Black Rain

Michael Douglas meets Japan in mix of visually stunning clichés

Video Days orders readers to surrender their badge and gun and while suspended for the month of May, return to ten films trafficking in law and order.

Michael Douglas in “Black Rain”

BLACK RAIN (1989) is a meeting between the most perfunctory cop movie cliches imaginable, and in fits and starts, magnificent world building, with two-thirds of the picture shot on location in Osaka, Japan. The filmmakers spared no expense to set the film apart visually from action thrillers trafficking in similar situations–notably Coogan’s Bluff (1968), in which Clint Eastwood played a sheriff’s deputy from Arizona out of his element in New York City–but not making an effort where it mattered most, end up with an effort that’s far easier to forget than it should be.

Titles by Anthony Goldschmidt

Julie Kirkham was a script reader who’d been promoted to production executive at Orion Pictures, where she’d worked in development and production on movies like Desperately Seeking Susan (1984), At Close Range (1986) and RoboCop (1987). Kirkham’s strength was material and working with writers to realize their potential. These included screenwriter Craig Bolotin–whose spec script No Small Affair Kirkham had championed and helped get produced by Columbia Pictures in 1984–and a production assistant named Warren Lewis, who’d written a script Kirkham liked as well. She put the two writers together to work on an idea Bolotin had in the hopper: a cop goes to Japan. Helping Bolotin & Lewis develop a script, in 1987, Kirkham got a draft of what was titled Black Rain to Michael Douglas, who as luck would have it, was looking to break out of the suits and ties his characters had worn in Fatal Attraction (1987) and Wall Street (1987) and transition into a role that was more physical.

Michael Douglas and Andy Garcia in “Black Rain”

Michael Douglas, who’d won his first Academy Award as a producer, prided himself for keeping up with current events, a knack that had influenced his decision to star in pictures about stalkers or corporate raiders. In the late eighties, not only was the U.S. auto industry struggling to survive against Asian competition, but Japanese investors were spending billions to purchase American real estate, from office towers to golf courses. Anxiety in the States of being invaded by Japan in an economic war, and lingering resentment in Japan over being conquered by the Allies in World War II, with two of their cities leveled by atomic bombs, suggested to Douglas that relations between the two nations had never fully healed. Despite the hairy nature of Bolotin & Lewis’s script, Douglas shared a copy with Stanley R. Jaffe and Sherry Lansing, the producers of Fatal Attraction. Paramount Pictures, where Jaffe and Lansing had a five-year production deal, agreed to develop Black Rain as a starring vehicle for Douglas. Paul Verhoeven agreed to direct in his follow-up to RoboCop.

Yûsaku Matsuda in “Black Rain”

The script–in which a dirty NYPD detective and his partner transport a Japanese gangster home, only to let him slip through their fingers when they arrive–would film extensively in urban locations. The producers quickly realized the reason films made in Japan seemed to take place in the countryside: filming in cities like Tokyo was a logistical nightmare, with permissions, permits and scheduling taking a great deal of time to negotiate, especially by western standards. By February 1988, Verhoeven felt he’d waited long enough and was poached by Arnold Schwarzenegger to direct Total Recall (1990). Jaffe and Lansing, producing Black Rain “in association” with Douglas, offered the directing job to Ridley Scott. Despite the 1988 Writers Guild of America strike halting any work on the script beginning March 7 until the work stoppage would be lifted on August 7, production designer Norman Spencer spent nearly that entire time–five and a half months–scouting locations in Japan with Scott and Jaffe. To his disappointment, Scott found Tokyo and Kyoto too clean and newly constructed in comparison to New York, which Scott valued for its grittiness, visceral locations like the Meatpacking District, in which Nick Conklin, the cop played by Douglas, pursues the bad guy Sato on foot into an abattoir.

Michael Douglas in “Black Rain”

Ridley Scott found what he was looking for in Osaka, an industrial city that offered not only the dense pedestrian and motor vehicle traffic of New York, but the air pollution and neon of Scott’s science fiction masterwork Blade Runner (1982). Alan Poul, a Yale University graduate in Japanese language and literature who’d been working as a Japanese cinema programmer when Paul Schrader sought his logistical help filming Mishima (1985) in Tokyo assumed a similar role on Black Rain. In what was a troubling sign, many property owners refused permission for their businesses to appear in the film, wary of being associated with a movie about Yakuza. Others took exception with locations that didn’t square with civil planning, such as an apartment unit the filmmakers wanted to place over a fish market. With Andy Garcia joining the cast as Conklin’s partner, shooting commenced in Osaka in October 1988.

