Arrow
Video has been on a roll lately regarding the late Japanese surrealist master
Seijun Suzuki’s oeuvre, whether it’s their recently released The Early Years Vol. 1 boxed set, the
celebrated Taisho Trilogy and their
new release of Detective Bureau 2-3: Go
to Hell Bastards! Picking up where
they left off on the prolific former Nikkatsu filmmaker years prior to his
termination over the bizarre and incongruent masterwork Branded to Kill, Arrow have returned to The Early Years series with Vol.
2, presenting an assortment of the director’s earlier works yet to be
released outside of Japan.
Where
the first collection of films focused on Japanese youths drifting in and out of
the yakuza way of life or touching briefly on the Taisho period explored
decades later in his Taisho Trilogy,
this time around the focus is on Border
Crossings: The Crime and Action Movies.
In other words, the five films contained within this particular boxed
set tend towards yakuza pictures and action thrillers depicted inside a Japan
in transition with more than a few English speaking American characters
cropping up in almost each and every offering.
All
prove to be indelible ensemble pieces that showcase the director in the act of
sharpening his subversive talents for visual flair while mixing what would soon
become his trademark surreal and even goofball abstractions. All in all, Arrow have outdone themselves
with a follow up to their already fascinating Early Years Vol. 1 set that manages to be even stronger than its
predecessor.
Eight Hours of Terror (1957)
Only
the fifth feature film in the director’s career, this action oriented ensemble
thriller is deceptively simple in design yet proves to be both compelling and
whimsical. After a group of passengers
on a train are derailed by a typhoon which destroys the tracks ahead, the group
boards a replacement bus keen on reaching their destination but soon find
themselves accosted by dangerous robbers on the run. Much like later English language thrillers
such as Runaway Train or Speed, the film is largely grounded in
the moving vehicle with the characters trapped inside, leaving ample room for
the cavalcade of quirky and dangerous characters’ back histories to be fleshed
out and story arcs to play through to their logical ends.
Something
of an outlier in Suzuki’s career, Eight
Hours of Terror is among the more overtly western features from the
filmmaker. Drawing heavily from
Hitchcock’s own The Lady Vanishes
which largely takes place within the confines of a moving train, the film
largely draws its energies from the group dynamics of the passengers stuck in
an unfortunate predicament. The
standouts of the group involve Keiko Shima as a prostitute who forms a bond
with a convicted murder on the bus played by Nobou Kaneko, with both characters
evoking sympathy from the viewer in spite of their pasts. In a way Keiko Shima’s character forecasts
the director’s own sympathies for the struggles of a prostitute later explored
in Gate of Flesh and Story of a Prostitute. There’s also a
great deal of comic relief sprinkled throughout the proceedings coming from the
wealthier characters who couldn’t act more put upon by the arrival of the
burglars if they tried.
Being
the one film in this set not shot in widescreen, Eight Hours of Terror makes terrific use of the enclosed spaces
with the Academy Ratio format photographed by Suzuki regular Nagatsuka Kazue,
creating a sense of claustrophobia and unease with everyone packed in a tight
box looking into the end of a loaded gun.
That said, visually this is one of Suzuki’s considerably less stylized
efforts, generally aiming for medium-close ups of the actors’ faces and more
western influenced framing of the characters in a single shot. Where it shines involves chase sequences
within the mountain woods, echoing the thick forests seen in Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon in between wide vistas of the
countryside seen from afar on high, making solid use of the natural locations.
Overall,
Suzuki fans will delight in seeing just how much the director managed to do
with a limited budget, a lack of a central protagonist and the ability to make
viewers empathize with unsavory characters.
However, those anticipating much of the filmmaker’s increasingly funky
visual anecdotes will have to wait until the next feature to see where the
director began to gradually toss in more derailing asides that set him apart
from the Nikkatsu pack.
The Sleeping Beast Within (1960)
After
Junpei Ueki (Shunsuke Ashida) returns home to his family following a long
business trip on behalf of a trading company, his daughter Keiko (Kazuko
Yoshiyuki) can’t help but worry when he mysteriously vanishes without a trace shortly
thereafter. Joining forces with
boyfriend and newspaper reporter Shotaro Kasai (Hiroyuki Nagato), the two
embark on a search for her missing father only to have him reappear as abruptly
as he disappeared. Junpei seems fine,
but an unconvinced Shotaro presses on with his investigation and in the process
discovers a hidden underworld of crime with far more dastardly implications
regarding Keiko’s father than the couple initially thought.
Having
switched to widescreen NikkatsuScope photographed by Mine Shigeyoshi this time
around, Suzuki’s mysterious and unnerving crime investigation thriller marks a
recurring theme running through his work regarding the coexistence of the
everyman and the yakuza. The film’s main
character, a well-to-do business and family man, may or may not have ties to the
criminal organization, a still very real problem for Japanese society. Moreover, even this early in his career we
can see the director’s focus on a Japan in transition, either concerned with
western influences depicted in his Taisho
Trilogy or with the presence of foreign English speaking characters
infiltrating the screen. In more than
one sequence, Suzuki depicts Japanese characters mingling with English speaking
characters whether it be within a bar setting or on the expensive cruise ship
where we first meet Junpei.
