Battles Without Honor and Humanity

Movie
Audience Score
74
Battles Without Honor and HumanityApple iTunes logoWatch on Apple iTunes
NR 1 hr 39 minCrime, DramaThe Yakuza Papers Collection PosterPart of The Yakuza Papers Collection
In the teeming black markets of postwar Japan, Shozo Hirono and his buddies find themselves in a new war between factious and ambitious yakuza.
StarringBunta SugawaraHiroki MatsukataKunie Tanaka
DirectorKinji Fukasaku
WriterKazuo Kasahara

Movie Details

Movie Budget:$150,000
Original Language:Japanese
Production Companies:Toei Company
Movie Tags:
yakuzabetrayalhiroshima, japanhiroshimajitsuroku

The Yakuza Papers Collection

While The Godfather romanticized the American Mafia in the early 1970s, Kinji Fukasaku's five-film series known as The Yakuza Papers: Battles Without Honor & Humanity revolutionized the Japanese yakuza film with unprecedented intensity. A post-World War II epic that broke Japanese box-office records, this complex, utterly authentic cycle of gangster films replaced the popular ninkyo or "chivalry" films of the '60s with jitsuroku, an entirely new breed of gangster film that rose from the ashes of Hiroshima and post-war reconstruction, depicting a meticulously detailed "alternate history" that had been ignored by the "official" factual record.