The History of a Man's Face

Startlingly unlike Kato's genre movies, this is a sprawling account of the rise of a ruthless Korean-Japanese gang in Osaka during the post-war depression of 1948. Much of it is presented through the eyes of Amamiya (Ando), a war hero now running the only medical clinic in the area targeted by the gang; the complicated flashback structure ushers in ancillary issues like the ambiguous identity of Koreans in Japan, attitudes to violence and sex shaped by experiences in the war, and so on. At heart it's all standard melodrama, but the fiction reflects social history rather accurately. The open ending forms a question mark as gutsy as anything in Sam Fuller's movies.