Ultimately
The Sleeping Beast Within is a film
about façade and denial, with people hiding behind the image they project for
the world to see and those personally connected to them refusing to accept the
situation for what it is. It’s a
timeless story with ongoing relevance to Japanese society, yet Suzuki’s fresh
and at times eccentric spin on the material sets it apart from the usual crime
investigation thriller. Suzuki, having
moved away from Academy Ratio for the time being, exploits the widescreen
format beautifully and displays a keen visual sense for camera placement and
staging of the actors in a shot.
Occasionally Suzuki evokes a first-person point of view such as when
Shotaro enters a bar as he looks on at the patrons, with drunkards walking directly
into the camera. It also, within the
same year, provided a springboard for actor Hiroyuki Nagato to offer two sides
of the same character, one with noble intentions and the other who will stop at
nothing to get a good story.
Smashing the O-Line (1960)
While
The Sleeping Beast Within prominently
featured actor Hiroyuki Nagato as a heroic journalist intent on uncovering his
girlfriend’s father’s potential ties to the Yakuza, Nagato would make in the
following months a complete 180 degree reversal with Suzuki’s next feature Smashing the O-Line. In the role of competing journalist Katori,
this time around Nagato plays a thoroughly devious and unethical newsman who
will freely engage in any means necessary to beat his friend Nishina (Yuji
Kodaka) to breaking the story about a human-trafficking ring first. Both men share a love/hate relationship in
that their race to the headlines often get in the way of their friendship,
until one day Katori begins to involve his own family in his illicit
methodology. Soon the film transforms
into an excoriating examination of the ethics of news media while introducing
elements of film noir and the femme fatale.
At
first the film plays like a flipside of The
Sleeping Beast Within, covering similar territory with an entirely
different regard and approach. It also
takes longer for the premise to reveal itself whereas the previous film sets up
the plot almost immediately with the film’s central protagonist vanishing from
sight early on. Of Suzuki’s films,
Katori might be among the most nihilistic antiheroes to prominently feature in
one of his works. In more than one
scene, Katori is seen bedding prostitutes before selling them up the river to
the police, all the while maintaining a smug distance from the characters being
duped. Having seen Nagato play such a
noble figure in The Sleeping Beast Within,
it’s somewhat jarring to see him give us the polar-opposite character
here. It comes as no surprise that Yuji
Kodaka, the film’s hero, would himself play the complete opposite character
later on in Suzuki’s The Man with a
Shotgun.
Of
Suzuki’s works, Smashing the O-Line is
also among the more violent and startling early 1960s Japanese films,
particularly involving a thread where a female yakuza boss kidnap’s Katori’s
sister and threatens to have her thugs gang rape her. While the violence isn’t depicted onscreen,
for 1960 it comes very close and marks one of the darker moments to appear in
any of Suzuki’s pictures. While in later
years yakuza violence towards women would become more explicit in the works of
Kinji Fukusaku and Takashi Miike, this was fairly early on in the Japanese film
industry to have such a concept dramatized on the silver screen. Suzuki’s films may have grown increasingly
surreal but they were rarely ever this dark and foreboding.
That
said, the film also like the eventual The
Man with a Shotgun which also dealt with the concept of rape in discussion
rather than dramatization, tends to suffer from there being too many plot
threads running simultaneously, diverting the narrative thrust somewhat. Also as our characters start to proceed
further down the rabbit hole, some of the plot developments’ dramatic impact
gets lost in the shuffle whereas The
Sleeping Beast Within maintained a solid trajectory towards unraveling it’s
central mysteries. Overall Smashing the O-Line is a fine effort
from the eventual grandmaster of Japanese surrealism in film with two leading
performances that give the actors a striking role reversal and it’s
considerably darker than some of Suzuki’s own uncompromising later
efforts. It, however, tends to stumble
somewhat in the third act despite having a memorable dramatic payoff.
Tokyo Knights (1961)
While
the previous two pictures in this boxed set presented it’s cast members playing
entirely different variations of the same character, Tokyo Knights with Koji Wada as a college student who takes on the
family business of organized crime more or less tasks Wada with playing the virtually
identical character he also played in the same year in Suzuki’s The Wind-of-Youth Group Crosses the Mountain
Pass. As with that film, Wada’s hero
is an infallible Mary Sue, a larger than life force of nature: fiercely
intelligent, skilled in the art of fighting, steps ahead of his enemies and a
shining example for everyone else to follow.
On the one hand, it can be very entertaining seeing Wada effortlessly
charge ahead through his adversaries while on the other hand, seeing him play
this exact same personality in another Suzuki film within the same year can’t
help but come off as predictable.
