Street Mobster

The jitsuroku style arriving fully formed. A small-time thug born the day Japan surrendered claws his way through the postwar underworld with no loyalty and no plan, and Fukasaku films his rise and inevitable fall as pure violent momentum. Bunta Sugawara is magnetic as a man who is essentially raw appetite.

It is rougher and more direct than the Battles films that followed, and it established the template: the amoral protagonist, the handheld chaos, the sense of crime as the natural product of a broken society. Sugawara became the face of the genre here.

Lean, vicious and hugely influential.