Plot: Four young friends get into the business of blackmail. They seem to be pretty good at it (though their tacts appear to be pretty crude) but compared to the real criminals they are just sort of playing at it. Pretty soon they get in over their heads and it all ends badly.

This film was fun and stylish (typical Fukasaku), with a nice sense of humor and great visuals – after all, this was swingin’ Tokyo in the late 60’s and the fashions and cars were fabulous. The actual quality of the film print could have been better, but compared to several other examples from this era, it could have been a lot worse too. Ditto for the color.

The plot was a typical one, in its outline: young criminals go up against the more corrupt gang bosses, and along the way people get killed; then it ends in tragedy. The protagonists of this film were never actually members of any organized gang (except their own little personal group), so in that way it wasn’t a typical yakuza story; but it nevertheless followed the traditional pattern fairly closely.

Why can’t one of these films ever end up pleasantly, with the heroes (who may or may not be criminals themselves) walking off into the sunset together, victorious and unmolested? But I guess that’s not the Japanese way. In certain respects the yakuza films were always, in their own bizarre fashion, morality tales; the villain of the piece was always the guy who forsook honor and broke the rules. The hero has generally been the guy who tried to bring things back in line with the ethics of his group, or of his own. That he always ended up dead, though with honor, was just part of the rotten bargain. To let him live would have been a cop-out.

Also, what is it with rape in Japan, anyway? In all of these films, the guy – even the otherwise virtuous protagonist – will force himself on the girl who rejects him, and somewhere in the process she falls in love with him. What the fuck? I mean, I know women are treated as second-class citizens in Japan even today, but do they have to go along with this? Rape is terribly common on in Japanese films (and apparently television also) – even occasionally showing up in comedies and children’s programming. Is it because women are considered chattel, owned by the men who claim them? Or because the society just sort of shrugs at the men who do this sort of thing? I don’t know, but it’s really disconcerting. It’s hard to cheer for the romance of two characters when you know it started with the man throwing the woman down on the floor and slapping her.

Anyway, Blackmail is My Life was fun, definitely a product of its era (not only within Japanese filmmaking but also within the worldwide culture shift of the late 1960’s) but also a nice diversion for an hour and a half today.