Street Fighter, The (1974)

aka Gekitotsu! Satsujin Ken

Directed by Shigehiro Ozawa
Written by Koji Takada and Steve Autrey
Starring
- Sonny Chiba
- Waichi Yamada
- Yutaka Nakajima
- Masashi Ishibashi

Of the seven hundred thirty-eight known “hand-picked successors to Bruce Lee” (and I’ve never figured out what that means anyway — isn’t he supposed to reincarnate instead? Or am I thinking of the Dalai Lama?), Sonny Chiba was unique to my knowledge, in that he was Japanese. Which kind of made the entire claim more ridiculous than it already was; if Bruce’s successor didn’t even need to be of the same ethnicity or a devotee of the same cultural traditions of martial arts, in what sense was he a successor? (I know, I know — those labels were fabricated by distributors who assumed that American audiences wouldn’t recognize any difference between Chinese and Japanese anyway. Chuck Norris shoulda seen something good back in the ’70s and dubbed himself “the only American successor to Bruce Lee!”)

Anyway. Sonny Chiba. Japanese. Badass. Shall we begin?

How karate masters flip the bird.

Chiba plays, according to the American credits, “Terry Surugy,” which in itself is pretty funny. The name’s “Tsurugi,” folks. Were the credits simply shouted across the room to the guy doing the titles? We first meet Terry disguised as a Buddhist priest as he comes to the cell of condemned convict Junjou (Masashi Ishibashi); we don’t know what he did, only that he’s “a mean bastard from Okinawa,” which seems pretty good grounds for execution right there. Since both of them are karate masters, they immediately engage in the Marvel Meeting Rule, which means they need to fight a while until Terry finally reveals they’re on the same side. More than that, Terry gives Junjou a special punch that slowly deprives his body of oxygen.

Why? Because Junjou’s on his way to his execution, and thanks to Terry’s punch, he collapses mere inches from the noose intended for his neck. Because Japanese laws are fully as stupid as American ones, they immediately cart Junjou off in an ambulance (guys, repeat after me: YOU WERE TRYING TO KILL HIM ANYWAY). On route, Terry’s sidekick Ratnose (Waichi Yamada) innocuously gets in the ambulance, then beats the two cops senseless. It’s a jailbreak!

See, Terry’s a mercenary, a badass for hire, and Ratnose is… Um… Some guy he keeps around for his cooking, apparently. In any case, they immediately ship Junjou out of the country to Hong Kong, then wait while Junjou’s brother and sister, who hired him to spring Junjou in the first place. Unfortunately, Bro and Sis don’t have the rest of the money they were supposed to pay upon completion, and since Junjou isn’t around, they can’t be sure he was rescued safely anyway. Terry reacts as anyone would: He beats them both up, tosses the brother out the window to his death, and sells the sister into foreign prostitution.

Terry’s mom once called him a basketcase. Once.

All right, maybe not anyone.

His connection for the slavery sale is Mr. Mataguchi (Fumio Watanabe), who also wants to hire him for a job. See, an oil magnate, Mr. Hamad, recently died under mysterious circumstances, and his half-Japanese daughter Sarai (Yutaka Nakajima) will inherit the entire kaboodle. Mataguchi’s employers, a Hong Kong branch of the Japanese Yakuza (does that make any sense? or was it invented by the same person who decided Terry’s name should be “Surugy”?), want her kidnapped so they can coerce her into signing away her claim in the company. Terry’s got this thing about Chinese people, though; he doesn’t trust them. So he declines to take the job.

Unfortunately, it’s one of those “accept the position or die die die” offers, so a half-dozen Hong Kong goons storm his apartment. Unfortunately, since this is one of those movies, nary a one of them brings a firearm, and only one even thought to carry a knife, which he consistently doesn’t use to his advantage. Terry, of course, wipes the floor with him, because in addition to his brutal fighting skills, he has another advantage: Funny Face Fu. All through the fight scenes, Sonny Chiba snarls, snorts, leers, hisses, grimaces, and generally does his best to make Bruce Lee look like Steven Seagal. (Maybe that’s how they choose a successor…) He’s so impressive, there are moments where he just stands there flexing and growling, and nobody dares attack him, not even from the back. (‘Course, he’s shirtless and just finished a sweaty workout, so maybe he’s got the added defense of body funk.)

“Ready or not… here I come!”

By the way, the lunacy of these thugs going without firearms is highlighted when the sole survivor makes his way back to the Yakuza’s evil “Fire Dragon” Lady, who promptly shoots him for his failure. See, lady, if you’d given one of those bozos a gun, they wouldn’t be reporting failure!

Terry’s pretty pissed that the Yakuza has violated the unspoken rules of the profession by not allowing him to refuse the contract, so he goes out for the other side. Sarai’s Japanese uncle is Masaoka (Masafumi Suzuki), sensei of a famous karate school, so Terry enters the dojo and starts wiping the floors with the students to prove he’s got the wherewithal to protect Sarai better than any of these jammie-wearing badasses-in-training. Masaoka himself is a round little man, and it’s painfully obvious when he starts trading karate chops with Terry that they’ve carefully tried to choreograph around Masaoka’s relative immobility. Nevertheless, he and Terry fight to a standstill, and since Masaoka also knew Terry’s father (who was shot by the Chinese in Hong Kong as a spy, which explains one of the chips on Terry’s shoulder), he gives him the job.

“This — is for YOU!”

But wait — the Hong Kong Yakuza is regrouping, and who is among their fold? Why, the escaped’n'exiled Junjou. and when Junjou finds that his enslaved sister has been shipped to the very same bar/brothel where he’s been hanging out (boy, what are the odds?)… well, there’s a little score to be settled.

As you may have noticed, Terry’s not the most sympathetic protagonist, and he stays that way. He likes to fight, he likes to hurt when he fights, and he sees nothing wrong with selling a debtor into sexual slavery. And it’s not like he reforms and becomes a better man by the end; he switches sides only because of the slight against the unspoken code of badasses for hire. In this sense, he’s very much a character transplanted from the Yakuza gangster films of the ’60s and ’70s, wherein the only possible redeeming trait of the designated protagonist is his adherence to a sense of contractual honor (and whose betrayal is usually usually the cause of the revenge that he spends the whole movie taking). He’s an unrepentant anti-hero from start to finish.

“I swear, if you don’t shave that stupid little soul patch…”

But nobody watches The Street Fighter for the morality of it; they watching it for the asskicking. If Enter the Dragon seemed groundbreakingly violent to audiences in 1974, viewers the next year would have found The Street Fighter positively gory. Blood flows and spurts with reckless abandon; Terry breaks arms, splinters skulls, gouges eyeballs, knocks out teeth, and rips out body parts whenever the occasion arises (including a windpipe and, naturally, a complete male reproductive system. OOOOOUCH!). Yes, it’s so over-the-top that it’s downright comical; at one point, the screen switches to an ersatz X-ray view so we can see the (rubber) skull of an opponent deform under Terry’s mighty fist. No wonder it was originally rated X on these shores. (No, that doesn’t stand for “X-ray.”)

Enter the Dragon, with its big budget and all, may have had pretensions to artiness, introducing the West to the magic of kung fu cinema. The Street Fighter, on the other hand, seems dedicated to showing the West how martial arts coould be used as exploitation fodder. Given the tenor of most of the martial arts flicks you find on the rental shelves, I’ll let you figure out who really had a greater influence on future cinema.