A few Japanese films, especially those by Seijun Suzuki.

An Actor’s Revenge (1963), directed by Kon Ichikawa. I keep being surprised and delighted by the visual splendours of Japanese cinema. An Actor’s Revenge is stunning in its visual beauty and imaginative staging. I say “staging” because the main character is a kabuki actor, a female impersonator, and the various sets (everything is on a set) and designs allude to, but do not simply deliver, the kabuki stage. The imaginative vision here is stunning. The story is familiar, even old-fashioned. A kabuki actor finds himself acting in front of an audience that prominently includes three men who are responsible for the deaths of the actor’s mother and father. The daughter of one of these men is also in the audience. The plot has the actor set out to avenge his parents. Complicating things are two master thieves, and another mysterious man who is out to kill the actor. And so we have many goings-on, much darkness, much colour, much play acting, and a stunning performance by Kazuo Hasegawa as the cross-dressing Yukinojo. Whether on stage or off, Yukinijo dresses as a woman, although most everyone knows he is a man. In fact, Namiji (Ayako Wakao), the daughter of one of the villains, falls in love with the female-looking Yukinojo knowing full well he is a man. Finally, I might note that this was Kazuo Hasegawa’s 300^th film (this is acknowledged in the screen credits), and he slyly plays two roles in the film, that of Yukinojo and also that of Yumitaro, one of the thieves who also serves as something of a chorus. I say “slyly” because Hasegawa is such a good actor that it is possible to miss this dual role performance. This film is mind-bendingly splendid.

 

Detective Bureau 2-3: Go to Hell Bastards! (1963), directed by Seijun Suzuki. The opening shot of this frenetic film is a close-up of an American G.I., and early on in the film a character remarks that this is not an “American TV show.” No, it isn’t, but it is a send-up of the American noir cinema. This is Peter Gunn on shrooms. Jo Shishiro, he of the chipmunk cheeks, is Hideo Tajima, proprietor of Detective Bureau 2-3. I have no idea what this name signifies, but the Bureau is the office of Detective Tajima, a sort of Sam Spade or Marlowe transported to Japan. The film delights in filling the screen with images that echo American culture, even going so far as to have a couple of production numbers, one of which sees Tajima singing and dancing along with a nightclub’s entertainer. Another number has several young women wearing little and dancing to “When the Saints Come Marching In.” The whole concoction is a hoot. Perhaps not as stylish as Suzuki’s later Tokyo Drifter (1966) or Branded to Kill (1966), this film does have the primary colours, the careful use of widescreen, the fast pacing, the quirky sound track, the offbeat locations, and the surprises we expect from Suzuki. The film’s title fronts a film that proudly parades excess. The plot, familiar and quite beside the point, has our detective hero infiltrating a criminal organization in order to get the goods on this organization. Meanwhile, the criminal organization is feuding with at least one other criminal organization and this leads to a couple of baroque shootouts. Through it all, our hero meets a femme fatale, has his cover exposed, and spars with his two minions, one of whom is a female reporter. The film is delicious. 

 

Branded to Kill (1966), directed by Seijun Suzuki. Talk about your deconstruction, and then take a look at this film. It is about a hitman who has a fetish for the aroma of rice wafting from a rice cooker. He also has two femme fatales causing him some anguish. Mostly, however, his anguish comes from his desire to be No. 1 hitman. As the film opens, he is No. 3. By the end of the film, he can echo James Cagney’s famous shout, “Top of the world, Mama.” And like Cody, the Cagney character, he has also met his doom. Suzuki is a film maker who marries pulp with more style than you can possibly wish for. He is the master of crazy ideas and wonky camera angles. He likes shots through doorways and passageways. His protagonist, Hanada, is played by chipmunk-cheeks Jo Shishido, a rather addle-pated hitman who finds novel ways to assassinate his targets. For example, he shoots one fellow through the waterpipe below the sink over which the fellow is washing his face. He also shoots a few people while sitting atop a hot air balloon. Then we have the surreal bits with birds in cages or dangling from the rear-view mirror of a car, or the many many butterflies that appear as décor or as impediments to an assassination. Oh, and then there is the scene in which Hanada lies beneath an automobile that has ropes hooked to its bumper, and he pulls the automobile closer and closer to his adversary who is trying to shoot him. So what does Suzuki deconstruct? The conventional noir thriller here finds it nemesis in this wild off kilter crazy Seijun Suzuki fling.

