even the slightest opportunity to do so, but in the same way, Charlie himself strikes me as a kind of cultural locust.
In addition to his extensive and well-documented connections to the music and movie industries (which we need not reiterate here), the wider scope of Manson’s activities also seemed to encompass various other cult religious groups, assorted ‘hippie’ communities (including the core San Francisco scene centred around The Diggers, The Grateful Dead and the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic), several fringe Christian churches, Scientology and its shadier off-shoots, Anton Lavey’s comical Church of Satan, certain therapy / self help institutions, behavioural/hypnosis specialists and the formative roots of California’s New Age culture, along with the world of literary science fiction, prison sub-cultures (of both racist and homosexual varieties), college students and Berkeley activist groups, pirate radio broadcasters, underground and documentary filmmakers, the world of strip clubs, go-go dancers and ‘stag films’, outlaw motorcycle gangs, desert motor-racing enthusiasts, a wide variety of drug traffickers and manufacturers, the community of stuntmen and cowboys hanging around the Spahn Ranch, and even the culture of modern day gold prospectors and wilderness homesteaders whom The Family interacted with in Death Valley.
Excepting perhaps Dennis Wilson, I’m not aware that Manson ever hung out with any surfers (his activities being primarily directed in-land), and his virulent racism prohibited him from interacting with any black, Latino or Native American sub-cultures (despite his constant bleating about “Black Panthers”, there doesn’t seem to be any evidence that he was ever even in the same zip code as any of them) - BUT, that aside, it seems as if pretty much EVERYONE who has was cultivating a lifestyle outside of the square, mainstream norm in Southern California in the late 1960s was touched by the dirty fingers of Manson at some point, and the groups on the above list who had any credibility to begin with all found themselves degraded and damaged to some extent by the association. Meanwhile, he managed to feed something gleamed from every single one of them into the insane, indigestible gumbo of his eventual ‘Helter Skelter’ project.
II.
How did so many doors open for him? That’s the question that fascinates. Purely in terms of his attempts to infiltrate the entertainment industry, the fact that a character this unkempt, criminally-minded and evidently deranged could manoeuvre himself into a position one step removed from figures of such diverse cultural import as Doris Day, Kenneth Anger, Nancy Sinatra and Neil Young, is remarkable. Even if he’d never turned to murder, Manson's exploits as a kind of Sunset Strip Rasputin would remain intriguing to those of us with an interest in this particular historical milieu.
And happily, as the back cover blurb for Panther’s UK paperback of ‘The Family’ strongly implies, these wider connections between Manson and the cultures he managed to infiltrate is very much the subject that Sanders gets stuck into herein, striking an extremely precarious balance between credibility and sensationalism in the process.
At the outset, I was slightly worried that, given his own sub-cultural affiliations, Sanders may have been tempted to take a more sympathetic line on Manson and his cronies than Bugliosi, but rest assured, he goes even harder on them than the Chief Prosecutor, if such is possible, with his pejorative-heavy descriptions of the Family members betraying the anger of a man who has seen the public image of the movement he tied himself to warped and discredited by the actions of a bunch of kill-crazy goons.
As anyone who taken even the slightest interest in this stuff will be aware, attempting to research the wider activities of the Manson Family is liable to lead one pretty quickly into a bottomless Death Valley black hole of mis/disinformation, rife with missing links, random dead ends and irresolvable contradictions. For each verifiable fact that can be established about The Family, there are a thousand rumours, exaggerations and outright lies to contend with.
As Sanders outlines in his introduction, his method for dealing with this was basically to trawl through the testimony of anyone and everyone who interacted with The Family and proved willing to talk about the matter (indeed, the author implies that his hippie/yippie ‘cred’ allowed him access to deeper sources than the authorities were able to tap), and then to cross-reference these interviews against a map and timeline outlining (as far as is possible) the locations and activities of the killers, their associates and (where relevant) their victims. Basically it seems, everything that proved both interesting and not verifiably untrue made it into the book, leaving us to draw our own conclusions.
As we’ll discuss below, Sanders’ excursions into the further realms of speculation got him into no small amount of trouble, and the accuracy of more or less everything he throws into ‘The Family’ remains open to question, but, when you’re dealing with a set of witnesses who were likely various combinations of stoned, mentally ill, terrified, brain-washed and self-interested at the time of their testimony, I’d argue that he was probably right to retain as many of the “apparently”s, “allegedly”s and “it is reported that..”s as possible.
I do wish that Sanders had been a bit more forthcoming about his sources, and a bit more circumspect about the wilder rumours he offers up as ‘fact’, but at the same time, when it comes to defining the contours of the vast psychic maelstrom emanating from the undeniably grim realities of Hollywood, August 1969, I tend to think there is probably just as much value in hearing what people were saying about the events in their immediate aftermath, as in the cold hard facts themselves – and, so long as you can take him with a generous pinch of salt, Sanders’ book certainly provides an invaluable record of the former.
III.
“It seems strange that all of a sudden they got in to wearing black capes. The girls made Charlie one that reached to the floor. With a flourish Manson tried it on, remarking how no one for sure now could see him when he creepy-crawled. Mary Brunner had a black cape. Sadie had a cape. Squeeky, according to Danny DeCarlo, used to dye clothing black in a pot in the Spahn Ranch kitchen.”
