“Aren’t you just wandering in the black fog?” Part yakuza noir, part political thriller, and part crime drama, Kinji Fukasaku’s Hokori takaki chosen (US: The Proud Challenge) requires very close viewing because, despite the entire story centered on a single arms deal, the plot bobs and weaves through countless interactions, double-crosses, and retaliations from which the viewer can easily be knocked off course. The weapons in question are being manufactured by Mihara Industries for arms dealer Takayama Hiroshi (Tetsuro Tamba) to sell to a Southeast Asian leader who needs them to crush a revolutionary uprising. The leader’s wife Marin (Yuko Kuzonoki), however, has been keeping the revolutionaries informed so they can intercept the shipment, but that’s not all: she’s also commenced an extramarital affair with Takayama (“You don’t love your husband, you just love the fortune”). Meanwhile, the postwar Allied Forces are on the hunt for illicit arms deals, while the Japanese press is most decidedly not interested in publishing any criticism of the intelligence community, that is with the exception of veteran trade reporter Kuroki (Kōji Tsuruta), the film’s lead protagonist whose natural instinct for exposing corruption was intensified after a friend’s unresolved murder on an Allied Forces base during the Korean War. Meanwhile, Kuroki’s old friend Hiromi (Hitomi Nakahara), who works for Mihara, is kidnapped and ends up going crazy inside a mental hospital. Yep, there’s a lot going on here, but Fukasaku injects so much cinematic style — extensive Dutch angles, thick shadows, overhead shots, torso shots, extremely low shots, long zooms and wide angles — that viewers will forgive a busy script. Among too many to count, highlights include a drawn-out fistfight where frenetic cameras, seemingly on the floor, chase the actors through a parking garage, and an extreme long shot of a female character being stabbed in a crowded park. Lowlights include the embarrassingly bad delivery of English language dialogue by the non-Japanese performers.