Proof of the Man (Blu-ray Review)
- Review Date: Sep 26, 2025
- Format: Blu-ray Disc
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Director
Junya SatōRelease Date(s)
1977 (September 9, 2025)Studio(s)
Kadokawa-ProSer Co./Toei Co., Ltd. (Arrow Video)- Film/Program Grade: A-
- Video Grade: A
- Audio Grade: A
- Extras Grade: A-
Review
Though extraordinarily far-fetched with its many outrageous coincidences, Proof of the Man (1977) is an immensely entertaining, primarily Japanese-made, all-star crime melodrama/police procedural with about a third of it in English and shot in New York, featuring American actors including George Kennedy.
Producer Haruki Kadokawa revolutionized Japan’s film industry with a technique called “media mix,” which involved producing slick, expensive, all-star movies that through saturation marketing synergized tie-ins to novels, pop music, and other media also controlled by Kadokawa’s media empire, finding additional revenue through product-placement and pre-release network television sales. So successful was this strategy that by 1992, seven of the 20 all-time Top-Grossing Japanese movies were Kadokawa productions. Proof of the Man, based on Seiichi Morimura’s bestselling novel (7.7 million copies sold) and Kadokawa’s first success in the film biz, quickly became the second highest-grossing Japanese film of all time.
In Harlem, 20-year-old African-American Johnny Hayward (Joe Yamanaka) is handed a large wad of cash that he uses to buy new clothes and book a flight to Japan. Later, during a fashion show at a Tokyo high-rise hotel hosted by wealthy designer Kyoko Yasugi (Mariko Okada), Johnny collapses in an elevator, fatally stabbed, his last words something like “straw hat.”
Nearby, minutes later, married bar hostess named Naomi (Bunjaku Han), she having an affair with company executive Niimi (Isao Natsuyagi), is run over by sportscar driven by Kyoko’s pampered, no-good son, Kyohei (Kōichi Iwaki), he and his girlfriend (Junko Takazawa) dumping the body in the ocean. However, back at the crime scene he dropped his hand-crafted pocket watch, one of only four imported to Japan, and thus easily traceable and incriminating. After confessing the crime to his mother, she sends him to New York to evade arrest, she lying to police Det. Munesue (cult star Yūsaku Matsuda) and his partner (Hajime Hana, of the Crazy Cats).
Believing the two deaths are linked, Munesue travels to New York, where police Det. Ken Shuftan (George Kennedy) is looking into Johnny’s death from the American side of things. It soon becomes clear to Munesue and Shuftan—though rather obvious to the movie audience, given the casting of half-Japanese Yamanaka—that the murdered Johnny was not born in New York to a black couple, but rather is the mixed-race son of Johnny’s black father and a Japanese mother, and that he was born in Japan during the U.S. Occupation.
The movie plays a bit like a Hollywoodized A Fugitive from the Past (1965), Tomu Uchida’s masterpiece about a years-long manhunt rife with dark family secrets. Both films have long scenes (as does Kurosawa’s High and Low) of detectives meeting in large groups, poring over bits of evidence, and Junzaburō Ban, who played the main detective in Uchida’s film, has a cameo appearance here as a hot springs owner.
Beautifully photographed by Shinsaku Himeda (Pigs and Battleships, The Insect Woman, Vengeance is Mine), the film shows off a nouveau riche side of Tokyo that’s both glamorous and oppressive, while the New York scenes dig deep into pre-gentrified Harlem. There’s even a big car chase through the streets of Manhattan comparable to a big Hollywood film. An aerial shot of Manhattan that opens the film rivals the beginning of West Side Story, while the film’s fog-shrouded dawn in the mountains of Gunma Prefecture at the climax is through Himeda’s lens hauntingly beautiful.
The startling all-star cast includes, on the American side, Broderick Crawford (all but reprising his Dan Mathews from Highway Patrol, if older, mustachioed and disheveled), Blade Runner’s William Sanderson as a gun dealer, and as a suspect Rick Jason, undoubtedly owing to the huge popularity of Combat! on Japanese television. (Jason’s Combat! co-star, Vic Morrow, appeared in Message from Space the following year.) Late in the story the esteemed black film actor Robert Earl Jones turns up as Johnny’s destitute father.
On the Japanese side of things, the great Toshiro Mifune guest stars as Kyoko’s powerful if philandering member of parliament husband; Kōji Tsuruta plays Munesue’s superior on the police force, Hiroyuki Nagato plays the frantic husband of the hit-and-run victim, Keiko Takeshita the granddaughter of another murder victim, and on and on. Other familiar faces make cameo appearances, including Hideji Otaki and Gajiro Satō (from the Tora-san films) as oden shop customers and, in another scene, Nenji Kobayashi and Hideo Murota as Kirizumi police officers. Even director Kinji Fukasaku has a cameo as a detective, though I didn’t spot him.
Star-packed cast aside, the film is primarily a showcase for cult actor Matsuda (Ridley Scott’s Black Rain) and, especially, Mariko Okada, who delivers a long speech near the end comparable to Joan Crawford at her peak. Indeed, the film plays like a beguiling fusing of Japanese crime films, Douglas Sirk melodramas, and Greek tragedy. The outrageous coincidences, directly connecting troubled Munesue not only to Kyoko and Johnny but even Shuftan via flashbacks of a violent assault on the detective’s father decades earlier, is too outrageous to be believed, yet these pieces all coming together aesthetically somehow works given the high-key nature of the story.
And while it’s mostly window dressing, the themes of racism (against the Japanese by white Americans during the Occupation, by both Japanese and whites against blacks), hard-earned and unearned wealth and moral responsibility, and lingering resentment toward the postwar American Occupiers raise the film above many glossy American crime thrillers. Proof of the Man would be cheap and unseemly were it not so slick and entertaining.
Japanese movies with sizable English-speaking parts tend to cast non-professional local expats (such as the ubiquitous Harold S. Conway), but even when they spring for bona fide Hollywood talent their scenes are often poorly-directed or just plain, well... off somehow. Here, however, the sequences putting Matsuda and Kennedy together are quite well done. All told, it’s one of Kennedy’s better movie roles.
Arrow Video’s Region “A” Blu-ray of Proof of the Man looks stupendous, in 1.85:1 widescreen (called “VistaVision Size” in Japan), derived from a 4K video master provided by Kadokawa. The image is impressively sharp with vivid color yet with no sign of excessive video tweaking. It’s among the best Blu-rays I’ve seen of a 1.85:1 widescreen Japanese film. The LPCM mono is also excellent for what it is. Retained are the Japanese subtitles for the English dialogue (mostly vertically presented, confined to the right side of the frame) and excellent optional English subtitles.
The bountiful supplements consist of a new audio commentary by film scholar Rob Buscher and DJ Skeme Richards; Taking the Big Apple, a video introduction by scholar Earl Jackson; A Japanese Blockbuster, a discussion with Junya Satō biographers Tatsuya Masuto and Masaaki Nomura; trailers, and image gallery, and a booklet featuring strong essays by Michelle Kisner and Alexander Zahlten.
I’d wanted to see a good subtitled version of Proof of the Man for decades, but I didn’t expect the movie, high-concept though it is, to be so completely engrossing, and the great transfer and extras make this one of the year’s best releases. Highly Recommended.
- Stuart Galbraith IV