Desperate Hoodlum

A lone gambler tries to keep a yakuza family from taking over a festival in Kitakyushu. After away from his hometown for 13 years, Ryuji comes back and saves the town that is becoming run-down from yakuza’s ill deeds.

An Osaka gangster Shimamura just got married. His new bride, Mineko is also involved in drug trafficking. When she goes to China to make a deal, things get botched pretty badly. Shimamura must travel to save her and recoup his employers’ losses.

8th part of the Gamblers / Bakuchi-uchi series.

Seijiro and Shizue meet in Niigata and fall in love. Seijiro has to go back to Tokyo soon after, and they promise each other to meet again a year later. However, Seijiro gets jailed for five years. Unable to find him, Shizue gets married to a yakuza boss who can help her family business.

Part 7 in the Gambling Den series. This time Koji Tsuruta is a gambler who feels sympathetic towards a woman whose naive husband is driven to a debt trap by a rotten gambling den owner (Tatsuo Endo) and his dishonest card dealer (Isamu Nagato). The plot is standard stuff and features too much talk, but there's also a decent balance between melodrama and lyricism in the form and storytelling. Tsuruta was a perfect fit for these kind of roles, with the stoic and emotional sides nicely mixed in his screen persona.