- p. 185
If nothing else, the version of Charlie presented here was certainly industrious. Whereas you’d naturally expect a messianic cult leader to express hostility toward competing gurus, Manson, in keeping with his locust-like M.O., often seems to have actively encouraged the crossover of personnel and ideas between his ‘Family’ and various other groupings of fringe whackos, and Sanders’ book is particularly strong when it comes to making the case that the Mansonites were not an isolated phenomenon, but merely the most high profile symptom of a entire network of similarly demented (and potentially dangerous) groups who seemed to flourishing on the far outskirts of American society.
It is reported, for instance, that in 1968 Manson was present as a “guest of honour” at a bizarre trial / exorcism rite undertaken by some kind of homosexual “death cult” operating out of a commune house (the Waller Street Ashram, otherwise known as the “Devil House”) in Haight Ashbury. During this alleged event, a young man identified only as “Pussycat” – the former lover of the cult’s boss, one Father P., who is later said to have visited Manson at Spahn Ranch - was put through a series of gruelling ordeals to try to save him from a supposed demonic possession orchestrated by a deserter from the group. “Poor Pussycat,” quoth Sanders. (2)
The author also spends a full chapter outlining the eye-opening history of an outfit known as the Solar Lodge of the O.T.O., an illegitimate off-shoot from the branch of the famed Crowleyite magickal order, which seems to have mutated by the late ‘60s into a controlling personality cult masterminded by a woman named Jean Brayton, the wife of a USC philosophy lecturer.
Like The Family, The Solar Lodge made their home on a remote desert ranch, and there seems to have been a clear crossover of ideas (and, Sanders implies, personnel) between Brayton’s group and the Mansonites. Brayton is reported for instance to have also preached a gospel of hard-line racism, predicting the approach of an apocalyptic race war and telling her followers they would need to hide-out in underground caverns to survive the resulting carnage (sound familiar?).
The control Brayton and her husband exercised over their followers seems to have been even more sadistic and authoritarian than that practiced by Manson, but, thankfully, The Solar Lodge was put on ice in July 1969, when their leadership was arrested en masse on child abuse charges, after some horse traders who had visited their ranch called the police, having observed what investigating officers later confirmed to be a six-year-old boy chained up in a six foot square wooden crate and left exposed to the desert sun – which gives us some insight into the kind of outfit these particular creepos were really operating.
It should be noted however that, despite the publicity surrounding this ‘boy in the box’ case, Sanders’ claims regarding Manson’s connections with the Solar Lodge seem never to have been verified elsewhere. A brief web search reveals that the Braytons – who were soon back on the street and heading up another neo-Crowleyite religious order after initially fleeing to Mexico to avoid the child abuse charges – actually initiated legal action against Sanders in 1973, reaching an out of court settlement which ensured that the entire chapter related to the Solar Lodge was excised from future editions of ‘The Family’. Presumably, Panther’s UK paperback, dated that year, must have made it to the printers shortly before this agreement came into effect. Lucky me! (3)
In parallel with the Solar Lodge, Sanders also raises the spectre of a particularly shady motorcycle gang known as the Satan’s Slaves, whose members are alleged to have provided the connecting tissue between the Solar Lodge, the Mansonites, the Ku Klux Klan and something the author refers to as the “Kirke Order of Dog Blood” (seriously, don’t ask). (4)
“There are subjects associated with the Manson case that are so soaked in evil that the mere knowing of them is like a nightmare,” Sanders states later in the book, kicking off a chapter in which he addresses rumours of unidentified Satanic groups (presumably, but not definitively, connected to the quasi-mythical Kirke mob referenced above) carrying out animal sacrifice / blood-drinking / orgy rituals on several remote West Coast beaches in 1968-69. Pretty hair-raising stuff.
Sanders goes on to print verbatim the transcript of an interview with a young male Manson Family hanger on, who claims to have been present at the Spahn Ranch when a set of films – apparently made by another cult group – were screened, depicting both the killing of domestic animals and the apparent decapitation of a human female, carried out in ritual circumstances on a nocturnal beach.
To be honest, the interviewee sounds pretty out of it, but Sanders insists that the information he provided on other subjects proved reliable, so – make of this what you will. As far as I’m aware, nothing concrete on any of this has ever come to light in subsequent decades, so by this stage, it’s nothing more than another sinister, apocryphal underground legend to add to the ever-growing bonfire of such, any grain of truth lost in a long-forgotten vortex of misfiled missing persons reports and blighted, undocumented lives.
In fact, Sanders seems to have had a real bee in his bonnet about the possibly that The Family may have filmed some of their own crimes (presumably using the equipment they stole from a CBS outside broadcast truck in early ’69?), repeatedly hinting that certain “uptight persons” are holding back information from him on this subject to protect their own skins. Whoever these “persons” were, they must have done a pretty good job, because again, fifty years on, this hypothetical footage remains elusive, insofar as I’m aware. (5)
Amid all this shady occult networking, I was surprised to note that Sanders’ book entirely overlooks Manson’s widely documented connections to that most infamous of Scientology spin-offs, The Process Church of the Final Judgement. The details of Manson’s interactions with The Process Church became public knowledge so early in the game that they even made it into New English Library’s otherwise largely fictitious Manson book (which I wrote about here), so it seemed surprising to me that Sanders would have ignored such a rich vein of High Weirdness.
