The Yakuza is a 1974 neo-noir crime drama film directed and produced by Sydney Pollack and starring Robert Mitchum, Ken Takakura and Brian Keith.

The film is about a retired American detective (Mitchum) who returns to Japan after decades away in order to rescue his friend's daughter, kidnapped by the eponymous crime syndicate.

It received mixed reviews from critics and was a commercial disappointment, though in the ensuing decades it has been praised by filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino.

After they'd been living together, with Kilmer repeatedly asking Eiko to marry him, her brother Ken returned from an island where he'd been stranded as an Imperial Japanese soldier.

Traveling to Tokyo with Tanner's bodyguard Dusty, they stay at the home of another old military buddy named Oliver Wheat.

Goro is unable to intercede due to his impartial role in yakuza society, but suggests Ken can remove the death threat by killing Tono with a sword.

During a violent attack on Ken and Kilmer in Oliver Wheat's house, Dusty is stabbed to death with a sword and Hanako is shot and killed.

Goro discloses that he has a "wayward son" who has joined Tono's clan and asks that Ken protect him should he be caught in the battle.

In private, Goro then discloses the shocking family secret to Kilmer that Eiko is not Ken's sister but his wife, and Hanako their only child.

Sliding the folded handkerchief that contains his finger to Ken, he says "please accept this token of my apology" for "bringing great pain into your life, both in the past and in the present."

Paul Schrader says the idea for the film came from a letter sent to him by his brother Leonard, who was then living in Japan; Leonard had left the U.S. when he received his military draft induction card and found work teaching English at a Japanese university, but frequently found himself with nothing to do when radical students shut down the campus and ended up spending a lot of time in yakuza-run bars.

[3] He felt the casting of Mitchum - which he was "very pleased with" - hurt the movie at the box office and if Redford had played the role "we probably would have made money".

While praising the characterization and the performances of Robert Mitchum and Ken Takakura, he criticized the plot as being somewhat difficult to follow and expressed concern over the level of violence: "it's for audiences that have grown accustomed over the last few years to buckets of blood, disembowelments and severed hands flying through the air.

It's very violent, and the fact that the violence has been choreographed by a skilled director (Sidney Pollack, who made They Shoot Horses, Don't They?)

"[11] Lawrence Van Gelder of The New York Times wrote, "Although admirable for its understated contrast of hoary ritual with modern trappings, The Yakuza ... is also didactic.

It is slowed by the need to instruct its audience in the way of the yakuza; it is marred in its early exposition by some impenetrable Japanese-accented English; it is burdened by the attenuation of an unexciting love interest (which Mitchum's character freely admits being too old for); and a couple of formidably important revelations are simply dropped in, as though no one had the time to plot them properly.

"[13] Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune gave the film three stars out of four and called it "a special kind of gangster picture" with "an extremely complex story" and "stylish sword-fighting sequences.

But don't confuse them with the boring karate chops so common in the Oriental sludge that typically fills our downtown theaters.

"[14] Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times thought that the film "suffers from a self-consciousness so stultifying it never really comes alive, its sense of reality (or lack of it) deriving from other movies instead of life itself.

"[15] Gary Arnold of The Washington Post called the film "such a clumsy combination of violence and inscrutability that the action becomes slightly laughable," further observing, "The right director for this slightly dubious material would have been Sam Peckinpah, who possesses both a taste and a flair for violence ... Sydney Pollack, the director chosen, gets sentimental about violent men, but he isn't on their wavelength.

"[16] Tony Rayns of The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote that Takakura "dominates the screen" with "his masterfully understated performance," concluding, "If The Yakuza is ultimately no more than a curious footnote to the Western exploitation of Oriental action movies, then it finds at least some self-justification in bringing a major film personality to a much wider audience.

"[17] Quentin Tarantino is an admirer of the film saying "for the last time as a lead, Mitchum was vibrantly alive... Takakura Ken's powerhouse performance, at the height of his fame, in this Hollywood Yakuza flick, seems even more of a triumph... the film's final coda, "The Finger cutting scene," is, for me, one of the great endings of any movie of its era.

And arguably Mitchum's single greatest acting moment on film (as long as some fuckwad in the cinema doesn't laugh during it).