The Japanese cast–Yūsaku Matsuda as Sato, Ken Takakura playing against type as a law-abiding cop, Tomisaburô Wakayama as the Yakuza boss–communicated with Scott through an interpreter. The crew consisted of roughly forty-five westerners on work visas, with 120 jobs being filled by Japanese. While Scott maintained that the local government was more accommodating than the one in Tokyo had been, Osaka authorities were adamant that filming regulations be adhered to without exception. In a case of life imitating art to a degree they didn’t anticipate, the filmmakers found themselves wrapped in the same red tape that Conklin faces as a foreigner working in Japan. Ridley Scott, who’d directed countless commercials, was accustomed to changing camera setups on the fly and paying overtime if necessary to finish his work in as few days as possible, but discovered overtime didn’t exist in Japan, where authorities issued permits down to the minute and had police standing by to halt filming.

Michael Douglas in “Black Rain”

Alan Poul was most critical of the Osaka Prefectural Police, which seemed to have no experience with crowd control and like hundreds of pedestrians, stood around watching them work. Private security was hired to keep onlookers at a safe distance. Sherry Lansing had to stall police from shutting them down for the day, saying anything to give Scott fifteen extra minutes to finish work. Tensions on both sides started to boil over when officials shut down the action sequence at the steel mill after it fell behind schedule. The climax had been planned to shoot on the island of Hokkaido, but with costs escalating on the $30 million production after six weeks of filming in Osaka, the filmmakers made the decision to complete the picture in the U.S. Scott knew a vineyard in Napa Valley, California, and the finale was shot there over a period of ten days, despite nine days of torrential rain. A steel mill in Fontana, California was used to complete the industrial sequence, while the scene in which Charlie meets his demise was shot under a freeway in downtown Los Angeles. Both exteriors and interiors of the nightclub scenes (featuring Kate Capshaw as an American hostess) were filmed on the Paramount lot.

Michael Douglas and Kate Capshaw in “Black Rain”

Black Rain opened in September 1989 on 1,610 screens in the U.S. While critics remarked on the film’s visual gloss, their reviews were uniformly negative. Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert turned two thumbs down. Siskel offered that despite having an excellent villain, the script was wrongheaded, with Conklin coming off as the typical hotshot cop rather than a stranger in a strange land. Ebert was hugely disappointed based on Scott’s work with Blade Runner, which curiously, the critic had changed his mind on and now regarded as a great film. Black Rain opened #1 at the box office and held that spot for three consecutive weekends, and after spending seven of eight weeks among the top ten grossing films, ducked out of theaters. Short of the glorious critical reappraisal Blade Runner enjoyed leading up to the release of a Director’s Cut in theaters in 1992, Black Rain did seem to stick with many of those who saw it.

Michael Douglas and Andy Garcia in “Black Rain”

Though completed a year after the writers strike lifted, Black Rain shows all the signs of being hurried before cameras with a script sketched out on a legal pad. It obeys the Maverick Cop playbook line by line. Nick Conklin is living on the edge (he’s introduced on a Harley-Davidson café racer, challenging a Suzuki rider to race from under the Brooklyn Bridge to the Manhattan Bridge) and returns to an empty apartment with the ex-wife on his answering machine (the ex-wife and the answering machine are believable). He does things his way despite exhibiting zero facility for investigative work. The problem isn’t that Conklin is unlikable, a yahoo as well as a crooked yahoo, it’s that he’s produced by cookie cutter. Running 125 minutes, the movie is one that could’ve improved dramatically with just two pages/minutes of material, Michael Douglas ideally coming across as a man as opposed to an action figure acting out a plot, with late eighties dialogue in which he calls everyone “pal” twelve times too many.

Ken Takakura and Michael Douglas in “Black Rain”

Neither the screenwriters nor Ridley Scott have a clue who Conklin’s Japanese counterpart is, Ken Takakura miscast as a man with the face of a samurai and the spine of a jellyfish, his character unlikely to speak English and Takakura tasked with having to recite a bit too much of it. The movie cooks with its villain, Yūsaku Matsuda, whose energy brings to mind the gangsters of James Cagney or later, Nicolas Cage, reined in here from going over the top. Matsuda, who was diagnosed with bladder cancer before booking this job and died six weeks after the movie was released, plays a terrific adversary for Douglas: younger, wealthier, better looking and invulnerable to reprimand by his institution. The plot, which is vaguely about warring Yakuza factions trying to obtain the plates necessary to produce counterfeit U.S. currency, is visual enough to require no explanation. Its simplicity allows us to bathe in the visuals by Ridley Scott and cinematographer Jan De Bont, which are exciting. We don’t simply watch motorcycles race, we feel like we’re on the back of one. Even though the filmmakers were able to get Osaka on screen fleetingly with the time they had, a little goes a long way, and a Japanese metropolis wouldn’t play this big a role in a movie until Lost In Translation (2003). The filmmakers accomplish a lot less than those with their talent could have, but the sum is a better than average hard-on cop thriller.

Video rental category: Action/ Adventure

Special interest: East Meets West