Japanese Title: Zubekô banchô: zange no neuchi mo nai
Director: Kazuhiko Yamaguchi
The fourth and last Delinquent Girl Boss movie, Worthless To Confess is without question the best of the series. From the opening moments where an auditorium full of reform school girls riot when the principal pulls the plug on a Ken Takakura-starring Abashiri Prison movie, the series, at last, strikes the perfect balance of action, humor, pop artifacts, music & fashion, and well-engineered melodrama. Reiko Oshida is released from reform school and goes to visit the widower father of her nemesis, Yuko Katayama. The widower (Junzaburo Ban) owns his own car repair garage, and soon Oshida, yearning for a decent parental figure, is apprenticing as his grease monkey/girl friday. However, things start to go wrong when boss, Nobuo Kaneko (from Battles Without Honor & Humanity) bids his gang shake down Ban. Oshida takes it on herself to negotiate, but is harassed at the gangster HQ. Chip-on-her-shoulder Katayama, the sweetheart of boss Kaneko’s spineless, mod right-hand man, intervenes with the thugs who are trying to humiliate her former nemesis. Unhappily, the girls are no match for the craven hoods, and papa Ban comes to their rescue, terrorizing the ruffians with a straight razor. Weaselly Kaneko offers the tubercular, impoverished gambler husband (Ichiro Nakatani) of Oshida’s friend (Yukie Kagawa) an outrageous amount of money to snuff Ban. Principled Nakatani initially hesitates but agrees when he realizes he’ll soon leave Kagawa a penniless widow. When Nakatani becomes too ill at the last minute, Kaneko’s mobsters in a waiting car run down both Nakatani and Ban. Back at the garage, Oshida, Katayama, Kagawa and the other girls break out their crimson dusters and swords, and bid elegaic farewell to papa Ban’s lying-in-state corpse. The swordfighting carnage that follows at Kaneko’s nightclub, the only major action setpiece of the film, is the finest in the series and only suffers from the girls killing five times as many hoods as we know to be in Kaneko’s gang. But, considering the over-the-top tall tale vibe dominating throughout the movie, such quibbling is beside the point. Nakatani’s former friend (Tsunehiko Watase) who has a crush on Oshida, joins the fray towards the end, at which point the death-dealing reaches a kind of orgiastic, pop art crescendo. Yakuza boss Kaneko is gorily run through by Oshida, and it’s filmed from beneath a glass floor ala director Seijun Suzuki. With the gangsters decimated and police sirens in-the-distance, we realize the coughing, widowed Yukie Kagawa has caught the TB from dead husband Nakatani. Her loyal friends hide her, and she weeps with futility as she witnesses Oshida and her comrades hauled off to jail. Judging from the three previous films in the series, who would have guessed Worthless To Confess would turn out to be such a tour-de-force.
©2006 - Chris D.