Well, guess what – the first edition copy of ‘The Family’ consulted by writer John Anthony Day for this review, published in The Harvard Crimson magazine in 1971, apparently contained an extensive (indeed, the reviewer claims, excessive) amount of information concerning Manson’s connections to The Process. But, Day also notes that Robert De Grimston, founder of the Process Church, had launched a $1.5 million lawsuit against Sanders and his U.S. publishers. So, consulting the entirely Process-free 1973 U.K. paperback, we can probably guess how that worked out. (6)
IV.
Sanders’ narrative becomes even sketchier, and even more queasy, when he occasionally turns his attention to the wider scope of The Manson Family’s crimes – unsolved category. Basically this consists of a grim run down of unsolved killings (primarily rape-murders of young women, with a weirdo/mutilation element) which were committed during 1968-69, at points when Sanders’ research leads him to believe that members of The Family were in the immediate vicinity.
As you can well imagine, reading capsule summaries of these cold cases – each of them a potential mini-Black Dahlia, just waiting for the True Crime podcasters to descend – is a grim business, and I’m actually not sure which possibility is more disturbing to contemplate; that Tex, Clem, Charlie and the gang were occasionally enjoying a brutal “boy’s night out” as they drifted hither and yon across the West Coast, or alternatively, that these killings actually had nothing whatsoever to do with the easy scapegoat of Satanic psycho-hippies, instead simply representing yr average, run-of-the-mill crime stats for a large American state over a two year period, the faceless perpetrators simply blending back into the mainstream ebb-and-flow of society and keeping their heads down. (7)
Of all the legally dubious claims contained within ‘The Family’ however, Sanders perhaps sails closest to the wind when he isuggests a connection between Charles Manson and the Esalen Institute, a storied and influential spa resort and spiritual / therapeutic retreat based in Big Sur, which survives to this day.
These claims centre around the admittedly intriguing fact that, a week prior to the Tate-LaBianca killings, Manson seems to have jumped behind the wheel of a stolen Hostess Twinkie bakery truck and spent a weekend tooling around the Big Sur area – entirely on his own, unusually, although he did manage to recruit a new Family member / sex slave / punching bag (a pregnant seventeen-year-old named Stephanie) along the way.
Sanders believes that Manson travelled to Big Sur to visit Esalen, and indeed, various rumours to this effect swirl about the lower depths of online Manson-ology. This is significant due to the fact that Cielo Drive murder victim Abigail Folger was a frequent visitor to the Institute, and Sharon Tate may or may not have also attended at some point.
The suggestion of a tangible connection between Manson and his future victims is chilling enough in itself, but once again, Sanders over-plays his hand by stating, apparently apropos of nothing, that both Folger and Tate were present at Esalen on the same weekend that Manson allegedly visited – a suggestion which I’m sure is contradicted by the official record, if not elsewhere in this very book.
Unsurprisingly perhaps, the Esalen Institute have spent the past fifty years vigorously denying that Manson ever came anywhere near them (their statements on the matter have been pretty weird and contradictory however, but.. that’s another story), and indeed, Sanders reports that a cast iron veil of secrecy hangs over the whole affair, even stating that representatives of the Institute have issued what he describes as a “veiled snuff threat” against him, should he persist in pursuing the matter.
Was there another, subsequent edition of ‘The Family’ with the references to Esalen also redacted? I wouldn’t be surprised. (8)
Exactly how many re-drafts did the text of this book go through to avoid legal action, I wonder? Three, four? I mean, I’m guessing the Kirke Order of Dogs Blood were unlikely to put a call through to their lawyers, but even so, if Sanders took some of the stuff he reports here remotely seriously, he must have spent a few years in fear of waking up some dark night with the smell of axle grease in his nostrils and a curved blade pressed to his throat.
V.
“There was one heavy problem facing Helter Skelter. By early 1969, the West Valley Station of the Los Angeles sheriff’s department had in use Bell-65 two-man helicopters with powerful searchlights installed that could light up a city block from 1000 feet in the air. Manson had various plans to deal with these helicopters. One was to attack the helicopter with magic. Another method was to thwart the helicopters at night by taping the headlights of the dune-buggy battalion with black tape, leaving only a small slit to allow a thin ray of light to escape, hopefully undetectable from the air.”
- p. 124
There is much more I could go on to say about other aspects of ‘The Family’; there is so much rich, soggy flesh here to pile onto the bones of the crazed milieu Manson and his followers operated within. Not least, the significant portion of the book which Sanders devotes to outlining the vast auto-theft / dune buggy manufacturing ring orchestrated by the Mansonites during their final months of freedom - an operation which proved necessary simply to keep the cult’s membership mobile and maintain supply lines across the incredibly inhospitable terrain which Charlie seemed increasingly fixated on forcing his followers to inhabit.
