Gekitotsu! Aikido

Modeled after the example of their Hollywood counterparts, Japanese movie studios were ambitious, competitive and, if money was to be made, forward-looking. As censorious standards that had kept a custodial yoke on filmmakers around the world began to relax in the mid-1960s, Japan's movie mills - Toho, Toei, Daiei, Nikkatsu, Shochiku, among others - upped their ante of sex and violence to keep current with the influx of western product and their local competitors. The death in 1973 of Chinese-American martial arts star Bruce Lee torqued the competition beyond the breaking point, with the studios scrambling to find a worthy heir to the King of Martial Arts Cinema. Toei found their candidate in Shinichi "Sonny" Chiba. Born Sadaho Maeda in 1939, the son of a test pilot took his professional surname from the prefecture where his father was stationed after World War II. A high school gymnast and Olympic hopeful until a back injury forced him out of the running, Chiba won a Toei talent contest and made his film debut in 1961. Often in collaboration with director Kinji Fukasaku, Chiba made a name for himself in crime films and made his first foray into martial arts cinema in Judo Life (1963). By 1970, Chiba had sufficient name recognition in Japan to start his own school for stuntmen and budding martial arts stars and to be chosen by Toyota as a celebrity spokesman. Toei's The Street Fighter (as Gekitotsu! Satsujin Ken - literally, "Sudden Attack, Killer Fist!" - was known internationally) was meant to blow away the competition and it certainly did that. In the United States, the film was initially rated X by virtue of its over-the-top violence, which included among its outrages (but was certainly not limited to) a bare-handed castration, a kung fu vocal cordectomy, and the shattering of a man's skull as seen by X-ray. (Sixteen minutes had to be cut from The Street Fighter before New Line Cinema could release it in America with an R-rating.) In Japan, The Street Fighter and its two sequels -- Return of the Street Fighter and The Street Fighter's Last Revenge (both released in 1974) were known as "The Killing Fist Trilogy." (New Line would distribute the unrelated 1974 martial arts actioner Onna hissatsu ken, starring Chiba and his female protégé Etsuko Shiomi , as Sister Street Fighter.) Though his character name would change in subsequent films, Chiba would play men of action not too far afield of his Street Fighter antihero Takuma "Terry" Tsurugi - perhaps most notably in Karate Kiba (1976), which ran on the American grindhouse and drive-in circuit throughout the 70s and 80s as The Bodyguard. Twenty years after his American heyday as the heir apparent to Bruce Lee (in Japan, his career was remarkably diverse, with well over 150 performances for the cinema and television), Chiba was championed by movie geek turned screenwriter/filmmaker Quentin Tarantino. In his original screenplay for Tony Scott's True Romance (1992), Tarantino set a key scene in a Detroit revival cinema running a triple bill of The Street Fighter, The Return of the Street Fighter, and Sister Street Fighter and went the distance to name-check Chiba (through the mouthpiece of Tarantino's protagonist/alter ego, Clarence Worley) as "bar none the finest actor working in martial arts movies today." Tarantino later cadged The Bodyguard's precredit allusion to Ezekiel 25:17 (mostly spurious and a seen/heard only in the film's American cut) for Samuel L. Jackson's fiery curtain-closing speech in Pulp Fiction (1994) and paid Chiba the ultimate homage by casting him in Kill Bill: Volume 1 (2003) as legendary Japanese swordsmith Hattori Hansô, who is persuaded to come out of retirement (and put on hold a lucrative second career as a sushi chef) to perfect one last weapon for the film's revenge-minded heroine, Uma Thurman. By Richard Harland Smith Sources: Outlaw Masters of Japanese Film by Chris D. (I. B. Tauris, 2005) Sonny Chiba interview with Jonathan Ross, 2012 "Comeback Kid," by Dave Kehr, The New York Times, October 30, 2003 "Charting the Tarantino Universe," by Dave Kehr, The New York Times, April 11, 2004 "Sonny Chiba's 'Street Fighter' Unleashed," by Donald Liebenson, The Chicago Tribune, February 9, 1996