Kungfu movies crept into the American market almost backward, with producers named Run Run Shaw and budgets around $19.95. But now, here’s the first American version of Japan’s favorite genre, the yakuza movie, and it’s a handsome expensive production with a great performance by Robert Mitchum and a scary one by Ken Takakura, Japan’s box office champion. The Yakuza is a superior action movie, but all the same, 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. — Roger Ebert, 1975.

I’m fascinated by Mitchum’s late career work, which has a wonderful gravity and sincerity. Here, as in films like The Big Sleep (1978) and The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973), he is somber and focused. You feel the weight of age on him, but not that he is a fading star. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he never descended into camp or roles that didn’t suit his abilities as he aged. Instead, he abandons some of the laconic cool of his younger years to create more realistic and fully realized performances. Both sides of Mitchum are marvelous, even complementary. — Kendahl Cruver