Nikkatsu Noir: INTIMIDATION (1960)

In a spin-off of its Nikkatsu Noir collection of a couple of years ago, Criterion Eclipse has released a five-film collection dedicated to studio director Koreyoshi Kurahara, who helmed the genre-defining I Am Waiting from the earlier set. The Warped World of Koreyoshi Kurahra is more generically diverse, but it picks up where the first collection left off with a Kurahara noir from 1960. Intimidation is 65 minutes of meanness, the story of a struggle of two desperate weaklings in a heartless business world. Takita (Nobuo Kaneko) is being promoted to general manager of his bank, while Nakaike (Akira Nishimura) warms the sake bottles in an antechamber. Nakaike is an all-around loser, passed over by management in favor of Takita, who also stole away Nakaike's girlfriend years ago. But it's not all unconditional victory for the new general manager. He's being blackmailed by a shady businessman who knows about some illegal loans Takita made and wants money the easy way: by Takita robbing his own bank.

Takita contemplates a life of crime uneasily

The prospect terrifies Takita, who envisions getting caught in a nightmare that proves useful as a warning to make sure the alarms are cut. Takita's best idea comes while awake: to get Nakaike drunk during a night shift so he won't be around when Takita breaks in. The only problem is that Nakaike still manages to blunder into the middle of the robbery. Takita's wearing a mask, but he's already lost half his disguise when he dropped his sunglasses before breaking in. Kurahara milks the robbery scene for all the tension Kaneko can convey with his eyes as Takita trembles with fear that Nakaike will recognize him. For his part, the equally terrified Nakaike can't help wondering why this brazen robber is only stealing three million yen out of all the millions in the safe. Finally, Takita breaks first, unmasking and telling Nakaike that he was only conducting a test of the bank's security system.



Nakaike contemplates crime even more uneasily, but a gun on your back will do that to you.

Without his loot, Takita confronts his blackmailer and manages to kill him. He tells the entire bank staff the security-test story, but makes a big mistake by publicly criticizing Nakaike for his poor performance during the "test." For the meek clerk, this is the last straw at last, especially considering the he wasn't really fooled by Takita's spiel. In fact, he knows more about Takita's troubles than the latter realizes, and in his rage sees an opportunity to step in and keep the blackmail screws on his old rival. This is Nakaike's big chance to turn the tables, to exploit his exploiter, but he just might stake too much on his new power over Takita....

If anything, Intimidation is more noirish in the American sense than anything in the original Nikkatsu Noir collection. There's no real femme fatale -- the nearest thing to that is Nakaike's geisha sister who eggs him on to stand up to Takita -- but the tension between two deeply flawed characters driven by conflicting compulsions could just as easily have been done with an American script and cast. The new collection touts Kurahara as a fierce stylist, but Intimidation has the virtues of concise efficiency. One of the few moments of stylistic outbreak comes during Takita's dream-rehearsal of the robbery. Here, perhaps hoping to recreate dream-logic or dream-narrative, Kurahara jump-cuts all over the place to accelerate the action, and does so at oddly timed moments to keep us slightly disoriented and maintain a sense that something's wrong. Ultimately, however, this is an actor's picture, and Kaneko and Nishimura fill the bill quite nicely. As a relatively workmanlike film, Intimidation should prove a good jumping-off point for the collection's exploration of Kurahara's more eccentric work through the 1960s. I picked up the collection during Barnes & Noble's semi-annual Criterion half-price sale, so stay tuned for more Kurahara in the weeks to come.

TATTOOED LIFE (1965)

The Japanese direcor Seijun Suzuki is notorious for making genre films that became such eccentric expressions of personal style that they got him fired from the Nikkatsu Studio. This particular film comes late in his Nikkatsu tenure but finds him on relatively good behavior from the studio's standpoint. Tattooed Life is a fairly conventional drama that brackets a story of working class life and doomed romance with outbursts of yakuza violence. It's in vivid color but could pass for one of the black-and-white "Nikkatsu Noirs" or "cosmopolitan" films Suzuki had made while paying his dues at the studio.