That
said, Tokyo Knights, the first color
film in the set, remains an engaging watch for Suzuki inserting moments of high
camp and melodrama that would inevitably forecast the lunacy unleashed in Tokyo Drifter. Take for instance a guided tour Wada embarks
on, with the heads of amazed and wowed onlookers cartoonishly popping up from
windows from below. We also get a goofy
schoolground fight scene between rival Yakuza gang Tokutake and the student
body with the American music teacher joining in on shirtless karate. While touching on Noh theater later glimpsed
in Suzuki’s Kagero-Za with elements
of the carnivalesque also seen in The
Wind-of-Youth Group Crosses the Mountain Pass also featuring bloodthirsty
yakuza trying to interrupt a live stage play, Tokyo Knights can’t help but suffer from a sense of deja-vu as the
story and characters too closely resemble the film which came out alongside it.
Loosely
based on a story by Japanese politician Hara Kenzaburo, Tokyo Knights is among the more fun and entertaining Suzuki
efforts, providing a breath of fresh air after the swan dive into depravity
seen in Smashing the O-Line. There’s also a decent amount of dramatic
impact involving Wada’s father’s death and his relentless search to unmask his
killer, deftly balancing between Suzuki’s goofball slapstick and hard-hitting
crime drama. It’s also just plain fun to
look at with some wonderfully stylistic flourishes including a nightclub scene
backlit by shaking red curtains which will no doubt remind modern viewers of
the Roadhouse in Twin Peaks. Tokyo
Knights is also, up to this point, the closest the auteur has come to
delivering a musical with numerous scenes exploiting Wada’s own jazz pianist
background and the aforementioned nightclub songs.
Although
one could gripe about this being a retread of what came before with Wada,
again, playing the exact same character he did in The Wind-of-Youth Group Crosses the Mountain Pass, Tokyo Knights is a frequently
entertaining and colorful romp echoing the director’s youth movies in the
previous Early Years boxed set. What’s more, after getting so knee-deep in
the muck with Smashing the O-Line,
it’s again refreshing for Suzuki to give viewers something a bit lighter this
time around.
The Man with a Shotgun (1961)
The
spaghetti western, i.e. an Italian cinematic take on the American western, is
common knowledge among cinephiles with many influencing if not outright
creating some of the most beloved westerns in American film. Few, however, are aware of the Japanese take
on the American western. I myself was
all but completely unaware of the subgenre’s existence. Anyway, the title itself The Man with a Shotgun as well as the plot could be easily confused
with the typical American or spaghetti western and yet Suzuki sets the story
deep in the Japanese rural mountain countryside amid very traditional stock
characters of drunkards, prostitutes and of course the Yakuza. Think of it as a standard western with just
enough Japanese characteristics to set itself apart from the pack.
Deceptively
simple in approach yet an oddly compelling revenge action thriller, The Man with a Shotgun follows the
mercurial lone hero Ryoji (Nitani Hideaki) echoing the debonair distant cool
of, say, Clint Eastwood’s Man with No
Name trilogy or even Giuliano Gemma from A Pistol for Ringo. On a
quest for bloodthirsty revenge for the rape and murder of his girlfriend, Ryoji
ends up in a small village comprised of drunken reprobates and a gutless
sheriff with his tail tucked firmly between his legs. Unable to fulfill his duties after being
wounded amid a shootout, the sheriff’s duties fall upon Ryoji as he tangles
with fierce competitor Masa (Yuji Kodaka giving the polar opposite take on his
clean-cut reporter from Smashing the
O-Line). Upon accepting the job,
Ryoji inadvertently finds himself in a war against local mill foreman Nishioka
(Akio Tanaka) who with his posse of brutal hooligans harbor far more illicit
and deadly secrets than meets the eye.
By
now, Suzuki has established himself as one of Nikkatsu’s top tier genre
directors with a keen command over his actors and an unparalleled visual
sense. Second to Tokyo Knights, The Man with a
Shotgun is Suzuki’s most crowd pleasing effort, subverting genre tropes to
fit the distinctive Japanese rural region as well as giving his performers a
chance to play drastically different characters than the one before. For instance, Yuji Kodaka more or less gives
viewers an entirely different character than the one they saw in Smashing the O-Line, playing a sweaty
violent drunkard this time around. Also
like Smashing the O-Line, the film
hints at the notion of sexual assault and violence against women from boorish
Japanese men, a heavy topic which is appropriately handled with care and
reserve in this revenge drama. And much
like the aforementioned Tokyo Knights,
Suzuki zeroes in on inanimate objects such as cufflinks or necklaces as vital
clues leading our hero to confront his long sought-after adversaries.
Colorful,
compelling and even whimsical at times including a musical aside where the
newly sworn in sheriff buys the locals drinks and entertains with an accordion,
The Man with a Shotgun winds up being
one of the more enjoyable entertainments offered in this Early Years volume. It’s
also curious to see Suzuki’s gradual rebellion against the Nikkatsu system
unfolding as he manages to produce a solid genre picture but still manages to
sneak in subversive asides that would become trademark in his later
post-Nikkatsu works. Moreover, fans of
westerns are inclined to give The Man
with a Shotgun a look for it’s uniquely East Asian take on the traditional
American western, giving fans a familiar story yet placing it in a setting
populated with characters we’ve never seen presented this way.
- Andrew Kotwicki