The Street Fighter

The Street Fighter (1974)
Japanese Title: 激突！殺人拳
Translation: Clash! Killer Fist

 

Starring: Shin’ichi “Sonny” Chiba, Yutaka Nakajima, Chiyoko Kazama, Etsuko Shihomi, Goichi Yamada, Nobuo Kawai, Masashi Ishibashi, Akira Shioji, Chico Lourant, Tony Cetera, Osman Yusuf
Director: Shigehiro Ozawa
Action Directors: Masafumi Suzuki, Ryûzô Ueno, Tsutomu Harada, Reggy Jones, Ken Kazama

 

While The Street Fighter doesn’t represent the first karate movie—Sonny Chiba had gotten into the game a year earlier with the Bodyguard Kiba films—it is certainly the most popular of the genre that took Japanese theaters by storm in the mid 70s. A little bit of background can be found from a Finnish viewer’s account[1] of the movie:

 

“Two important factors should be considered when we discuss the film: timing and talent. Although Chiba had been making action movies since the early 1960s, including a couple of full-fledged martial arts films, Japanese karate films had never really taken off. For years Chiba had to deal with producers and directors who had little to no interest in the fighting aspect. Matters were made even worse by tight filming schedules. Things finally begun to change when Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon was released in Japanese theatres in December 1973 and proved a major hit (it was the first Lee film to arrive Japan; others followed in 1974-1975). All of a sudden there was a genuine demand for martial arts films.

“The story behind The Street Fighter goes a bit further back than that, though. The production was launched earlier in 1973 after Toei screenwriter Koji Takada had seen a number of kung fu films in Hong Kong (probably during the production of Tokyo-Seoul-Bangkok Drug Triangle) and managed to convince Toei executives that they should produce something similar with Japanese karate. Takada had Toei producers attend an advance screening of Enter the Dragon, which did the trick. Chiba was selected as the star: not surprising considering not only his status as the leading Japanese action star / stunt choreographer, but also his expertise in martial arts.

“At first Toei intended the film to be an international co-production, but the Hong Kong studio it was offered to, Golden Harvest, did not take the bait. Perhaps Toei's understanding of a movie with an international appeal -that is, Chiba killing gangsters from various foreign countries - was not to their liking. This does, however, explain why parts of the film take place in Hong Kong and many of the characters are Chinese (although portrayed by Japanese actors). The budget was cut from the original, but the film went to production and Chiba spent his Christmas holidays filming the movie. The Street Fighter hit the theatres in February 1974, six week after Enter the Dragon.

“The Street Fighter was also a movie that could not have been born much earlier - or at least not turn out the way it did - as the necessary action talent had just been discovered a few months earlier. Chiba’s earlier action films had often suffered from the lack of co-stars with martial arts experience who could make good opponents for Chiba. Most of Toei’s action film stars were yakuza film actors who looked good with a gun or sword, but made poor karate fighters. This finally changed when Chiba discovered Masashi Ishibashi, who was cast as a villain in Chiba’s previous movie Bodyguard Kiba 2 (1973). Ishibashi was a real life karate master and Chiba’s senior, who had been acting in movies for a good while already but hadn’t done much on-screen action before. With Ishibashi on board Chiba had finally found an actor who could keep up with the choreographies even when films had to be completed at lighting pace.”

  

While it lasted, however, the Japanese karate movies proved to be just as trashy, if not more so, as your sleaziest Hong Kong fare and just as violent as your average Chang Cheh cinematic massacre. The Street Fighter stands out in that its American release was saddled with an ‘X’ rating, the first one given to a film solely on account of its violent content[2]. In this case, two particular scenes stick out: one in which our protagonist castrates a would-be rapist with his bare hands; and a second scene in he rips out his opponent’s throat, leaving it on display for several seconds.

The story follows the exploits of badass-for-hire Terry Tsurugi (Sonny Chiba), who does all sorts of amoral things as long as there is a buck to be made. In the opening scene, he saves a man from the noose—yes, Japan does execute some violent criminals via hanging—by dressing up as a Shinto priest, visiting his cell, and striking him in a way that closes off his air passages after a few minutes. The man, Tateki Shikenbaru (Bodyguard Kiba 2’s Masashi Ishibashi), faints on his way to the gallows. Rather than leave the man to suffocate to death, which would have happened anyway, they rush him to the hospital as Japanese penal law dictates. Terry and his assistant, Ratface (Goichi Yamada), ambush the ambulance and take the body away, sending Shikenbaru to Hong Kong.