 

Tokyo Drifter (1966), directed by Seijun Suzuki. If Gate of Flesh is the most pulp of Suzuki's films, then Tokyo Drifter is the most stylish. This film offers Classical form crossed with Romantic content. The form delivers sparse sets singularly coloured and lighted, with emphasis on verticals and horizontals. The colours, dark green, mauve, purple, muted yellow, red (of course), pastel blue, white, along with black and white with hot lighting at the beginning, give us eye-popping visual fields to look at. The action is stylized in the extreme giving the action something of a mechanical look. I was reminded of both Melville's Samurai with Alain Delon and MGM musicals of the late 40s and early 50s. The action has clear choreography that gives it an artificial but effective look. Camera angles are various and noticeable diverting the viewer from action to form. As for content, this involves a lone "drifter" with a sense of loyalty who is quick on the trigger and fast with his fists. He is a combination of the typical film noir hero out on a limb and sawing it off, and the American cowboy. The film even has a "Western Saloon," in which an entertaining and wild brawl breaks out. This is as imaginative a take on the gangster film as you could expect to see.

 

The Ballad of Narayama (1958), directed by Keisuke Kinoshita. This film is an exquisite exercise in formalism, painterly and deliberate. And yet it also manages to be an examination of the human capacity for self-sacrifice, kindness, stupidity, and selfishness. Orin (Kinuyo Tanaka) is a woman about to turn 70, and in her village, a village strained by poverty and hunger, when someone turns 70, he or she goes to Narayama to die. Orin accepts this ritual. Her son and his new bride (his first wife has died) are saddened by the prospect of losing Orin, but her grandson and his lover are just thrilled by the prospect of having one less mouth to feed around the house. We have much ado about Orin’s teeth. We have a kerfuffle with some local thieves. Mostly, however, we have Kinoshita’s beautiful set pieces. The film takes the form of a kabuki play. Everything except for the final shot of the film, takes place on sets, but these are exceptionally detailed and beautiful sets. The colours are eye-popping. Most striking are the autumnal colours. We are, after all, dealing with old age and mortality. The journey Orin takes to Narayama, carried by her son, is arduous and wrenching once they arrive, snow begins to fall, and Orin sends her son away so she may die alone. Paired with Orin is Mata (Seiji Miyaguchi), an old man who refuses to take the journey to Narayama until his son binds him with rope and hauls him up the mountain. Then we have that final shot of a train crossing a landscape and going through a town named Obasute (Abandonment of Old People). Just what does this signify? 

 

Gate of Flesh (1964), directed by Seijun Suzuki. The word "pulp" is often used to describe the films of Seijun Suzuki, and of the four Suzuki films I have seen, Gate of Flesh is the most deserving of this descriptor. Suzuki worked for Nikkatsu Studio and he was obligated to take the films the studio gave him. He also regularly had a shooting schedule of not much over a month. With such constraints, he (like Howard Hawks in Hollywood) managed to make films stamped with his singular vision. Gate of Flesh was to be an "adult" film, one of two categories of film available at the time in Japan. In other words, it was to be lurid. And it is. The still photographs one finds on the internet do not capture the richness of Suzuki's colour or his careful structuring of his wide screen photography or the shocking things we see such as the graphic killing of a cow. The action of the film takes place shortly after the end of the Second World War, and it expresses the damage, both materially and psychically, the war inflicted on Japan. The central characters are a group of prostitutes who live in a bombed out building. They eke out an existence by selling their bodies. They will not offer their services to American GIs, and they will not allow any of their group to offer sex for free. To give oneself freely results in severe and humiliating punishment. Each prostitute wears signature clothing, mostly a feature of colour, although one dresses in traditional garb. Anyway, into this group comes chipmunk-cheeked Joe Shishido (a regular in Suzuki films), an ex-soldier who is on the run from the police for having robbed a U.S. army depot. You can guess that the cat has found the chicken coop. Suzuki handles the action with visual flare, and the characters express their anger at the world, their hope amid hopelessness, with intense words, looks, and actions. This is a bleak look at life in post war Japan, but it is also a sobering examination of abject conditions at any time. The narrow streets, ruined buildings, enclosed waterways, teeming markets are reminders of a humanity trapped by circumstance. Even with masterful wide screen photography, Suzuki manages to capture the claustrophobia of existence in this world. Somewhere outside this ghetto people may live more relaxed lives, but we can only imagine this because we cannot see this. What we see is life in extremis. This is pulp fiction with artistry.