With this film, his breakthrough movie in Japan, director Kinji Fukasaku slew the myth of criminal respectability, depicting the yakuza underworld as a snake pit of treachery and deceit.

Shozo Hirono (Fukasaku main man Sagawara) is a demobbed soldier surviving on his wits in the bombed out ruins of Hiroshima. Sentenced to twenty years inside for killing a yakuza boss, he gains early release by helping a mid-level criminal in a parole securing suicide attempt. Once out Hirono becomes accepted into the Yamamori gang, but when a feud ignites with the Doi organization, Hirono begins to question his loyalties. As the war rages, within the Yamamori group may be where the real danger lies.

An antidote to the rose-tinted yakuza films of the 1960s, Fukasaku's jitsuroku rosen (greater realism) yakuza films depicted these men as inherently venal and murderous. In 'Battles Without Honour and Humanity' bosses promise their soldiers the world yet bleed them dry, and tit-for-tat killings punctuate the story in a battle caused by fuzzy motivation and ending (in the first film at least) in an uneasy truce.

With a lavishly mounted period setting, multiple characters, location filming and enough firepower to re-fight World War 2 Fukasaku's movie is certainly explosive, with points to make about post-war Japan being an ideal breeding ground for a criminal underworld to flourish, and tellingly splashing the film's title across Hiroshima's mushroom cloud. Elsewhere, the US military's purchasing of black market arms to aid the Korean war effort enables the Yamamori group to expand into all areas of society and influence governmental procedure.

Stylistically Fukasaku is indebted to The Godfather, offset by Spaghetti Western-style bloodletting including some outrageous dismemberments, and "signing" each murder with a trumpet theme borrowed from Ennio Morricone's score for 'The Sicilian Clan'.

What prevents Battles Without Honour and Humanity from being a true masterpiece is its confused, muddled plot. The basic story is simple enough, but Fukasaku cannot keep up with the multiple characters blazing through his film, creating long stretches where the audience literally loses the plot. Fukasaku's trademark onscreen titles and documentary style narration fail to keep the story coherent here, and the film becomes a selection of astounding, yet barely held-together set pieces.

The runaway success of this film in Japan led onto four sequels Fukasaku breathlessly produced in two years, that told the whole sordid tale and left no doubt that yazkuza were never "men of honour".

The complex story is full of fast-moving twists and turns as it follows a former soldier named Shozo Hirono (Bunta Sugawara ) as he enters the world of the yakuza and becomes embroiled in a violent conflict between the Yamamori and Doi families. Both are bitter rivals who exchange defectors and corpses as gang violence escalates into total war. After winning this conflict, Shozo must choose which path to take as his own faction splinters under the weight of corruption and greed. In Fukasaku's Street Mobster, Bunta Sugawara played a lows-level gangster bent on destruction, but here he is the only one attempting to live by a yakuza code of honor while those around him stab each other in the back in a fast grab for wealth and power. It is his sense of honor that sets him apart and ultimately sets the stage for him to become a yakuza boss himself.

The film is a little bewildering at times. Fukasaku's pacing is relentless as he depicts countless killings and backroom dealings. Characters are introduced and killed off while Fukasaku keeps a relative distance from them. The film is shot more like a documentary of the mob scene and this is enhanced by the urban realism and grittiness of the direction and art design. Like most of Fukasaku's work, the fulfillment of watching this film comes from his unflinching perspective on the brutality and ugliness of violence and the rich narrative texture that he creates. It's rewarding to sit through even if you don't catch all of the details the first time. (The character tree provide by HVE in their DVD release helps tremendously in sorting out the main characters and their various relationships throughout the series.)

Battles Without Honor & Humanity is an extremely violent film throughout that doesn't get any more extreme than when two thugs have their arms graphically chopped off. The scene ends with a severed and ragged arm spewing blood and hurling directly at the camera in a blurry freeze frame as the victim and his attackers struggle in the background. There is no one who shoots violence quite the same way. With this kind of dynamic and stylized handling in a realistic setting, the film easily stands up to anything the Takashi Miike's and Quentin Taratino's of the world could ever conceive of.