Sympathy for the Underdog (1971)

Description

FROM KINJI FUKASAKU (BATTLES WITHOUT HONOR & HUMANITY) comes this pivotal early crime drama in the celebrated career of the director who changed the face of Japanese action cinema. Stylish and hard-boiled, SYMPATHY FOR THE UNDERDOG stars Koji Tsuruta, one of Japan's seminal figures in the Yakuza genre, as Gunji, an aging Yakuza who is released from prison after ten years. Gunji lives by a code of honor that has no place among Tokyo's modern corporate gangs. He gets a new lease on life by reforming his former gang and taking over the whiskey trade on the island of Okinawa. But he is forced to make a final, fateful, bloody stand against the mainland gang that sent him to prison.