Japan’s Film Outlaws

Perhaps because there’s so much impassive surface conformity in the largely homogenous Japanese society, its cinema, as justly celebrated as it is, has long had a lurid sidebar devoted to the most extreme violence, often intermingled with sex. So watch out. The American Cinematheque’s “Outlaw Masters of Modern Japanese Filmmaking” is not for the faint of heart.

The series began Tuesday at the Directors Guild with the U.S. premiere of Kinji Fukasaku’s bloody but serious and impressive “Battles Without Honor and Humanity” (1973), capturing the mood of despair and treachery among yakuza mobs in the immediate chaotic aftermath of World War II.

Fukasaku is best known in America for his high camp classics of the ‘60s, “Black Lizard” and “Black Rose,” underworld thrillers starring female impersonator Akihiro Maruyama, and as co-director of the Japanese portions of “Tora! Tora! Tora!” While it’s a sizable stretch to go along with a 1990 Japanese critics’ poll that voted “Battles” among the 20 best Japanese pictures of all time, it is clearly a notable, powerful work.

But then Cinematheque, moving over to its usual venue, Raleigh Studios, comes up with Kihachi Okamoto’s 1966 “Sword of Doom,” grimmer and grislier than a Jacobean revenge drama. It is likely to separate die-hard samurai aficionados from more mainstream film buffs when it screens Friday at 7:15 p.m.

Tremendously complicated, “Sword of Doom” is demanding in the utmost in simply trying to follow the plot, but is beautifully photographed in black and white. It stars the always-formidable Tatsuya Nakadai, who plays a sadistic swordsman who comes to a spectacularly savage end after a couple of seemingly interminable reels.

Okamoto will be on hand to discuss his film.

“Sword of Doom” will be followed by Koji Wakematsu’s “Go, Go, Second Time Virgin” (1969) at 9:45 p.m. It will be repeated Saturday at 7:15 p.m. This is an arty take on teenage boredom and alienation and is set almost entirely on the rooftop of a Tokyo apartment house.

A 17-year-old girl (Mimi Kazakura) is gang-raped and only wants to die. The atmosphere is one of such lassitude that the rapists don’t even bother to run off but fall asleep on the roof. Drawn to her is the building’s superintendent’s nerdy, virginal son (Michio Kayama) who’s undergone a humiliating, though less severe, experience himself. While the girl is overcome with despair, the boy is consumed with lethal rage.

Wakematsu has a certain sense of style and mood but no real depth of the kind one finds in, for example, a famous, similar sequence in Hubert Selby Jr.’s “Last Exit to Brooklyn.”

On Saturday, “Go, Go, Second Time Virgin” will be followed at 9:45 p.m. with another Okamoto samurai movie, “Kill” (1968). It’s also a blood bath that’s best left to genre aficionados.

Okamoto will again be present for a discussion.

The “Outlaw Masters” series runs through July 26. Information: (213) 466-FILM.

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The USC School of Cinema-Television Alumni Festival will be held at the university’s theater Friday through Sunday.

The range is terrific to terrible, but on its opening night, it presents two features of impressive impact.

Directed by Jeff Fine and written by Patrick Tobin, “No Easy Way,” which screens at 7 p.m. Friday, is the kind of emotion-charged drama you may try to resist only to have it wipe you out. It shows what a director and a writer can accomplish when they believe steadfastly in their material and inspire their co-workers, especially their stars. Alan Boyce and Khandi Alexander come through with stunning portrayals and display plenty of star quality, Alexander especially.

Boyce plays a doomed young man who crosses paths with Alexander’s feisty, sassy yet vulnerable welfare mother; maybe, just maybe, these two desperate characters might be able to reach out to each other.

In Gregory Ruzzin’s remarkable “Blue Skies Are a Lie,” screening at 9 p.m. Friday, Keith Brunsmann plays Joseph, a once-successful international photojournalist who one day recorded with his camera one atrocity too many for his psyche. As a result, he has holed himself up in his second-floor Los Angeles apartment for seven years, systematically recording from the media how the human race is destroying itself and popping pills for his various ailments, including epilepsy.

Recently, however, he has been responding to what appears to be his only human contact, his mail carrier, Robyn (radiant Julie Moses), a pretty, vivacious young woman. In struggling to master stand-up comedy, Robyn finds herself opening herself up to life’s possibilities, outgrowing her sweet-natured, handsome but not especially imaginative live-in boyfriend (Matthew Sheehan) and becoming intrigued with the gaunt, clearly brilliant but damaged Joseph. What happens next is tremendously touching and thoroughly captivating. Ruzzin is a real talent, and so are his actors.

Of interest to festival attendees will be the personal appearance of Tim Russ (Tuvok in UPN’s “Star Trek: Voyager”) Saturday at the 5:30 p.m. screening of the coming-of-age drama set in inner-city L.A., “East of Hope Street,” in which Russ stars and which he co-wrote and co-produced with its director, Nate Thomas.

Information: (213) 740-4432.

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“Exodus 1947,” shown last November in the Music Hall’s Cinema Judaica series, returns this weekend for Saturday and Sunday 11 a.m. screenings at the Sunset 5. It is the very model of a meticulous yet exciting step-by-step account of a major historical event. It is also a tribute to a group of some 40 American Jewish men, now in their 70s, who almost half a century ago lent an essential hand to the formation of the state of Israel. This splendid, carefully researched and assembled documentary is chock-full of fascinating details as it recalls a courageous, complex and dangerous mission with immense consequences. Information: (213) 848-3500.

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Two alternative film offerings this weekend are both on the bleak side. Along with the premiere of Charles Lane and Joyce Guy’s performance piece “You Better Work: A Cultural Look at the African American Work Ethic,” Newtown Pasadena is also presenting Saturday at 8 p.m. at All Saints Church, 132 N. Euclid Ave., Pasadena, Florence M’mbugu-Schelling’s 45-minute “These Hands,” a lyrical, loving study of a group of Tanzanian women who earn their living crushing rocks with mallets all day. With all due respect, the filmmaker’s points about dignity, labor, hardship and the human spirit could have been made in half the time. Information: (818) 398-9278.

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German filmmaker Fred Keleman’s 80-minute “Fate,” which the Goethe Institute and Filmforum are screening Saturday and Sunday at noon at the Nuart, arrives steeped in critical acclaim and prizes. But you just might get the feeling that Keleman has pushed absolute despair without a trace of wit or irony to the point that his film verges on parody of all those European studies in abject alienation and despair.

Information: (310) 478-6379.