Later on, Shikenbaru’s younger siblings (Sonny’s younger brother Jiro and a pre-fame Etsuko Shihomi) show up at Chiba’s pad to inquire about their brother. He assures them that Tateki is fine and asks for the rest of his asking price. When they tell him that they don’t have the money, he gets mad and fight breaks out. The brother mistimes a jump kick and flies out the window, falling to his death. Terry then takes the girl and sells her into prostitution, with the money he gets paying off the rest of the debt. Ladies and gentlemen, our hero! Terry’s racketeering contact then invites him to dinner to discuss a new job: kidnapping the heiress (The Killing Machine’s Yutaka Nakajima) to a billion-dollar oil empire. When Tsurugi insists on upping the price, the female Triad involved in the deal, Yan Gei-Chuen (Chiyoko Kazama of Girl Boss Blues: Queen Bee Challenge), has her men try to kill Tsurugi. They fail. Miserably. Now Tsurugi is pissed off with the Mafia/Yakuza/Triads, so he throws in his chips with Sarai, the heiress, and becomes her bodyguard.

The Street Fighter is definitely the sort of movie that could not be made today. Sonny Chiba’s Terry Tsurugi is the textbook definition of antihero: an amoral asshole who does the right thing only because he hates the villains and wants to flip them the birdie while he’s at it. This is the sort of movie that will make us root for the man who sold an relatively innocent girl (she did pay a man to spring her brother out of prison) into prostitution because she could not pay her debts. This is a movie in which the “hero” sells his services to the female protagonist after trying to force himself on her for no reason other than to show her that her current bodyguards are worthless. Western audiences in the post #MeToo world would completely reject a film whose hero is guilty of not only committing sexual assault, but of condoning it, too.

Moral issues aside, the film is a hoot to watch, mainly because of Sonny Chiba’s patently bizarre overacting and the fight scenes, both of which frequently overlap. Even when he is not making weird-sounding kiai’s, or battle calls, in his fights, Chiba chews the scenery with his over-the-top eye-bulging, face-sucking expressions whenever he gets into a fighting pose. Chiba, who was trained in Kyokushin Karate by the founder himself, Masutatsu Oyama, is a paragon of martial confidence. It is that confidence that makes him so compelling to watch in action. You want to laugh at the man whenever he grimaces before a fight, but then he cracks a man’s skull in X-ray vision and you want to cheer the dude on. Few fighters demonstrate so much charisma while literally busting heads opens.

The Street Fighter featured no fewer than five credited action directors, plus Sonny Chiba and Masashi Ishibashi. Masafumi Suzuki is mainly known for his work on The Street Fighter series. Ryûzô Ueno had done action direction on the Red Peony Gambler series prior to this, one of his last films. Tsutomu “Riki” Harada is best known for playing the Kendo master in Lau Kar-Leung’s classic Heroes of the East[3], and is credited alongside Reggy Jones as being the film’s “Wrestling director.” Finally, Ken Kazama is the film’s “Kick Boxing Director” and had worked in Hong Kong on When Tae Kwon Do Strikes a year earlier.

The choreography style in The Street Fighter falls somewhere in between what Sammo Hung was doing with Angela Mao at the same time in films like The Tournament and Hap Ki Do, and what Sammo would do a decade later in his modern action movies. Sonny’s kicks are not immaculately executed feats of human acrobatics, but they are not the wobbly, height-challenged displays of imbalance that marred so many early 70s films in Hong Kong. His punches, true to Kyokushin philosophy, are powerful and direct. He punches people with the intent to kill, or at least take the fight out of his opponents as quickly as possible. Most of the fights feature multiple opponents, although he does get in a few good one-on-one’s. Near the end, Tsurugi faces off with a blind Chinese assassin who wields a mean cane sword (an obvious nod to the Zatoichi films, which had been popular with audiences for more than a decade). The finale has Chiba dispatching several dozen men aboard a ship before engaging with Tateki Shikenbaru, who is none too happy to discover that Tsurugi turned his sister into a heroin-addicted whore. The film ends in the most violent manner possible, making similar scenes in Roadhouse and Blade looks like children’s films in comparison. And that is about as fitting an ending as it can have.

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[1] - <https://www.36styles.com/kungfufandom/index.php?/topic/21640-sonny-chiba-mega-review-thread/&do=findComment&comment=264839>

[2] - Movies like The Wild Bunch (1969) and I Drink Your Blood (1970) were threatened with X ratings for extreme violence. Their directors, Sam Peckinpah and David Durston, respectively, ended up cutting some of the content out to appease the censors and get an “R” rating.

[3] - Look for Sumi Tetsu, the karate máster from Heroes of the East, in a small role as one of Sarai’s bodyguards.