Like many of the Nikkatsu Noirs collected in Criterion Eclipse's essential box set, Tattooed Life deals with characters who are waiting for a chance at a better life. But while the "cosmopolitan" films are set in their present day, Suzuki's film is a period piece, set in 1926, aka Showa Year One, the first year of Emperor Hirohito's reign. The heroes' waiting, meanwhile, is complicated by the fact that they're fugitives from justice. Testu (Hideki Takahashi) is a yakuza, nicknamed "the White Fox," who recently carried out a hit but is now targeted for one by his own bosses. His younger brother Kenji (Kotobuki Hananamoto) aspires to attend art school, but when he sees his brother set upon by the killers, he impulsively kills one of them. Guilt-stricken, he wants to turn himself in to the police, but Testu can't stand the thought of the gentle youth in prison and proposes that they run off together.

They end up in a port city in northern Japan where business is booming. Well before Japan invaded Manchuria, Japanese migrant workers were making a living there, and that's where the brothers intend to make a fresh start. But they have to start from scratch after they get swindled by a local bar owner who promises to get them passage on a steamer. They end up going to work on a tunnel construction project for the Yamashita family, and once they settle in to the working-class community of roughnecks and losers, each gets a romantic storyline. Interestingly, Kenji ends up falling dangerously for the boss's wife, while his elder brother, a more reticent Tetsu, struggles to resist the affections of the boss's daughter. Tetsu has kept aloof from the crowd, notably refusing to bathe with his co-workers. The reason, of course, is that he doesn't want to show the tattoos that identify him as a yakuza. Once badges of pride and belonging, Tetsu now regards them as brands of shame. He isn't like that any more, which is what they all say just before the past comes strolling into town to prove them wrong.

The tunnel workers are capable of some rough justice themselves. Here they subject one of their own to water torture to find out who's been sabotaging their project.

Thanks to its nuanced portraits of the brothers and the people around them, Tattooed Life ends up being one of the most humane of the Suzuki films I've seen to date. It's also one of the most naturalistic, making good use of outdoor locations on the coast and along a river. Suzuki saves his more typical pyrotechnics for the very end of the picture, when Testu at last puts on his "White Fox" kimono and settles scores. The director has Takahashi run amok in a traditional home, stepping through layers of passageways deeper into the frame, then racing horizontally across the wide screen to engage the enemy. Suzuki catches the action from above and below, shooting down from an imaginary ceiling and up through a transparent floor. If anything, the gimmickry seems wrong because Suzuki has been so restrained until then, but the dynamism of it all overcomes any objections.

In one respect, Tattooed Life is more noirish than the so-called "noirs" marketed by Criterion. Those films often had happy endings, or at least victories for their protagonists, but Suzuki's movie takes the more familiar noir line that one can never really escape the past, especially when you have to answer for it. The villains are defeated, of course, but the film ends with one brother dead and the other going to jail, with romance possibly to come only after more years of waiting. Despite the violent climax, this is a sobering rather than exhilarating story, and it may be the last time that Suzuki could really take the genre seriously. It was worth his trouble to do so.

Nikkatsu Noir: A COLT IS MY PASSPORT (1967)

Takashi Nomura's thriller is nine years removed from I Am Waiting, the first film in Criterion Eclipse's Nikkatsu Noir collection. In those years the "borderless" genre inevitably, even purposefully absorbed influences from new genres around the world. The liner notes acknowledge the most obvious influence, the one we can hear in Harumi Ibe's music -- the influence of Ennio Morricone and his peers in the spaghetti western genre. The final showdown between Joe Shishido and his enemies in a desert-like landscape is probably partly spaghetti-inspired as well. But to my eyes the Italian influence doesn't end there. Nomura proves himself a widescreen master here, and the way he films architecture and landscape, especially when he emphasizes empty space or the absence of people or objects, reminds me more of Michelangelo Antonioni than of Sergio Leone.

Nomura gives Colt an imposing sense of vastness, but still keeps the focus on Joe Shishido as the archetypal hard-boiled anithero.