As is implied by the book’s memorable sub-title, Sanders details Manson’s apparent dream of drilling his Family into a unit of full on, ‘Road Warrior’ style desert outlaws, undertaking armed raids on the small towns bordering the Death Valley national monument, carrying off food and women like some kind of motorized neo-vikings, and bamboozling the cops from their impenetrable network of underground hidey-holes.
Even if they’d been left to their own devices however, the chances of The Family achieving this level of self-sufficient barbarity seems remote. Another thing that becomes clear from Sanders’ book is that, far from their rep as ruthless killers, these hapless hippies – many of them nursing either young children or severe mental illness by the time Helter Skelter took hold – were simply not prepared for the hardship of the desert.
As food and shelter became scarce, as Charlie became more violent and demanding, and as lines of communication between various outposts started to fray, The Family’s vital biker allies disappeared, and tertiary family members began drifting away at a steady rate, several of them walking vast distances across the desert in the search of help.
When a combination of armed police units and National Park officials finally began carrying out raids and pulling the Mansonites into custody on grand theft auto and arson charges in September/October 1969, the roving miscreants are reported to have been in an appalling physical condition, riddled with sores and parasites and caked in mud to protect themselves from the sun, the girls having tonsured and shaved their hair into bizarre, Mohawk-ish arrangements….. a far cry from the heady days of '68, when Gregg Jakobson and his fellow “golden penetrators” would cruise over to the group’s latest Hollywood hang-out to enjoy a few sexual favours in exchange for vague promises of booking Manson in for another studio session.
Where might this trip have ended, if the authorities hadn’t moved in to put a stop to it? Would the whitened bones of The Family’s hardcore members and assigned assassins now be buried in the sands of some distant canyon, as survivors of the nastier end of biker/field hippie sub-culture mutter darkly of their legend, and probable fate?
God knows, it certainly would have saved the State of California a lot of time and effort, and given a few generations of “transgressive culture” assholes and neo-nazis one less incarcerated icon to look up to.
Crazy, man. Crazy.
A song for the closing credits:
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(1) I was initially shocked to hear that Tarantino (and, more to the point, the studio marketing bods backing him up) had decided to tie-in the release of their new movie with the anniversary of – uh - *a mass murder*, but cooled down after reflecting on Jello Biafra’s memorable answer to a question re: whether a Dead Kennedys concert on the anniversary of JFK’s shooting was in good taste: “well, the assassination wasn’t very tasteful either”.
(2)It is interesting to note that, despite his racism, misogyny and relentless enthusiasm for heterosexual congress, Manson never seems to have espoused any homophobic sentiments, having spent much of his of early life exploring the “other side of the tracks” whilst incarcerated.
(3)Those wishing to journey further down the Brayton / Solar Lodge rabbit hole are advised to begin here.
(4)Trying to google up some info on the Satan’s Slaves who were active in California in the mid/late ‘60s turns up practically nothing, beyond the knowledge that dozens of other motorcycle clubs have used the same name over the years (most prominently in the U.K.), and a reference to a California-based gang bearing that name who were “patched over” by (ie, incorporated into) The Hell’s Angels in 1978.
(5)Adult film fans with a stronger stomach for research than myself may wish to take note of the following paragraph, from p. 126: “Around this time [January 1969] Charlie and the girls made a pornographic movie by the swimming pool at 2600 Nicholas Canyon Road in the hills above Malibu. The producer, according to Los Angeles homicide officers, was Marvin Miller.” Your safety filter-free search engine of choice awaits.
(6)It seems ironic in the extreme that De Grimston should have filed for defamation against Sanders in the same year that The Process Church’s official magazine proudly published an article dictated by Manson from his prison cell, but Jesus/God/Lucifer/Satan moves in mysterious ways I suppose.
(7)The timeframe of Sanders’ book, it should be noted, discounts the inclusion of the several rather more compelling “officially unsolved” murder cases which sprang up in parallel with the trial of Manson and his co-defendants during 1970, including the violent death of at least one woman who severed ties with the remnants of The Family, and the mysterious disappearance of a controversial and reportedly incompetent attorney who for a time was representing several of the Mansonites in court… until he reportedly went on a camping holiday and never returned, delaying the trial for several weeks as a result. But, this isn’t a True Crime blog, so I’ll shut up now, and let you investigate further, should you wish to.
(8)If you’ve somehow found your way out of the other internet wormholes I’ve dumped on you so far in this post, take a leap into this one for everything you need to know re: Manson and Esalen. My own takeaway is that, compared to a lot of these rumours, the kernel of this one actually seems pretty plausible.
I mean, it’s certainly not beyond the realm of possibility that Charlie may have called on the Institute, either to try to connive his way in as a guest lecturer/visiting guru, or to audition for someone involved in organising Esalen’s annual folk festival, and that he may have subsequently kept quiet about it to salve his ego after the Institute - known for its tight security and elitest attitude - presumably just told him to get lost. From there, is it too much of a stretch to suggest that, in the depths of his enraged, stoned/paranoid mind, he might have pegged the Esalen crowd as the same “type” he encountered when he scoped out 10050 Cielo Drive in search of Terry Melcher? And, a week later, Helter Skelter time? We will likely never know, but hey - it’s a theory. What’s that? Oh yeah, NOT A TRUE CRIME BLOG. Sorry.
