The Stairway to the Distant Past

I get 50,000 Yen a day, plus expenses, growls tough-talking detective Maiku "Mike" Hama (Masatoshi) in Stairway to the Distant Past, the second part of director Kaizo Hayashi's stylish modern-day Japanese film noir trilogy. Picking up where the Most Terrible Time in My Life Left off, Stairway delivers a knockout combination of widescreen color visuals and savvy pulp storytelling more luridly violent, outrageously ironic and sincerely affecting than it's predecessor. Broke, his vintage Nash convertible repossessed, private eye Mike Hamma is reduced to combining the mean streets of the Yokohama waterfront on a borrowed bicycle. But when Lily, a beautiful stripper from out of Hama's past, returns to town, the fuse is lit on a criminal powder keg set to blow the lid off the Yokohama underworld. Hama's search for his long lost parents soon has him up to his neck in a simmering conspiracy pitting corrupt politicians, local Yakuza gangster and the Taiwanese mafia against the mysterious "Man in White." Forced to admit the truth of his past to both himself and his plucky kid sister, Hama now must discover whether private eyes are born or made - if he can just keep from getting killed first.