There seem to be three shades to the prolific, great Japanese film director Kinji Fukusaku. The man took on debatably qualitative English language work such asor, cemented his formidable reputation with the now infamous high-school massacre as modern social critiqueor most notably offered up a wholly original, gritty and violent take on the yakuza subgenre consisting of stray dogs on the fringes of Japanese society on a drug induced downward spiral or in the midst of a violent outbreak., the second collaboration the director embarked on with action star Sonny Chiba within the same year, falls into the latter category.

Like Chiba’s, the film is based upon a manga though the aforementioned series proved to be fantastical whereasis decidedly grounded in realism. Written by Buronsen offame, the film adaptation finds Chiba in the titular role of Joji Kano, an Okinawan country cop who moves to the city life of Tokyo with his pet pig by his side who quickly mounts his own investigation into a series of serial murders when the police division fails to bring closure to the crimes. One of director Fukusaku’s least seen pictures and arguably one of his most underrated,is a hard boiled cops vs. yakuza tale which proves to be likeone of the director’s most lyrical, wild and oddly poignant offerings in his oeuvre.

While exploiting the cool swagger of Chiba, Fukusaku’s gritty and often haphazard audiovisual approach of handheld camerawork and deep telephoto photography compounded with a melancholic jazz score are what most viewers will remember from Doberman Cop. Though Fukusaku and Chiba indeed make a great actor-director team, this is mostly Fukusaku’s show through and through with his usual obsessions concerning self-destructive and neurotic heroin and dope addicts on the fringes of urban Japan falling in and out of the yakuza way of life.

Chiba’s take on Kano sports the actor’s usual debonair cool, wild stunts and fighting sequences with the camera loving every inch of him though Fukusaku gives equal time to the ensemble cast of characters falling in and out of this often rough around the edges crime saga.

Fukusaku also leaves ample room for dialogue about the polar opposite balance between the country and city ways of life with Kano as a kind of Sanjuro Tsubaki wandering through a modern world locked in mortal combat.