Has the output of a commercial film studio ever matched the sheer level of NO RULES anarchy exhibited by Japan’s Toei studios during the early 1970s? Well, I can’t say for certain, and of course Toei were still producing plenty of relatively ‘normal’ genre pictures to sit alongside their more outré efforts through this period, but nonetheless - the more examples I see of the kind of high-octane, good taste-eviscerating madness that seemed to rule the roost at the studio during these years, the more I’m inclined to think that, for better or worse, there was *something* pretty unique going on behind the scenes.
God only knows what was transpiring on a management level at Toei during this period. If anyone has seen fit to discuss the matter in English, I’m unaware of their efforts, but we can at least speculate some, based on the knowledge that Toei had always been something of an enfant terrible amongst the Japanese film studios, having been established during the period of reconstruction that immediately followed WWII, and bank-rolled largely via the corporate/construction money that accompanied it.
Unashamed b-movie bruisers right from the outset, Toei were free of the sense of dignity and respectability that sometimes dragged down the older studios in the post-war marketplace, and from the mid-‘50s onwards, they locked into a relentless production schedule of action-focused samurai and crime films that allowed them to swiftly gain ground on their more venerable competitors, providing exhibitors with competitive deals on pre-packaged, audience-pleasing double bills that by the dawn of the ‘60s had secured them a position as one of the biggest players in the domestic film industry.(1)
With this kind of underdog, low-brow history, I guess it stands to reason that when cinema attendance began to fall sharply in the ‘70s, and with the remaining audience skewed heavily towards itinerant single men and those too poor to afford TV sets, company policy at Toei would naturally have been to try to push the sex and violence quota of their product several steps further than their competitors, whilst upping the pace of on-screen action as much as possible. And verily, this is exactly what they proceeded to do. AND THEN SOME, as anyone who has seen even the smallest fragment of their post-1968 output will testify.
Which is all well and good, but still, I think it only goes some way toward explaining the sheer madness that seems to characterise much of Toei’s output in this era. Could it be that the films in question were perhaps just the progeny of one or two rogue producers, giving their film-makers a “what the hell, go nuts” blank slate, just to help keep product rolling..? If so, I suppose it figures that when your roster of creatives includes deviants and innovators on the level of Shinyo Ito, Teruo Ishii, Kinji Fukasaku and Norifumi Suzuki - all buoyed up by the knowledge that at least some of their wilder outings turned out to be huge hits – sparks are inevitably going to fly. With this in mind, perhaps the writing was simply on the wall as the studio ploughed on toward the accumulation of what now seems like one of the world’s greatest stockpiles of totally crazed exploitation films.
Beyond all that though, Toei’s daily bread always came from straight-up yakuza films. In fact they pretty much dominated the genre from the ‘60s onwards, releasing vast quantities of formulaic product and setting the agenda for all of the genre’s periodic reinventions. Chris D.’s recently published ‘Gun & Sword: An Encyclopaedia of Japanese Gangster Films, 1955-1980’ (see footnote 1 and then BUY IT) lists details of over 300 Toei yakuza films, and in all likelihood they probably made many more. In fact they made so many of the damn things that the various other genres they dabbled in (pop culture-inclined ‘youth’ flicks and Sukeban/Pinky Violence of course, plus sexploitation, comedy, martial arts, horror, etc.) often seem like mere spin-offs from the endless grind of the yakuza machine.
But just as yakuza material tended to drift across almost by osmosis into other genres, so the pop art surrealism, weird sex and goofball humour seen in the studio’s more unglued productions also sometimes filtered back into the yakuza titles… or at least, I think that’s probably the best way for us to go about making sense of a movie like ‘Yakuza Cop: The Assassin’, whose none-more-generic yakuza title actually masks an all-over-the-map, genre-defying freakout, wantonly mixing elements of Bond-style action/adventure, screwball comedy, crime movie badassery and youth movie energy into a bewilderingly ridiculous, endlessly enjoyable brew that has little to do with any variation on the yakuza formula, but that surely does provide an exemplary demonstration of the kind of craziness Toei were capable of unleashing at the dawn of the ‘70s.
In the aforementioned ‘Gun & Sword’ (I did remind you to buy a copy, right?), Chris D. is actually pretty scathing about the ‘Yakuza Cop’ movies, describing the first entry in the series as “..an eminently forgettable timewaster”, and dismissing this one as being “Not so much directed as slapped together from what looks like nearly unsupervised footage”, concluding that it is “..fun in a very light-hearted, non-discriminating way. Don’t go in expecting high quality and you may be able to enjoy it.”(2)
To which I say: c’mon Chris, really..? I mean, I get where you’re coming from I suppose, and I know you’re primarily about the serious, well-made yakuza films and all that but - *MAY* be able to enjoy it? To be honest, I’d question the sanity of a ‘70s b-movie fan who failed to enjoy this one. I mean, I know from your write-ups on the sukeban films and so on that you’ve got a keen appreciation for mindless mayhem too, so could you really find so little to appreciate in this... this wondrous motion picture, this film in which…. well, I think the best way for us to proceed is with a brief synopsis, don’t you?
