Release date: February 14th, 1965
Director: Jun Fukuda
Studio: Toho
Cast: Tatsuya Mihashi, Makoto Sato, Akihiko Hirata, Mie Hama, Akemi Kita, Toru Ibuki, Somesho Matsumoto, Yoshifumi Tajima, Junichiro Mukai, Shoji Nakayama, Nadao Kirino, Wataru Omae et al.
Availability: No home media or streaming release; occasional theatrical screenings.
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Toho's "Ankokugai" (Underworld) series was an unconnected group of seven crime movies released between 1956 and 1965. Three of them have English subtitles and one even has an extant English dub, but - despite the fact that those of the series that have been subtitled are top-notch films - the other half remains unsubtitled and unavailable on home media anywhere. At a glance, the Ankokugai movies that haven't received English subtitles are:
- The Underworld (1956, Kajiro Yamamoto)
- The Witness Killed (1961, Jun Fukuda)
- The Weed of Crime (1962, Jun Fukuda)
- Mission to Annihilate the Underworld (1965, Jun Fukuda)
Relevant to our interests, all but two of these seven movies plus the series' "companion piece" Big Shots Die at Dawn feature Akihiko Hirata in usually a fairly decent role. Since The Weed of Crime was at some point floating around online long enough for me to have watched it (one of my biggest regrets is not keeping the file), that makes Mission to Annihilate the Underworld Hirata's only Ankokugai movie that is fully unavailable through any channel. Let's take a look at it.
Check out a trailer courtesy of @makoto_ookubo. (I'm embedding the video directly so I don't have to link you to Twitter).
Mission to Annihilate the Underworld was both directed and co-written by reluctant Godzilla auteur Jun Fukuda, with Yoshihiro Ishimatsu and Ei Ogawa also collaborating on the screenplay. Of the two co-writers, Ogawa was the more prolific, and he was attached to Taiyo ni Hoero! for much of the series' lifespan. I mistakenly believed that Mission had been produced by Tomoyuki Tanaka (a fair assumption, given that he produced almost everything Toho put out for decades), but its producer was actually Kenichiro Tsunoda, DP for Toho's affiliate studio Tokyo Eiga.
Mission was the seventh and final film in the Ankokugai series. Why it ended here is not currently known to me - whether it had just run its course, or if perhaps declining ticket sales forced the series to cease. I do find it a bit curious that Mission was only featured once in Kinema Junpo, Japan's largest and most influential film magazine, and never reviewed by it.
I unfortunately have not been able to drag up much information about Akihiko Hirata's character Shimada, a second-generation yakuza boss who seems to have been fairly important to the plot but evidently not important enough to be shown on any Japanese posters. He's billed pretty high within the cast: in the poster above, the two names on the far right that you see in orange are Tatsuya Mihashi and Makoto Sato, who play the leads, then it's Mie Hama, Akemi Kita and Akihiko Hirata. (Remember the cast is intended to be read from right to left.)
Notice that I said "any Japanese posters". We do have a poster from the Thai release of this film (retitled something like "Two Fierce Tigers") that includes Shimada:
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| Exhibit A in my "sometimes I see a picture of Makoto Sato and for a second I think I'm looking at Bunta Sugawara" catalogue. |
Something I found very interesting about this movie is that it's set in Tokai City, Aichi Prefecture, which is of course a perfectly normal city today, but as of the time of movie's production, it did not actually exist. Tokai City was formed by a merger of the Chita District towns Yokosuka and Ueno in 1969. Yokosuka and Ueno had been considering merging since the mid-1950s, but evidently reception of the idea was not so good locally. In the following decade, though, the population of both towns began to grow to the extent that boundary disputes arose, and in 1967 the governor of Aichi Prefecture suggested a merger.
It's a small thing, but these are the kind of details that get lost in translation so easily. I do not know what the name "Tokai City" would have meant to a Japanese audience circa 1965. Would it have invoked a sense of overcrowding and possibly crime? Would the audience as a whole have been aware of Yokosuka and Ueno's encroachment upon each other? Would anyone have cared? Did Toho just pull the name out of a hat?
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| Tokai City's Great Buddha of Shirakuen. Incidentally, this Buddha was consecrated in 1927, the same year Hirata was born. |
In any event, Toho released Mission to Annihilate the Underworld on a double-bill with Ryo Kinoshita's adaptation of Mishima's School of the Flesh. Toho also promoted the film alongside the Frank Sinatra picture None but the Brave, which shares several cast members with Mission, but I'm not sure if this was a double-bill or if only flyers were produced.
Since Kinejun never bothered with the movie, I can't say what critical reception was like at the time. Modern reviews are okay, with nobody seeming like they really love the film but nobody hating it either. Everyone seems to agree that Mie Hama is great, which goes without saying. Apparently Makoto Sato wears a red jacket in the film, which is not particularly remarkable to me, but two separate Filmarks reviewers and Sato's own son Tosuke evidently found it memorable enough to make mention of it, so I feel that I should as well. (Maybe it's the same jacket Sachio Sakai wears in Ironfinger; Toho did reuse costumes.)
Though it has escaped both official physical release and illicit internet distribution (as far as I know?), Mission has evidently been digitized: check out a short scene featuring Shoji Nakayama here. The film has also been broadcast on television for what does appear to be quite some time, since I found a random Twitter user claiming that they had seen the movie on TV "as a child".
Theater screenings within Japan... have happened; not very often, but they have. As with most things it has played at Laputa Asagaya more than once, and in 2019 it played as part of a Makoto Sato film festival, advertised as a "new print" - not exactly sure if that means a restoration or a recently-unearthed print or something else, but it's good to know.
As far as I can tell - and this is backed up by Stuart Galbraith's Toho Studios Story, though Galbraith has been wrong - Mission to Annihilate the Underworld never received a theatrical release in the United States. (Google's AI summary claims that it did, but it also thinks Ironfinger is part of the International Secret Police series, which is just stupid.)
Continuing on the theme of things being wrong, the film is on IMDb under the title "Ankokugai gekitotsu sakusen". I genuinely have no clue where it acquired that title. I can find no primary Japanese sources indicating that that name was ever associated with it.
That dearth of information on international releases leads us now to the conclusion of what was (to me) something of an overall disappointing post. Considering how (relatively) well-known the other Ankokugai movies are, it's even more frustrating how little information I'm able to give about this one. The last thing I'll mention is that the movie's funky surf-rock soundtrack is available to listen to online - check out timestamps 10:31 and 12:29 in this compilation video.
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