Second Time Around

Scarface-san: Two More by Tai Kato
Ya gotta love those bluntly explicit Japanese movie titles. Swordplay-film master Tai Kato's 1966 Korean-vs.-Japanese gangster movie A Man's Face Shows His Personal History (playing Saturday at the PFA) takes its title from a critic's description of the film's star, Noboru Ando. Ando sports an alarming, very real scar that carves an arc from his lip to his ear, a souvenir from his post-World War II days as boss of a Tokyo yakuza gang. After a stint in prison, Ando played himself in a biopic, Blood and Rules, and became an instant movie star. A Man's Face Shows His Personal History takes place during that postwar chaos. A Korean gang, dressed in hideous Hawaiian shirts and sunglasses, attempts a takeover of a small Tokyo suburb. Ando is riveting as the laconic neighborhood doctor with a dark past who's just trying to stay out of trouble. Trouble, of course, is his middle name, and so he's finally forced to take long blade in hand and carve a few payback scars himself in the climactic, jaw-dropping shop-to-shop battle with the bad guys.

Kato's 1963 The Sanada Warriors, playing Thursday, may be his nuttiest film. In one of his typically spectacular openings, a group of children picking over the remains of a vast samurai battle meet Sasuke, a strange boy with psychokinetic powers and glowing blue eyes, these caused by a meteor crash when he was born. Following this makeshift family into adulthood, Kato's film slaps us with such wacky anachronisms as an Elvis-esque, guitar-playing wandering minstrel and cops directing battleground traffic. For those who need to attach larger meanings to something that's already vastly entertaining, The Sanada Warriors also happens to be a political allegory of the student uprisings of the time.

-- Tod Booth

The Sanada Warriors screens Thursday, Aug. 27, at 7 p.m. A Man's Face Shows His Personal History screens Saturday, Aug. 29, at 8:50 p.m. (with Red Peony Gambles Her Life at 7 p.m.). Both screenings are at the Pacific Film Archive, 2625 Durant (at College) in Berkeley. Tickets are $6, $1.50 more for the second film. Call (510) 642-1124.