Black Line

Freelance reporter “Scoop” Machida is hot on the trail of a prostitution ring called the Black Line, when he is framed for the murder of a young woman. Forced to clear his own name, the handsome journalist sinks deeper into the Black Line’s rotten swamp of drugs, prostitution, and murder and finds unexpected help in Maya, a steamy female gambler familiar with the neon-lit streets, shadowy alleyways, and seedy nightclubs he must navigate. The closest film in the Line series to classic American film noir, Ishii’s Black Line is a pulpy assortment of crime film conventions including the starkly expressionistic black and white cinematography by Jûgyô Yoshida, a jazzy music score by Michiaki Watanabe, and a sleazy screenplay by Ishii and Ichirô Miyagawa.

• Release date
• January 13, 1960
• Runtime
• 80 min
• Genres
• Crime
• Director
• Teruo Ishii

Cast

Shigeru Amachi Koji Machida Utako Mitsuya Misako Yōko Mihara Maya

T

Toshio Hosokawa Goro Torii

R

Reiko Seto Reiko Onuma

K

Kyôko Yashiro Chiaki Junko Uozumi Kaneko Sano

H

Hiroshi Ayukawa Hotel manager