Like courtroom dramas and police procedurals, prison stories have the convenience of ready-made conflict. Prisoners versus guards. Gangs versus gangs. Everyone is there for a reason, either because of their terrible actions or the inequities of society. The removal of freedom, both for the characters and the filmmakers, concentrates the possibilities of stories.
Buy Prison Walls: Abashiri Prison I-III Blu-rayPrison Walls: Abashiri Prison I-III collects the first three films in a long-running Japanese prison-story series that catapulted lead actor Ken Takakura into stardom. Takakura is probably best known in the West for his part in Ridley Scott’s Black Rain, starring alongside Michael Douglas. In Japan, he’s tied with the great Koji Yakusho for being awarded the most Japanese Academy awards for Best Actor.
In these films, he plays Shinichi Tachibana. He’s a prisoner, serving three years in Abashiri Prison. That’s a prison in the far north of Japan. As the title song, sung by Takakura and prominently featured in all the films, says, “this place is nowhere.”
And in the first film, filmed in the winter, it is a kind of frozen hell. Shinichi is in a cell with a diverse group of criminals: an unrepentant rapist, some thieves, a man who says he is the accomplice of a notorious murderer, and Shinichi. He doesn’t elaborate about his crimes, but we get flashbacks of his tragic past. His widowed mother marries a nasty drunk, who’s mean to Shinichi and his sister. When he’s grown, Shinichi can’t take it anymore, and after attacking the man takes off on his own. He plans to make money to take care of his sister and mother. Unfortunately, he ends up falling in with the yakuza. After a vicious assault on a rival boss, he ends up in prison.
There he finds that a harsh hierarchy exists. Shinichi finds himself at odds with his fellow criminals. When he later tries to ingratiate himself, he finds he’s risking his parole. That’s not a big deal, until he finds out that his mother is dying of cancer. He needs to get out as soon as possible to see her.
After several convoluted plot contrivances, Shinichi ends up on the run, chained to Gonda, that evil rapist. He escaped and forced Shinichi to come with him. Gonda is an evil man, not a reformed character like Shinichi, but they have to work together or die out in the frozen north.
In truth, director and screenwriter Teruo Ishii balked at adapting the novel the film is nominally based on, finding it a lurid melodrama. He wanted to remake the Hollywood classic The Defiant Ones, which had Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier chained together in a prison escape. So, he essentially does that in the second half of this first film.
It was wildly popular, and Toei wanted more. Ishii didn’t want to do more prison movies, but the studio essentially told him, if he includes Takakura and the title song in the movie, he could do whatever he wanted.
So, he did. The second film, Another Abashiri Prison Story, doesn’t spend a single second inside the prison. Shinichi is going home with a sidekick friend who did not appear in the original film. He gets wrapped up in a jewel heist, falls in love with a pickpocket, and is nearly murdered by a Turkish steam bath.
The second film is less of a story and more of a series of very strange scenes that director Ishii wanted to string together into a film. Some of them are great fun. I particularly liked the scene of a stripper selling off various pieces of her clothing for collateral so she could keep gambling. And there’s a scene at the end in the middle of a Japanese fire festival where nothing makes any sense, but all the characters must dance through it anyway.
The third film, Abashiri Prison: Saga of Homesickness, is the most cohesive drama in this collection. Shinichi comes home to his yakuza gang after spending his time in prison (the second film completely ignored) and finds them in shambles. The old boss (played by an actor who was a completely different character in the last two films) is infirm. His son, married to Shinichi’s sweetheart, is in hospital after an attack. And they’re trying to go legit, so fighting is forbidden. That means a rival gang is running roughshod over them.
It’s up to Shinichi to turn them around. And he does so, with tough-guy stoicism. This is Takakura’s best performance in this set, even though his character seems completely different from the convict in the first film. The third film has as many disparate elements as the second, but they meld together cohesively.
The oddest, and oddly most touching element, is Shinichi’s attachment to a street urchin, Emi. She’s a half-Black Japanese, abandoned by her mother. She’s supposed to live at an orphanage but routinely escapes to hang out on the streets. Shinichi takes her on as a kind of sister, and tracks down the mother to berate her, only to learn the story is more complicated than he thought. It’s part of what makes the third film the most emotionally dimensional and satisfying of the three films.
All three films have been brought to Blu-ray with newly restored masters. It looks like the second had the roughest surviving materials, because it’s the worst looking of these three. I think the first film looks the best, with its absolutely gorgeous black and white photography in the frozen wasteland of northern Japan in winter. The other two films are in color, and the third is the most stylishly directed of the three.
The Abashiri Prison series ended up being enormous. Ultimately, there were 18 films made in the series, 10 of which were directed by Ishii. He was an oddball cult filmmaker, perhaps more at home with The Horrors of Malformed Men than a mainstream success like this.
Prison Walls collects what are essentially three yakuza dramas, each with wildly different tones and effects. The first is a gritty prison drama. The second is… a bizarre heist movie that is entertaining but rarely feels connected to the world. The third is maybe a more traditional yakuza story, but it’s multi-layered and gives depth to Shinichi’s character. And all of them are cool, and fun. If you love ’60s Japanese cinema even a little, there’s a lot to be gleaned from these oddball, oddly successful films.
Prison Walls: Abashiri Prison I-III has been released on Blu-ray by Eureka. It’s part of the Masters of Cinema series, which has only recently been releasing films in the U.S. They were previously primarily (to my knowledge) a U.K. concern, comparable to the Criterion Collection overseas, so it’s exciting that they’re bringing their releases Stateside. The three films are spread on two discs. Each film has an audio commentary, respectively by Tom Mes, Chris Poggiali, and Mike Leeder and Arne Venema. Video extras include “Break Out: Jasper Sharp and Mark Shilling discuss Abashiri Prison” (30 min); and “Interview with Tony Rayns” (31 min); and theatrical trailers with each film.
