Get 'em All (1960)

directed by Eizo Sugawa

Japan

87 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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I'm not very familiar with Eizo Sugawa's other films, apart from by name, but it seems like this one is not one of his more well-known works. Despite that, I still had been wanting to see it for a dog's age, and I was very excited to have stumbled upon a crowdfunded fansub. I was not going to review this, but I liked it so much that I feel like I have enough to talk about for a whole review. It should be noted, also, that the screenplay for this was written by the great Shuji Terayama.

Although it shares many conventions with other Japanese noir (and noir-adjacent) films of the Showa era, Get 'em All stands out in a couple of ways. It is hard to call it strictly a crime film, because the "crime" that is hinted at repeatedly and never quite fully brought into light happened at some shadowy time in the past. It's more apt to call it a revenge film, but what I think it really is is a character study and a commentary on the self-absorbed nature of society. It's nuts to look up the lead actor, Hiroshi Mizuhara, and see that he was only ever in a handful of films over a relatively short period of time, and nothing that had any kind of breakout, international success. He plays his character, Kyosuke, with a quality that I mentioned recently in my review of Nope: We get to see him before a tragedy occurs, and despite the fact that the bulk of the movie takes place after the tragedy, it's the entirely different personality he had beforehand that strikes us. You see him go from seemingly not knowing or caring much about the world beyond his family and immediate surroundings to being wholly disaffected, passively (sometimes actively) homicidal, looking like a shell of a person.

The gist of the plot is that Kyosuke's brother was part of a group of seven men who at some point in the past robbed a bank and got away with a huge amount of cash, which they stash in an empty grave but, upon trying to retrieve it, find gone. Out of all of them, Kyosuke's brother gets pinned with the blame and is killed in a way that's staged to look like a car accident. Unintentionally, Kyosuke stumbles upon his brother's gun, which fired a single bullet during the robbery - a bullet that, if traced, could bring every single person who was in on the robbery down. From then on, all of the remaining robbers are focused on two things: Who has the gun, and who has the cash.

Nobody in this movie seems to feel empathy or be connected with reality in any way that goes further than their own momentary entertainment. No character embodies this better than Kyosuke's sister-in-law, who, immediately after her husband's death, openly and shamelessly takes up with Kyosuke instead ("I can't mambo with a dead person"). Nothing fazes her, life is just dancing and playing and having fun, nothing is ever serious. In a way, this is how every character goes through the world, except instead of being motivated by having fun, for most of them, life - although framed, in this narrative, as one huge game - is a game to be won through being the worst, the most ruthless, essentially the last man standing, with cash in hand. As juxtaposition we see groups of children playing in the streets in ways that are almost uncivilized: A boy kicks around a dead pigeon, a group of kids noisily play cowboys with (...mostly) fake guns. The pigeon motif is actually really interesting because the pigeons are used, I think, as a symbol of the characters' lack of empathy towards other creatures. At a pivotal moment in the film, Kyosuke stops the same boy from stealing someone else's pet pigeon, and after he runs off with it, you think he's just going to let it go - but he doesn't, he shoots it. Kyosuke using the gun on the pigeon opens the door for him to be able to use the gun on other humans. His goal becomes tracking down his brother's associates and killing them all, not caring which of them was the specific one driving the car - all of them are complicit in his eyes, except, strikingly, his brother.

What I liked most about this is that despite a somewhat short running time it still manages to give most of its characters enough background that they feel like disparate people living disparate lives, not just a group of homogeneous shady crims. Tatsuya Nakadai's character is almost (almost) uninvolved in the crimes but still serves as a vital framework for the whole film. He's a former boxer who retired after a leg injury some time in the past and kind of watches the proceedings as an outsider, but proves that he knows what's going on better than anyone when he confronts Kyosuke at the end, telling him that none of this meant anything, none of it was real, "We all had a nice dream. You had fun playing with your pistol." That's what Get 'em All is, in a nutshell. People putting on an act as something bigger, but ultimately none of it lasts, nothing means anything. There's a really strong strain of pessimistic nihilism that runs through this.

This reminded me a lot of Tai Kato's masterpiece I, the Executioner, although the key difference is that the whole motivation behind the main character of Executioner's revenge is specifically that the victim he's avenging was not close to him. But I think that they're similar in that they present a cruel and morally decayed world, where widows move on from their husbands' death in the blink of an eye, where children play with dead things and pretend to kill each other. Personally, when I think "Toho crime movie", what comes to mind first is the Ankokugai films, and this is totally unlike those, although it's contemporary with them. There's also a really cute cat, who fortunately survives everything. Reviewers seem unanimous in their love for Demp the cat.