For all my viewing of foreign cinema, I don't think I'd ever seen a yakuza film before. The name of the subgenre didn't ring a bell, nor did any of the examples I found listed, except one that I know I hadn't seen: The Punisher (1989). As far as I can tell, they're just gangster flicks in Japan.
This one starts with the dissolution of a yakuza gang as honcho Kurata would rather do legitimate business. The focal character, former member Tetsu, soon gets a tough choice from former rival Otsuka: join or die. Kurata talks Tetsu into a third option: become a drifter. But for reasons that escape my memory, Kurata decides that Tetsu is too dangerous to let live, so now Tetsu has two de facto gangs after him....
As you may have surmised, the plot is not the main draw here. I came to perceive that it was the action, which gets pretty stylized and intense for the time. I wouldn't be surprised if many other films, even international ones, took some cues for their action scenes from TD.
More broadly, there's the overall visual style. I'm not sure how to describe it, but it's a signature of director Seijun Suzuki. Producers worried he'd make it too weird and confusing, so they cut his budget. This backfired: While it doesn't look too cheap, it does limit the shots and thus the ease of understanding what exactly happens.
Indeed, the more I think about it, the more surreal the movie is. Plotwise, this is most obvious in Tetsu leading what his enemies call a charmed life; he seems way too lucky for a man frequently in the line of fire. There's also an extended, over-the-top bar brawl in mockery of westerns. Up until that point, I saw it as more faux noir, starting with a stark B&W opening scene. Suzuki did claim inspiration from a wide variety of genres, not least musicals (Tetsu sings to himself and takes interest in a female lounge singer).
It's no Godfather spiritual successor after all, but you may get a kick out of Tetsu's adventure. I only wish I knew Japanese so I could appreciate the dialog in full.
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