After and given the aesthetic design of Blade Runner (1982) it was arguably little surprise that Ridley Scott would sooner or later find his way to Japan. Neither it is especially notable that, after the commercial and largely critical failures of Legend (1985) and Someone to Watch Over Me (1987), the British director would be seeking a means to connect to said earlier hit. What is perhaps more of an eye-opener is the extent to which a majority of overt Orientalist visual cues and cliches, indeed almost any stylistic flourishes, are summarily eschewed throughout Black Rain. Shooting in Osaka (bureaucratic red tape had curtailed initial plans to make the film in Tokyo) the vision at hand here is a dirty, grungy, industrial cityscape, one that bespeaks a sense of a dark underbelly to the country’s post-WWII economic success story.

As allied to an unsurprising, fairly standard-issue narrative (Michael Douglas’ disgraced cop and his flashy younger partner [Andy Garcia] are tasked with escorting a Japanese criminal back to his home country and then working to capture him following his escape) the narrative and thematic meaning of Black Rain’s vision is arguably rudimentary. However, it does at least serve to adumbrate the extent to which wider,  national, imperatives are significant; and this is true of both the US and Japan. Douglas’ Nick Conklin, on the surface a generic type of lone wolf, maverick copy derided by bookish superiors, has been under investigation for taking money seized in busts, whilst the yakuza operating (rather vaguely and unconvincingly) in America offer a mirror image of misappropriated funds and personal gain.

Money and the vagaries of its use and dissemination are, then, key referents throughout. The setting and contemporary temporality of Black Rain means that it captures a real moment in time. It is set at a time when Japan’s economic miracle and international capital expansion had reached a decades-long apex and was on the cusp of falling away. Indeed, this was almost a mirror of the path to nationalism and to war in the 1930s (territorial replaced by industrial expansion), and was similarly fated to end very badly and leave Japan in a state of social decay.

The film’s project thereafter is, unsurprisingly, to trace a redemptive arc wherein Conklin is in a sense purged of his (ostensibly) criminal tendencies through confronting such overt criminality and excess of individualised violence. That is, both he and his yakuza adversary eschew communal endeavour in favour of a singular path throughout their particular attitudes and activities, not an original theme perhaps but given that it arises through Conklin facing and conquering an international enemy does at least suggest an allegorical imperative here. If the yakuza are a manifestation of a capitalist aesthetic taken to its logical conclusion then one can easily posit both America and Japan as inexorably intertwined. Indeed, the title of the film (also the title of a famous post-WWII drama by Imamura Shohei produced in the same decade) is an allusion to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The script alludes once, briefly, to the Americans having created modern Japan because of the A bomb; and thus their intertwined fates position the crime thriller as a way of addressing social history and different forms of violence, which indexes Black Rain to directors like Fukasaku Kinji and Nakajima Sadao, who had revolutionised the yakuza genre through their so-called jitsuroku (true account) films of the 1970s. Ultimately, if this is a US story, it is at least one in which the country is dealing with evils that cannot comfortable be dissociated from its own specificity and actions around the world.     

There is little pandering equivalence in this contrast, which is to be celebrated; yet still the interplay develops along predictable lines. The Japanese cop assigned to help the US cops, Masumoto (played by legendary yakuza star Takakura Ken) becomes far more American in his actions and attitudes – an almost brash individualism that is mined for comedic (karaoke) and dramatic effect – than Conklin does a Japanese. Nonetheless, after Sydney Pollack’s The Yakuza (1974), it is good to see another international stage on which this notable actor can strut his stuff, albeit it is a safe stage that does not challenge his onscreen persona. Elsewhere, several other notable Japanese actors fill out the supporting cast – including action hero Matsuda Yusaku (Proof of the Man [1977]; The Most Dangerous Game [1978]) and, in one of his final film roles, Wakayama Tomisaburo (the Lone Wolf and Cub films) – and contribute to the film’s interest as genre fare. However, Black Rain is not a film that relies on action set-pieces to propel its narrative. It reminds one of a halcyon time when mainstream genre entertainment was routinely for adults, a time when it didn’t pander or patronize. It is also notable that it traces, however cursorily, the fact that WWII had far-reaching consequences, ones that were still being felt almost half a century later.