The Rapacious Jailbreaker

I wasn’t sure I’d ever come across Sadao Nakajima, the director of The Rapacious Jailbreaker (1974), before, and approaching the film featuring a criminal in jail who breaks out of it, had me thinking of the recent Abashiri Prison films put out by Eureka; though most of all, in my mind was the ever present image of Female Prisoner 701: Scorpion. Why? The Rapacious Jailbreaker being 1974 was contemporaneous and honestly I didn’t know what to expect – except that Radiance’s releases have been excellent, definitely the best label to appear in years – so my mind was filling itself with assumptions and expectations.

Add to this a funky few months where I’d really struggled to watch anything - the improbability of having a Seijun Suzuki movie I’d never seen look me in the eyes and yet I just could not watch it. Yeah, something was very wrong in the state of Durrance. But as with all funks you find your way out of it, and in the way that feels right – and in this instance it wasn’t going to Suzuki to help break out of the funk, but something new: The Rapacious Jailbreaker.  

Post-war Japan, a drug deal goes bad. Bad enough that Ueda (Hiroki Matsukata) kills the man that double-crosses him and his partner; caught by the police Ueda gets 20-years in prison, but his eyes are set on escape.  

Immediately the comparisons with Female Prisoner 701: Scorpion never materialised; the prison guards are not the psychopathic inhuman monsters of that film and also, interestingly, Ueda is very guilty of his crimes. Yes, he takes revenge on the man that tries to screw him and his partner over, but he also without hesitation murders his double-crosser's girlfriend, too. In short, he’s not a nice man. Unlike Shunya Ito’s film, The Rapacious Jailbreaker is a curious one, as there is underlying reason to escape: no obsessive thoughts of revenge, no Shawshank Redemption-esque miscarriage of justice to right and corruption to unveil, nor brutally unjust cruel misdeeds of the guards that provides motivation to escape. (OK, prison conditions are not always nice but often these are in response to Ueda's actions.) Though the story is based on a true one, the motivation is all internal: Ueda's pure desire to escape is the crux and core of the story. There is nothing else beyond this, except in aspects of prison life that are revealed to us over time.

It’s a curious thing because it immediately makes you realise how the film could then fall utterly flat without any obvious overarching reason for our protagonist to run beyond being in prison itself. Some films, like Escape from Alcatraz, or innumerable WWII escape movies, are often about the mechanics of escape, and while this film does touch on them, it’s often in the sense of brutal mind over matter that feels real, in the sense of how Houdini trained his body so that he would not choke but could hold in his throat a pick for use in his escape tricks, here we see Ueda put his body on the line. Moreover the film has a kind of brutal honesty to it that is there in Matsukata’s performance as Ueda. On one level it is Hiroki Matsukata playing himself, but if so he’s perfectly cast, as there is something utterly uncompromising about him that makes you believe in all that he does in escaping time and again, even as it adds to the years that he is legally required to serve in prison. His hunched, coiled figure could be a caricature, yet is always the right side of mannered. But this is not a loud film, though it has moments of relatively graphic violence they are short and sharp, as violence should be, never drawn out or gratuitous and again this adds to the sense of curious realness to it all. It’s real because there is no great external motivation, it’s all the inner need; plus the supporting characters tend to be maintained likewise, especially Tomisaburo Wakayama’s made-to-look-older yakuza boss in jail, who provides a quiet intensity to his short scenes with Matsukata. It’s never humourless though and sometimes assumes an almost absurdist tone. Upon his first jailbreak, Ueda is happy to stand next the cutout of the star of the film in his local cinema and mock himself.  

The film, too, extends its realness to the world around it. As Ueda escapes into the country where his sister lives, he finds her being paid by men to illegally kill cows on her land. We’re in a post-war world where food is scarce and people will do what they must, and this is a parallel to where we first see Ueda and his partner as they peddle their drugs to a man who has piles of illicit alcohol and cigarettes and who knows what else? Everyone is slightly illegal at best, Ueda always just goes too far.  

I find it tough to say just what the film gets so pitch perfect, maybe because it could easily misstep or else become a bit of a low-rent Kinji Fukasaku clone. True it uses some of his devices like using text to tell us everyone's history and also mimics some of Fuaksaku’s handheld camera techniques, but The Rapacious Jailbreaker eventually carves its own unique cinematic space while being very obviously of a period, and that is perhaps one of the hardest things to do, especially with a story that could wilt worse than a lettuce leaf left out in the midsummer sun if poorly handled.  

And to be fair the direction is really strong, the way small aspects are made to be important without being dwelled upon, like the week where bars are turned to make them loose or trying to scale a wall using rope so thin it burns the hands and makes it impossible to get purchase, where the filmmaker in seconds projects a visceral sense of what the prisoners are doing to their cell and to themselves. It’s the small things, and The Rapacious Jailbraker is full of small things that make a film that is much, much bigger and richer than I expected.