So: ‘Yakuza Cop: The Assassin’ opens with the sight of ubiquitous character player Ryôhei Uchida, greasy-haired and cackling in an immaculate white suit, kipper tie and jauntily angled hat, boarding a brightly painted bus belonging to a Hindu dance troupe at an airport carpark. Cutting open the skin of a bongo drum, he finds what he came for – a massive quantity of weed – and the requisite suitcase full of cash changes hands. But wait! Sirens! Apparently a small army of cops are on their way to intercept Uchida! What’s he gonna do?
Well it turns out that what he’s gonna do is run around in a panic for a few minutes, until he is unexpectedly rescued by Sonny Chiba, resplendent in a full-on black leather pimp suit and Meijo Kaji floppy vengeance hat, who screeches to a halt beside him in a bright red dune buggy! “Hop in,” says Chiba, and the requisite enka/funk-fuelled credits sequence plays out against the duo’s tyre-screeching escape from the fuzz, as they leave the cops literally eating their dust.(3)
And what can you possibly say to a movie that begins like that? Not much, beyond a happy combination of “I have no idea why this is happening” and “but please continue, it’s amazing!” that is engendered by only the very best action/exploitation films, and that continues to predominate through the majority of ‘Yakuza Cop’s run time.
When we re-join Chiba and Uchida, they’re busy doing what any of us would do having just staged a daring escape from police custody whilst in possession of a large quantity of illegal drugs: namely, goofing about on a street corner in the same flamboyant outfits they wore during the getaway, exchanging banter with an itinerant fortune-teller and preparing to cement their new friendship by heading to the nearest bar to get drunk. You see, it turns out the pair didn’t actually know each other prior to their escape. But if it occurs to Uchida to wonder exactly WHY Chiba came out of nowhere to stage such an unlikely rescue, well… quick ,move along there, viewer! You’re thinking too hard, when there’s random mayhem to be enjoyed!
Entering the film’s requisite subterranean psychedelic nightspot (‘Club Queen Bee’), complete with a Group Sounds outfit called The Scorpions wailing away on-stage, our heroes are immediately assailed by the sight of a Japanese woman being man-handled by a bunch of neckless, Gomer Pyle lookalike American GIs. Clearly this kind of crap won’t stand, and our guys are just about to go into action when the club’s bouncer intervenes ahead of them. A thoroughly gigantic individual, this turns out to be none other than legendary wrestler Giant Baba, making a brief but memorable cameo appearance.
“You son uva bitch!,” yells one of the Americans, charging forward with a red Gretsch guitar raised above his head(!), before Baba hurls him across the room with such force that he and his buddies are apparently thrown completely out of the movie. With national pride safely reasserted, Chiba and Uchida proceed to pal around with Giant Baba for a few seconds, proclaiming him “the strongest Japanese [they’ve] ever known” and dutifully doing the old ‘bone-crunching handshake’ routine, before he too exits the movie and our heroes move on to the club’s next room, a casino, where some serious yakuza business is going down.
As Uchida is busy introducing Chiba to his gang boss though, disaster strikes in the form of, uh… ninjas!? Well, sort of. Four masked assassins drop from the ceiling wielding pistols and open fire, allowing Chiba the chance to take a hit that conveniently saves the boss’s life, and also to unleash a few licks of the jaw-dropping karate that make him an international star a few years after this film. It’s all to no avail though, as the assailants disappear as quickly as they arrived. Where could they have gone..? Well let’s just say that The Scorpions are piling into their tour van a little bit quicker than might be expected…
And so things go on. If I’ve recounted these opening scenes in exacting detail, it’s simply to give you a feel of the head-spinning velocity that characterises these Toei films – the relentless piling up of incident upon incident, strung together with only the slightest thread of narrative glue, with speed-freak editing and crash zooms barely giving you a chance to catch your breath before the next batch of carnage unfolds. It’s insane, and I love it.
Actually, it’s just as well ‘Yakuza Cop’ takes this kind of non-stop, event-packed approach, because when we do finally get stuck into the central plot-line, it’s pretty dull stuff to be honest. Obviously Chiba is an undercover cop, and obviously he’s busy playing out another variation on the old Yojimbo / Fistful of Dollars formula, ingratiating himself with both sides in a gang conflict and turning them against each other until he’s the last man standing, with only the fraternal bond he develops with Uchida serving to twang his conscience a little along the way.
And so things might have played out if this were a standard Yakuza film, but thankfully director Noda and his collaborators seem keen to do everything in their power to distract us from this fairly hum-drum tale, diverting our attention toward all manner of largely irrelevant shenanigans at every opportunity.
