The Red Silk Gambler
    
Director: Teruo Ishii
Year: 1972
Rating: 7.0
When Junko Fuji (aka Sumiko Fuji) retired in 1972 and ended the Red Peony series, Toei quickly looked around for a replacement and produced this film with Teruo Ishii at the helm. While the Red Peony series was Hibotan Bakuto, this one is Hijirimen Bakuto, Tiger Lily. They hoped to make it into a series but apparently the box office put an end to that. Which is a shame because this is right up my alley. It is full of tough deadly women and vile men who need killing. From the opening scene, I was into this film and though there are too many sub-plots for its own good, it kept my attention throughout. Okatsu is Tiger Lily and played by Eiko Nakamura, who probably not coincidentally has more than a passing resemblance to Junko. In this is also Reiko Ike often unclad which signals that this is not your old Red Peony films but somewhere between those and the emerging Pinky Violence films.




There is a fair amount of nudity - one brutal gang rape scene - and yet when not being exploitive it feels like a traditional Ninkyo Eiga film (chivalrous) of obligations and friendships.  Perhaps audiences were not ready for this schizophrenic mix and admittedly the rape scene in particular was very off-putting. Tracing Teruo Ishii's career is similar to this film - during the 1960s he directed fairly conventional films - all those Abashiri Prison films - but by later in the decade he was making more exploitive films. It is a beautifully shot film with glorious colors and a few scenes that verge on art that send a chill of appreciation up your leg.




Set in the 1880s. Okatsu is a traditional woman. The daughter of a dead Yakuza Boss. She politely knocks on a door and enters. Bows and tells them she is here to kill their boss for the murder of her father. After the formalities, the killing begins. She kills everyone with her short whiplash sword - with the exception of the Boss's daughter Onaka who throws her body on her father and gets a cut across her back. Onaka is Reiko Ike and she swears revenge, the same as Okatsu for her dead father. Okatsu spends five years in prison and when released Onaka is waiting for her in the baths with a blade.



That isn't successful but she tracks Okatsu through the film looking for another opportunity. In her journey, Okatsu meets some other women - one who lends her money to gamble and then saves her with her pistol; Omon (Hiroko Fuji) who is a dice dealer who cheats for Okatsu and then duels with her. She is blind and quite magnificent. Later when she enters a room of bad guys and cuts the lights out with lightning flashing and begins to kill them is beautiful. Okatsu meets up with an old friend Onide (Sanae Tsuchida) who is having trouble with two vicious Yakuza gangs who traffic women and put on floor shows for an audience of women being raped. One of gangsters is Bunta Sugawara who is a freelance killer who falls for Okatsu. In the end like so many of these films, the music swells, Okatsu picks up her sword, opens her umbrella in the rain and begins the long walk for retribution. Eiko Nakamura is terrific in this - unfortunately she only went on to make a handful of films before retiring.