The story freely flashes backwards and forward through time, mainly following two young, uneducated laborers, Kikuo (Tetsuo Ishidate) and Asao (Gin Maeda), "Golden Eggs" brought in to Tokyo from the country to help in the rebuilding of Japan. After years of hard work and subsequent unemployment, Kikuo and Asao pool their resources and buy a shiny new dump truck. The pair, friends since childhood, had originally planned to go into business with three other men, but one by one they dropped out. One man needs his share of the investment back after his girlfriend (Kiwako Taichi) becomes pregnant. Another is sent to prison. And a third, desperate for cash, earns extra money as a strikebreaker only to die when he ironically comes to the aid of strikers beaten savagely by police.

As Kikuo and Asao remember their friends' fates, the two seem poised at last for financial freedom. But a combination of deeply-rooted psychological scars and outside forces (another labor strike) threaten their independence.

Fukasaku's long association with the Japanese studio Toei was interrupted by a half dozen or so years of outside assignments. Ironically, it was several of these pictures, notably The Green Slime (1968) and as co-director of Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970), for which he was for years best known in the west. Conversely, If Your Were Young: Rage, produced independently (by Shinsei Eigasha) for release by Shochiku, was forgotten even in Japan until the director's high profile canonization shortly before his death exactly one year ago. Writer Tom Mes, who contributes liner notes to Home Vision's DVD of If You Were Young, rightly compares it with another, even better Fukasaku/Shinsei Eigasha collaboration, Under the Fluttering Military Flag (Gunki hatameku motoni, 1972). (That film, released through Toho, is about a convicted war widow's vain attempts to clear her executed husband's name.) Both are bleak, impressively blunt political films condemning a system with stories that bear witness to those left behind during Japan's postwar success.

The picture is almost like The Bicycle Thief done as a Fukasaku crime melodrama, with Kikuo and Asao's truck functioning in much the same way. Theirs is a cruel life. Unemployable after the factory they work at goes bankrupt, the men are forced to live in its abandoned dormitory -- until they're kicked out of that, too. When Asao earns money at a construction site, his wages are stolen on the way home. Painfully, the thieves are university students who have benefited from Asao's backbreaking labor. The fast-paced film (part of Fukasaku's cult following now seems to stem from his very contemporary style of cutting action) is bursting with ideas and atmosphere.

One of the best of these is the almost psychic, twins-like bond between Kikuo and Asao, childhood friends brought together because their coal-miner fathers both died on the same day in a cave in. Asao is haunted by suppressed inner demons (his mother prostituted herself to buy him shoes for school) and begins a psychological meltdown, this in spite of his victory in buying the dump truck. As Asao drinks himself into a stupor and Kikuo nervously sips miso soup at home, Fukasaku cuts them together as if they were in the same room looking deeply into the other's soul.

Video & Audio

For a movie long forgotten, If You Were Young: Rage looks pristine on DVD, in a 16:9 transfer which does justice to Fukasaku's typically excellent use of 'scope. (He was also one of the very few directors who could get away with the wild, hand-held camerawork common to the period.) The DVD also accurately reflects the feature's bright, almost Day-Glo color. The mono sound is clean and clear, and the optional English subtitles are excellent. Besides Mes's useful liner notes, an eight-minute interview with the director, completed shortly before his death, is the primary extra. Oddly presented in black and white, it's in the same style as another Vitagraph/American Cinematheque title, Fukasaku's Black Rose Mansion. The only thing really missing here is a cast and crew list.

* A direct translation of the onscreen title is "If You Were Young." I have no idea where the awkwardly inserted "Rage" comes from.

Stuart Galbraith IV is a Los Angeles and Kyoto-based film historian whose work includes The Emperor and the Wolf -- The Lives and Films of Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune. He is presently writing a new book on Japanese cinema for Taschen.