A brutal and outrageous symphony of depravity, Shohei Imamura’s Buta to gunkan (US: Pigs and Battleships) takes film noir as far as it can go without shattering into a billion nasty pieces. Viewers be warned: this film is as silly as it is brilliant. Most of all, and against all odds, it’s a social commentary: in a postwar Japan lost between cultures, America and its occupying forces symbolize both the greatest hope and the most insidious evil. (The patriotic American march music bookending the film is clearly ironic.)  As for the story, the young, precocious Kinta (Hiroyuki Nagato) takes a job running black market pork distribution for a yakuza gang who exploit the boy’s desperation and insecurity, promising him a “bonus” of 150,000 yen, which remains always just out of reach. Kinta’s girlfriend Haruko (Jitsuko Yoshimura) wants to move to Kawasaki before his gangster ways destroy their lives, but Kinta wants to make something of himself, and opportunity arrives every few days in the form of a new ship full of American sailors and their disposable income (and libidos). With law enforcement practically nonexistent, the city’s replete with theft, corruption, prostitution, violence, and murder; we’re immersed in this chaos from the opening sequence of a half-assed police raid in the beautifully perverse brothels and back alleys and madness of the crowd. This is a society clinging to its final thread of morality; Kinta, however, will be clinging to an automatic rifle, his only form of control, before the film ends. Imamura’s cinematic imagination may be bleak but it explodes in every scene, perhaps most notably in a kaleidoscopic aerial angle of a hotel room gang rape, which is followed a bit later by — what else — a deadly pig stampede through the city.