Even though the cast and crew are making a lark of a movie, Hasebe never lets it collapse under the weight of its own self-awareness. He understands that the best spoof of the campy spy film of the 1960s also has to be a very enjoyable spy film, and Black Tight Killers doesn’t forget to entertain. Kobayashi, as usual, throws himself into the role’s physical aspects with gusto, and he and the girls who make up the black tight squad get to have frequent fights with fists, feet, guns, bamboo bazookas, and of course more mundane weapons like killer albums and ninja chewing gum. The whole thing is light, frothy, and totally ridiculous. Black Tight Killers looks like some scamp replaced the crew’s cameras with kaleidoscopes

As the studio sought directors to tweak the formula, Kobayashi remained as a clear and dependable connection to what had been and what was coming. A little heavier, a few years older, he slipped easily out of the rebellious youth roles of his early career and into the role of a more sophisticated and imposing man of action. Films like Velvet Hustler were redefining what Nikkatsu action was, still making callbacks to film noir and the French New Wave but infusing it with something less morose, snappier, and more in keeping in touch with the evolving go-go and rock ‘n’ roll culture. Kobayashi couldn’t pull off the “Sun Tribe with a gun” mood of those movies, but he had his own more grown-up version of cool that still appealed to younger viewers. And then everyone started watching James Bond movies.

Branded to Kill was the death nell for Suzuki’s initial stint at Nikkatsu Studios. For years he had been reprimanded for deviating from Nikkatsu style and structure in the films he was making. Furthermore, his films were considered incomprehensible — and the biggest crime was that they were not making money. At one point, Nikkatsu even banned him from using colour film, forcing him to work in only black and white. But regardless, Suzuki kept doing things his own way. Branded to Kill was the straw that broke the camel’s back, and subsequently Suzuki was fired from Nikkatsu Studios, and to add insult to injury, he was also blacklisted as a director for ten years.

Velvet Hustler is the story of a cocky, carefree Tokyo hitman named Goro. When we first meet him, he casually steals a smart red convertible sportscar from an airport, pulls up next to a limo, and blows away the occupants before casually returning the car to the exact same parking spot at the airport and leaving town to lie low in Kobe. Goro expects to be back in Tokyo in six months, but a year later, he’s still stuck cooling his heels in Kobe, waiting for the heat to die down. He spends most of the day sitting in a rocking chair on the docks, waiting for the foreign ships to dock so his crew of touts can pick up the gaijin men and spirit them away to associated nightclubs. Goro himself seems neither disappointed or enthused by his small-time pursuits. His only regret is that he can’t yet go back to his beloved Tokyo.

Cruel Gun Story is –- like Nikkatsu’s Youth of the Beast, Detective Bureau 2-3: Go to Hell Bastards! and 3 Seconds Before Explosion before it –- based on a book by hardboiled crime novelist Haruhiko Oyabu. It tells the story of Togawa, a con who is sprung from prison early via the machinations of a mysterious underworld kingpin who communicates with him through an emissary, a former mob lawyer named Ito. Ito and his boss want Togawa to carry out a robbery that they’ve planned, involving an armored car shipment of racetrack receipts worth 120 million yen, and have hand selected a crew of four men to assist him in the task.

In the end, Underworld Beauty is perhaps not as singular a viewing experience as Suzuki’s later, more idiosyncratic masterworks like Branded to Kill, Tokyo Drifter and Gate of Flesh, but it is nonetheless noteworthy. Watching it, you are reminded of just how rare and true are the pleasures of watching a simple, well-constructed story told with wit, economy, energy and style. I would go so far as to say that it is not only a great example of Japanese noir, but a great noir film period. Perhaps it’s not on the level of more epic or metaphorically freighted examples of the genre like Out of the Past or Kiss Me Deadly, but I would definitely put it in the same category as smaller gems like The Narrow Margin – films that are essentially potboilers, but whose masterful execution elevates them to the level of classics.

Within just a few years of Asia-Pol‘s release, Nikkatsu hit financial rock bottom and was forced to retool itself from being a purveyor of action films to the stylish kink of the more lucrative Roman Porno films it became known for in the seventies. Shaw Brothers, on the other hand, would remain a dominant force in the world of martial arts cinema for most of the next decade, though advances in the state of the art and competition from emerging studios would force them out of the game by the mid-eighties. Though one couldn’t reasonably expect a hybrid product like Asia-Pol to provide a real taste of what distinguished each of these studios during those respective lost eras, it is a film worth seeing for its novelty value, as well as one that is solidly entertaining when taken on its own terms.

Mako and her girls tolerate The Eagles’ shenanigans, mostly because they don’t really give a rat’s ass about race and race relations. They are, in a sense, representatives of the Japanese population at large, only in bigger hats and higher platform shoes. They don’t consider themselves racist, but they blind to the racism running rampant in Japan. At least, that is, until Meiko’s Alleycats come into contact with a mixed-race gang led by the hunky Kazuma. He’s in town looking for his lost sister, and naturally he catches the eye of both Mako and Baron, leading to an inevitable showdown when The Alleycats are dragged into the light of racial awareness by encountering this mixed-blood gang and watching them preyed upon by Baron and his jeep-driving goons.

Hasebe, I’m told, learned his craft from the master of pop-art yakuza madness, Seijun Suzuki, and the influence of Japan’s number one maverick certainly showed in Black Tight Killers. By 1969, however, much of the eye-catching weirdness seems to have left the work of Hasebe, and while Bloody Territories is not a bad film, it’s also nothing special, certainly not as special, quirky, or weird as you would hope from the man that gave us Black Tight Killers. It is just a yakuza film. Well, no. Maybe it’s not just a yakuza film, but with Kinji Fukasaku just over the horizon, Bloody Territories is simply the kind of movie that gets lost in the shuffle even if it has a few interesting thematic twists.