Honor Bound

THE YAKUZA

Directed by SYDNEY POLLACK Screenplay by PAUL SCHRADER and ROBERT TOWNE

A cultural footnote: the Yakuza in Japan is very much like the Mafia Stateside: a clandestine and very powerful criminal organization with heavy political connections. The Yakuza has its own code of conduct but, typically, the code has a kind of fearful stringency that makes the Mafia look by comparison like a gang of clubhouse rowdies.

This movie, a fitful action adventure starring an excellent Robert Mitchum, must first explain all about the Yakuza to uninitiated Westerners, so that the whole opening seems like an orientation course. The plot that has been contrived to go along with all this Yakuza lore is not a wieldy thing either. It has to do mostly with layers of intrigue and betrayal that end when Mitchum and a single ally (the engagingly somber Takakura Ken) take on what looks like the entire criminal population of Tokyo. This face-off makes for a bloody and modestly spectacular finale, but it is long in coming.

Precisely what Robert Mitchum is doing in Japan becomes a sticky point. Mitchum plays, rather snugly, a former private eye from California named Harry Kilmer whose pal Tanner (Brian Keith) calls an old marker on him. Tanner has promised to sell the Yakuza some guns but failed to deliver. In reprisal, the Yakuza has kidnaped his daughter and is threatening to kill her.

As it happens, Kilmer was stationed in Japan during the American occupation and supported a Japanese girl whose brother, thought to have been killed in the war, returned home and became Yakuza.

Though he has been out of the organization for a decade, the brother is compelled by honor to help Kilmer. The Yakuza is much concerned with these matters of duty. The obligation is a burden, but the brother takes a grave pride in helping his sister's old lover. What is canny in this movie is the way these various obligations are made to snake around each other, then abruptly thrust inward to threaten and destroy. Unfortunately, these serpentine strands also cause a great deal of confusion and hob ble the movie just when it should be moving briskly along.

Mystical Grace. Director Sydney Pollack (They Shoot Horses, Don 't They? and The Way We Were) is not a master of the action genre. The Yakuza's scenes of violence lack real force. For all the slashings, knife fights and ritual sacrificing of fingers, the film is, strangely, not violent enough. It does not catch at all the awful mystical grace that can draw and hold a man to such a life. The violence is held down, whereas the intricacies of the Yakuza are too extensively explained. The movie would have been more chilling had it been stranger, if all the ritual and violence were part of a world that was wholly mysterious -- and therefore more immediate, more threatening.

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