Hideo Gosha made a brief visit to Toho and directed the studio’s first ninkyo yakuza film. Obviously Toho was quite late as by 1971 the genre was already past its prime. The Wolves is no match for Toei’s royal yakuza productions – or Gosha’s best movies in other genres – but it certainly has its merits. Most importantly, The Wolves is lot darker and more pessimistic than stories usually told in the ninkyo yakuza genre. Much of the content is actually closer to jitsuroku films. In this aspects, the film might have been ahead of its time rather than late. The storyline follows a yakuza who returns to his clan after being released from prison. As typical for ninkyo yakuza films, he must choose between following the yakuza codes and doing the right thing. The first third of the film doesn’t work quite that well, but the rest is captivating. The supporting characters are well drafted and Gosha creates some memorable images (a beach full of ship wrecks is used as background in several scenes). Tatsuya Nakadai, Noboru Ando and Isao Natsuyagi play the leading roles.
Animeigo’s dvd is problematic. The picture quality isn’t too bad, although a bit pink, but the audio is weak. There’s two audio tracks. The first one is a remastered track. The music sounds good, but dialogue and sound effets are very muffled. The second track is the original track. It’s clear, altough a tiny bit harsh on ears, but features loud hiss. As far as Japanese 70’s cinema on dvd goes, both tracks are clearly below average (myself I managed to make the audio slightly better by giving it a custom touch). Bonus material feature trailer, photos and text info. The photo gallery features a weird little glitch; the pages are anamorphic but the content is not; in other words, the photos are horizontally stretched. No big deal, really.
