Violent Cop as a title stands emblematic of the far simpler film that could have been. It’s a title straight out of the rural garage bargain bin, the title of a film even Danny from Hot Fuzz would scoff at. It’s the film the original script pointed toward, the one you imagine the execs at Shochiku would have infinitely preferred got made. Instead, the making of the film was chaos at every stage, but from the situational maelstrom of its birth was produced a genuinely eccentric genre classic, and the first glimpse of one of the defining filmmakers of the era.
With filming initially earmarked for 1987, all plans were put on hold when the film’s lead, Takeshi Kitano, found himself in court. The story goes that scabrous tabloid Friday had accused Kitano of having an affair with a 20-year old student, and Kitano, so incensed by this, set about doing something about it. That something was leading a 10-man drunken attack on the offices of Kodansha, the magazine’s publishers. The extent of the attack is pretty vague in the widely available reports, but it’s been suggested that both umbrellas and fire extinguishers were the weapons used, so one gets the sense we’re talking more hijinks than putsch. Either way, the resulting court case and suspended sentence forced Kitano out of the public eye for a period, and delayed production for months.
That said, out of the public eye would have been a difficult place to find for Takeshi Kitano in 1987. Initially making his name as part of comedic-duo Two Beat before going solo, “Beat” Takeshi was well-established as one of Japan’s biggest TV stars. By all accounts, he was something of a controversy magnet for his caustic black comedy, which I’m going to have to take people’s word for; everyone knows comedy neither ages nor translates well, but what I’ve seen of it is all very Little and Large, and it wasn’t until Kitano caught on to the endless comedic possibilities of violence that he found his true voice. However, his supporting role in Nagisa Ōshima’s Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence had enticed him toward more dramatic fare, and with the chance to work on a hardboiled noir with one of the genre’s great directors on the table, he signed up to Violent Cop.
The film was originally intended to be directed by Kinji Fukasaku, known most widely now for directing Battle Royale, but in the late ’80s a man in a curious position. He’d made his name as one of the key figures in the ushering in of the jitsuroku eiga era of Yakuza film in the early ’70s, bringing a nihilistic, vérité edge through his Battles Without Honour and Humanity films that revolutionized the genre. However, by the late ’80s he was in a precarious spot, the decade containing both his Japanese Academy Best Film Winner Free Man and the studio-ruining megaflop Virus.
Ironically enough for someone with his torrential output, it was wanting more time for the film that cost him his job on Violent Cop, demanding two months of straight shooting. Kitano, who had commitments to seven (seven!) weekly shows, said they would have to work around him. Not to be undermined, Fukasaku walked. Kitano in turn, who had only signed up to work with Fukasaku, also threatened to leave the film. When the studio instead offered Kitano the chance to direct the film, it was their last throw of the dice, their hope being that maybe if they could stick “The Directorial Debut of Beat Takeshi” on the poster, then perhaps they might drag some audiences to see what they assumed would be an unmitigated disaster. Kitano largely agreed to direct just to get the job done, a circumstance that did not exactly bode well for the film itself. But — a disastrous first day aside — Kitano hit upon a shooting style that worked for him; rewrite the script as you see fit, improvise blocking and camera movement, and only ever do one or two takes. It’s a style he still uses to this day.
As you’d imagine with such extensive rewrites, the film’s eventual plot bears little relation to the original script. The violent cop in question is Azuma, and he is just that: a Harry Callahan figure whose bosses overlook his constant indiscretions due to his ability to get results. When he’s not battering suspects, he’s gambling, or being a doting carer for his intellectually disabled sister Akari. When he and his new partner stumble upon a drug deal in a club bathroom, it opens up a world of police corruption and yakuza violence that threatens to bring Azuma’s precarious existence crashing down. It’s straightforward fare on paper, and the plot is largely unremarkable, and downright awful in the case of a nonsensical addiction plot line for Akari, but what elevates Violent Cop is Kitano’s burgeoning style, both as a director and as a dramatic actor.
Azuma as a character as conceived is nothing special, essentially a conglomeration of clichés, but it’s Kitano’s performance that makes him so captivating in execution. The persona that would become a mainstay throughout his films is already firmly in place here, simultaneously stone-faced and inscrutable while bringing a sly, giddy chaos to all around him. There’s an indefinable ability to be unflappably cool while also looking totally out of place at all times, like a wonkily applied fridge magnet on reality.
The Dirty Harry comparison shines an interesting light on this. Where Siegel’s film fawns over it’s authoritarian vigilante powering through the protests of the pinkos and liberals who don’t understand that — in the film’s view — violence is the only answer to the world’s spiraling ills. Kitano, on the other hand, is too nihilistic for that, amused by the simultaneously ambivalent and ineffectual nature of the superiors whose only way of reprimanding Azuma is to constantly make him write apologies. There is no tacit endorsement from the film, his violence ultimately solves nothing, and what heroism he does rise to is circumstantial. In other words, it makes total sense that the persona would so easily switch from a cop to a yakuza in Kitano’s forthcoming films.
The subversion of genre norms that would become essential to Kitano’s later work is already present too, if in less polished, defined fashion. Kitano proves to already be entranced by stillness in Violent Cop, the film’s frequent violence never receiving anything like an energized action sequence, instead being rendered with a muted resignation. The closest the film has to any such high energy is a 10-minute long chase sequence that plays out in stillness, over the kind of smooth jazz that would be more at home in Emmanuelle. But it’s this ever-present coldness that stops the film from veering into parody; funny things may happen, but it never counters the sense that it’s happening in a world of hopeless moral decay.
By 1990’s Boiling Point, Kitano had fully taken the reins, and that film is his first real masterpiece — the first of many. But Violent Cop bears out something else: the energy of one of the greats finding themselves, a moment of transformation and transition that sowed the seeds for one of cinema’s great living genre filmmakers.
Part of Kicking the Canon — The Film Canon.
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