Якудза: Трудная судьба фильма Сиднея Поллока

1975 film by Sydney Pollack
the 1974 film

Sydney Pollack then became attached. Schrader says that Pollack wanted rewrites, notably a "softening" of the Harry character. Schrader says "I was fired, because I was unable to write what Sydney wanted. Sydney and I did not get along well, and he needed someone of his own age, whose work he respected, for feedback."

Schrader says the reception to the film was "disastrous. It cost five million and brought back maybe a million and a half". Roger Ebert gave the film a mixed review, awarding it two and a half stars out of four. While praising the characterization and the performances of Robert Mitchum and Ken Takakura, he criticized the plot as being somewhat difficult to follow and expressed concern over the level of violence: "it's for audiences that have grown accustomed over the last few years to buckets of blood, disembowelments and severed hands flying through the air. It's very violent, and the fact that the violence has been choreographed by a skilled director (Sidney Pollack, who made They Shoot Horses, Don't They?) just makes it all the more extreme." Lawrence Van Gelder of The New York Times wrote, "Although admirable for its understated contrast of hoary ritual with modern trappings, The Yakuza is also didactic. It is slowed by the need to instruct its audience in the way of the yakuza; it is marred in its early exposition by some impenetrable Japanese accented English; it is burdened by the attenuation of an unexciting love interest (which Mitchum's character freely admits being too old for); and a couple of formidably important revelations are simply dropped in, as though no one had the time to plot them properly." Arthur D. Murphy of Variety called it "a confused and diffused film which bites off more than it can artfully chew." Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune gave the film three stars out of four and called it "a special kind of gangster picture" with "an extremely complex story" and "stylish sword fighting sequences. But don't confuse them with the boring karate chops so common in the Oriental sludge that typically fills our downtown theaters. The fighting in The Yakuza is more ritualistic and more meaningful because we know who is attacking whom and why." Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times thought that the film "suffers from a self consciousness so stultifying it never really comes alive, its sense of reality (or lack of it) deriving from other movies instead of life itself." Gary Arnold of The Washington Post called the film "such a clumsy combination of violence and inscrutability that the action becomes slightly laughable," further observing, "The right director for this slightly dubious material would have been Sam Peckinpah, who possesses both a taste and a flair for violence Sydney Pollack, the director chosen, gets sentimental about violent men, but he isn't on their wavelength." Tony Rayns of The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote that Takakura "dominates the screen" with "his masterfully understated performance," concluding, "If The Yakuza is ultimately no more than a curious footnote to the Western exploitation of Oriental action movies, then it finds at least some self justification in bringing a major film personality to a much wider audience." Quentin Tarantino is an admirer of the film saying "for the last time as a lead, Mitchum was vibrantly alive Takakura Ken's powerhouse performance, at the height of his fame, in this Hollywood Yakuza flick, seems even more of a triumph the film's final coda, "The Finger cutting scene," is, for me, one of the great endings of any movie of its era. And arguably Mitchum's single greatest acting moment on film (as long as some fuckwad in the cinema doesn't laugh during it)."