Real-life yakuza turned actor Noboru Ando, whose hauntingly scarred countenance was the basis for the film's title, dominates this warped vision of postwar Japan, Kato's first contemporary drama. Immigrant gangs terrorize a Japanese town with their threats, loud jazz, and tasteless fashion sense, and only the tough but suave Dr. Amamiya (Ando) can stop them, as long as he gets rid of his silly peace-loving ideals. Told in a flashback, as Amamiya prepares to operate on the honorable Korean yakuza who befriended him, the film hops wildly from present to past to future, creating a far more fascinating mosaic of violence and memory than its simplistic narrative suggests. Veering from stately realism to hyperstylized action and melodramatic love scenes, the film constructs a wondrously memorable, fragmented history of a man, and Japan, out of the disparate cinematic shards of cruelty, jazz, and tears.-Jason Sanders