Take for instance the almost surreal romantic interludes wherein Chiba and Uchida visit the latter’s sister, a dewy-eyed young thing who appears to be single-handedly running an orphanage for a generic crowd of happy, cheering children in an idyllic rural setting. (4) A hilariously over-extended sequence shows Chiba and the sister getting to know each other by riding horses through verdant meadows, with so much Vaseline on the lens we can barely see what’s going on. Meanwhile, they leave Uchida in charge of the kids, which scarcely seems a good idea. (One suspects that this whole sub-plot only exists so that Chiba can show off his riding skills and squeeze in his rousing rendition of a romantic ballad, but it’s all pretty funny regardless – weird ‘Sound of Music’ vibes with a ramshackle looking Alpine farmhouse in the background and everything.)
This all provides something of a contrast to the scene later in the movie where Chiba follows a lascivious bar girl / yakuza operative to a wild marijuana party, where we get to see Japan’s leading action hero ‘tripping out’ on the demon weed, complete with all the wild lighting, fish-eyed semi-nudity and fuzz guitar freakout jive you could hope for.
And, making up most of the time when that kinda stuff isn’t happening, we get a veritable avalanche of light-hearted action set pieces that seem peculiarly reminiscent (in tone, if not necessarily in quality of execution) of the kind of stuff Jackie Chan would go on to perfect a decade or two later.
Highlights here are plentiful, taking in blink-and-you’ll-miss it spoofs of everything from Golgo 13 to Thunderball to The Dirty Dozen, a guy who looks like Bunta Sugawara but isn’t putting in a winningly melodramatic turn as a crippled, drunken assassin, and – my personal favourite – frequent appearances by a lead goon who looks like he’s going all-out to win the Japanese Charles Bronson lookalike contest. (I thought this might have just been an accidental happenstance, until Chiba greets him with a line that the subtitles translate for us as “be punctual, you fake Charles Bronson!”)
Frankly, Chiba’s wardrobe alone was enough to keep me entertained through the moments of dull yakuza plotting that punctuate the film’s middle half hour (aside from his aforementioned Sasori outfit, the various-shades-of-green and swirl pattern tie ensemble he’s rocking just prior to the conclusion is astonishingly cool), but thankfully those moments are rare indeed.
I mean, I don’t think I’ve even told you yet about the bit where Chiba chases a crossbow-wielding assassin through an abandoned funfair, complete with randomly placed trampolines and a potentially lethal cups and saucers ride. Or the bit where he gets the ass burned off his trousers after careering around in a burning jeep. Or how about Uchida and his mute sidekick rampaging through a coastal yakuza hideaway in a leopard-skin painted military assault vehicle with a sack full of dynamite..? Man, I was cheering like a football fan at the cup final through that shit. I guess that would have just about done most movies for their action-packed finale, but ‘Yakuza Cop’ carries on to give us random backflipping female kung-fu assassins in black & gold ‘bumblebee’ style outfits, speed boats chases, helicopter stunts, smoke bombs… holy cow, do I ever love this movie.
Well, anyway - you get the idea. Presumably you’re already sold by this point, or have stopped reading. So let’s move on.
One thing that’s notable about ‘Yakuza Cop’ compared to most other Japanese genre films of this period is the complete lack of any nasty sleaze or sexploitation elements. Throughout, the film has an earnestly good-natured, upbeat feel to it to match Chiba’s mugging and Uchida’s slovenly grin. Hell, give or take the marijuana party and the occasional gangster massacre, the movie is practically family friendly – a nigh-on inexplicable occurrence within the context of Toei’s usual MO, but I for one don’t think that makes it any less enjoyable. (Indeed, it’s nice to have one of these kinda films that can be screened in mixed company without the need to issue a warning / apology in advance.)
Such an approach becomes even more surprising though given that we last encountered Yukio Noda on this blog via the singularly vicious Zero Woman: Red Handcuffs, a film that sits at completely the other end of Toei’s tonal spectrum. Insofar as I can tell, Noda remains a fairly undistinguished figure within Japanese b-film lore, a workaday type director with relatively few IMDB credits to his name,(5) but if we can draw any comparison at all between these two examples of his work beside their relentless mayhem, it’s probably an ability to identify the core essence of a film’s appeal (psychopathic abuse in the case of ‘Red Handcuffs’, zany humour in ‘The Assassin’) and to go about as far with it as he possibly can with it before the metaphorical engine splutters to a halt.
And whilst Noda isn’t exactly the smoothest of directors, I can’t help but think that Chris D.’s above-quoted dismissal of his work here as “near unsupervised footage” is a little harsh. Sure, it’s all pretty rough n’ ready, with scenes thrown together seemingly at random, and at least some material apparently shot on the fly with little in the way of finesse or preparation. But that, I think, is very much in keeping with the spirit of a film like this one, in which sheer velocity is valued above all things, and in which any undue application of care, forethought or, heaven forbid, rational thought is liable only to succeed in sabotaging the unstoppable forward momentum.
Plus, amid all the chaos, individual sequences here are often quite well handled, I think. Noda certainly never loses the audience’s attention, that’s for sure, and, in keeping with the majority of Toei product, the cinematography remains accomplished enough to make most low budget American filmmakers weep with envy. The numerous action scenes, though knowingly absurd, are often pretty great too, at times exhibiting some imaginative framing and editing, staggering levels of destruction and above-average stunt-work and fight choreography. (Chiba himself can presumably take responsibility for some of the latter - he was in the process of establishing his famed Japan Action Club at around this time, and many of ‘Yakuza Cop’s action scenes become blatant showcases for his acrobatic prowess… not that there’s anything wrong with that.)
