The sixth film in the Red Peony Gambler series finds Oryu, the eponymous cardplayer, in Asakusa, the old entertainment quarter of Tokyo, looking for the blind girl whose life and sight she saved in Flower Cards Match (see August 15). She becomes caught in a violent struggle between a popular theater troupe and the local yakuza mob-a wildly choreographed play of jujitsu and swords. But the sensual opening shots of Oryu and the young girl set another mood, one of searching and longing. For the outsider heroine, romance is a transitory thing, love with a proper stranger, symbolized by the fallen tangerine in the snow in this film with Bunta Sugawara, the passing of the umbrella in the earlier one with Takakura Ken. But "where outlaws and drifters gather," Kato's yakuza world, the quest for bonds of family-be it between parent and child, or oyabun (godfather) and yakuza-however doomed or disappointing, endures. (JB)