“You’re insane. You’re twisted inside. I want to have your baby.” The malevolence of Yasuzô Masumura’s Karakkaze yarô (US: Afraid to Die) takes the noir ethos to a whole other level of late-cycle, new-era, sadomasochistic, bright-color badness. One of the most fascinating and iconic figures to come out of Japan in the 20th century, an author, poet, nationalist, activist, and actor who publicly committed harakiri (suicide by disembowelment) in 1970, Yukio Mishima plays young gangster Takeo Asahina, just released from prison, whose attempt to avoid falling back into a criminal lifestyle lasts a matter of minutes before a rival yakuza gang, including a heavy-breathing hitman named Masa the Asthmatic (Shigeru Kôyama), wants him dead. A fugitive on the run not from police but from his own kind, Takeo grunts and emotes his way into a perversely abusive relationship with the virgin Yoshie Koizumi (Wakao Ayako) whom he violently rapes (“Sorry, kid; forgive me”), impregnates, and repeatedly beats to a pulp, yet somehow the performers still manage to evince moments of genuine love. (In the most cynical twist of all, when Koizumi refuses an abortion at the last minute, the abortionist and Takeo collude to end the pregnancy without her consent.) The story is standard noir fare, but the dissonance of its tone, the contradiction of Takeo’s violent inhumanity (“Yakuza can never become human beings,” Yoshie tells him) with his vulnerable charm (his plea with the prison warden to let him stay, his avuncular play-wrestling with the little girl he’s kidnapped for ransom) exposes our psychic Cold War instability in the form of one severely unbalanced man.