Furthermore, Noda also seems here to be tapping into a vein of self-aware pop art surrealism that to some extent places ‘Yakuza Cop’ within the lineage established by Japanese cult cinema godhead Seijun Suzuki, as presumably filtered through the ‘70s-exploito lens of disciples like Yasuharu Hasebe and Toshiya Fujita. (The police briefing room scenes, where the cops have life-size cut-outs of the criminals they’re tracing propped up against the wall, seem a very Seijun-like touch, for example.)
In fact, at a push you could easily see ‘Yakuza Cop’ forming a perfect bridge between the brash spectacle of those latter-day Nikkatsu youth/action movies and the even more unhinged, comic book stylings of Noda’s more notorious Toei contemporary, Norifumi Suzuki - a man whose formidable Non-Shit Giving this film definitely seems to emulate, if in somewhat less explicit form.
We’ve already noted ’Yakuza Cop’s tendency to lurch momentarily into spoof territory, but I think the legacy of the anarchic post-modernism borne of the aforementioned influences can be seen most prominently in the deliberate ludicrousness of the film’s action scenes. A form of humour that I’ve actually noticed popping up in a wide variety of Japanese films - from Kazuhiko Hasegawa’s Leonard Schrader scripted ‘The Man Who Stole The Sun’ (1979) through to Takashi Miike’s ‘Deadly Outlaw: Rekka’ (2002) - this technique reaches its apex In ’Yakuza Cop’ during the finale, in which we see Chiba in close pursuit of a boat full of heavily-armed yakuza, first in a speed-boat, and subsequently dangling from a rope suspended from a helicopter. Throughout this, our hero appears to dodge the solid wall of machine gun fire aimed at him at near point blank range, only falling when a well-aimed pistol shot cuts through his rope!
Seeking to pre-empt the viewer’s automatic “that’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve seen in my life!” response to such poorly staged or implausible goings-on, the approach used here functions by throwing caution to the wind and simply making the events portrayed on-screen so outrageously stupid that, rather than calling foul, the viewer is instead inspired simply to laugh with the filmmakers in a spirit of happy disbelief - a playful wrong-footing of audience expectation that didn’t become common in Hollywood cinema until… when? Andy Sidaris movies? ‘True Lies’? I dunno.
In conclusion, I don’t want to pump up expectation for this movie too high – god knows, it’s certainly no masterpiece, and it’s certainly not going to change anyone’s life any time soon. But: it is a blast, and sometimes that’s exactly what you need – pure, mindless entertainment, presented with an idiot grin and an energy level akin to a runaway train. A perfect Saturday night party double bill filler, ready mixed to warm up the palette, ready for, say, ‘Stunt Rock’ or ‘Ninja III: The Domination’ or ’Lady Terminator’, or some other truly world class example of mind-boggling action movie nonsense… but with just a touch of cinematic elegance and sly intelligence slipped in there too for an added kick. Perfect.
(1)Prior to this, the convention in the Japanese film industry had been to mix A and B pictures from different studios, so Toei’s ability to provide BOTH halves of the bill at a bargain rate understandably put the rest of the industry into a bit of a spin. Thanks by the way to Chris D.’s utterly invaluable ‘Gun & Sword: An Encyclopaedia of Japanese Gangster Films, 1955-1980’ for all this Toei background.
(2)Pp. 373-374 in the book. There were four films made, of which this was the second. Or at least, I’m pretty sure it is -very similar titles, cast & crew credits and plot synopses of the first two films don’t help much with aiding identification, and discrepancies between the entries in ‘Gun & Sword’, the films’ pages on IMDB and the subtitled credits on the film itself muddy the waters further, but yeah, I’m pretty sure this is the second one, also known as ‘Yakuza Cop: Marijuana Gang’. The third and fourth films by the way were ‘Yakuza Cop: Poison Gas Terror’ and ‘Yakuza Cop: No Epitaphs For Us’ (both 1971), which I mention simply because they have cool names.
(3)I’m assuming it’s Chiba himself singing the theme song incidentally, as is standard practice for Japanese popular movies, and a right, throaty, gravelly job he makes of it too.
(4)I’m afraid I can’t match up the IMDB cast list well enough with character names stated in the film to really be sure who plays who in the supporting cast, so I thought I thought it best just to leave out acting credits from the majority of this review, rather than randomly guessing. So apologies to the woman who played the sister, and to Fake Charles Bronson for that matter.
(5)Noda went on to direct several other Chiba vehicles later in the ‘70s, and it’s strange to note that several of the cinematic in-jokes seen in ‘Yakuza Cop’ seem to act as odd ‘future echoes’ of moments in his subsequent career; the brief spoof of Golgo 13 prefigures his directorship of a live action version of that franchise in 1977, whilst the appearance of Japanese Charles Bronson seems to anticipate the utterly bizarre sounding US/Japanese kung fu flick ‘Bronson Lee’, which he helmed in 1975. Coincidence..? To avoid the distraction of further thought on the issue, I’m going to go with “yes”.
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