Nomura's approach results in some uncanny moments. The film opens with Shishido, a hitman, being shown the daily itinerary of his newest target. We get a sequence of the target's car pulling out of his driveway, then arriving at his office. The we cut to the man inside his office, his bodyguard at his side, and the camera pulls back majestically to show Shishido and his handler casing the scene from across the street. Nomura repeats the same sequence a few minutes later, holding each shot long enough to show us that Shishido isn't following the target or staking him out where we expect him. The director dramatizes Shishido's absence, making us wonder where he is until we see how the hitman will solve the problem of reaching his target in a way his employer can easily verify. Another brilliantly shot scene shows one gangster in a car trying to shake a tail. We see the action from the back of the gangster's car as he accelerates and the tail car disappears around a hillside. Nomura holds the shot for nearly a minute as the car keeps going until the tail car suddenly reappears.


The final showdown shows that Nomura isn't just a clever choreographer of non-action. But where the spaghetti directors emphasized close-ups, Nomura's showdown is all about long shots that emphasize the wide-open landscape and Shishido's almost hopeless vulnerability. After a lengthy buildup as Shishido prepares his ground for who knows what (it involves some TNT and digging what might be a foxhole or a grave), the scene explodes into rapid-fire cutting and a remarkable tracking shot as Shishido runs from left to right across a line of enemies, dodging bullets, switching weapons and blasting away.

Colt is easily the most ingeniously directed of the Nikkatsu Noirs, but the story is still basic crime cinema. Shishido's hitman is hired by one crime family to kill the head of another, but he does so in a way that puts too much heat on his employers initially. Worse for him, the families are quite quickly reconciled, on the condition that Shishido pay with his life, a pawn to be sacrificed. The rest of the film is his attempt to flee Japan (tying in to the "new start" theme of many of these films), or at least facilitate the escape of his sidekick and a waitress who's befriended them. The sidekick or protege is an unwelcome touch, since the actor Jerry Fujio seems to be in the movie only to sing a song and remind us that Japan could well have gone the way of Bollywood if some things had changed. But that's probably the only unwelcome touch in this terrific genre film. It's not as emotionally complex as I Am Waiting or Rusty Knife with their mirror-plots, but as pure entertainment and in especially in visual terms it's arguably the best of the Nikkatsu Noir set.

The no-frills nature of the Eclipse series means no trailers for the films. ctcasey has made up for that by uploading the A Colt is My Passport trailer to YouTube. The film's really a lot less crass that the pulpy ballyhoo of the trailer suggests.

Nikkatsu Noir: TAKE AIM AT THE POLICE VAN (1960)

The sleaze factor rises a bit in Seijun Suzuki's contribution to the Criterion Eclipse Nikkatsu Noir collection, a film that comes the closest of the three I've watched so far to fitting the film noir rubric. It has three things that give it a closer resemblance to the American genre: narration by the main character; a femme fatale; and the main character being an older, more world-weary personality than the young protagonists played by the comparatively cherubic Yujiro Ishihara in the two previous films.

The title is the unspoken instruction given to a sniper who sets up an ambush for the title vehicle at the start of the film. He sets a trap by sending an empty truck down a hill to collide with the van containing three prisoners. Suzuki uses the landscape to set the pace and create suspense for this scene, establishing a Burma-Shave like series of warning signs at the start and returning to them to establish where the different vehicles are as the ambush approaches. In any event, two of the prisoners are shot while another escapes in the confusion.

The debacle results in the six-month suspension of Tamon (Michitaro Mizushima), the prison officer responsible for the three men. He takes the discipline in stride because it gives him an opportunity to conduct a one-man freelance investigation. He has plenty of questions to answer. Was the attack meant to kill one or both of the victims, or to free Goro, the one who got away? Or could it have been a botched attempt to kill Goro? And what was the significance of the name "Aki" that Goro kept writing with his finger on the steamed up van window?

"Aki" (upper right)

Tamon's investigation leads him to a "talent agency" that fronts for a prostitution ring, headed by an ailing boss, around whom swirls a struggle for future control pitting the boss's stepdaughter Yuko (Misako Watanabe) against a rival faction. The search for "Aki" becomes a hunt for "Akiba," a mysterious mastermind scheming to take over the agency. Is it a pseudonym for one of Yuko's rivals -- or for Yuko herself? She's shown to be a dangerously proficient marksman with bow or gun, and the most likely suspect in the death-by-arrow of a prostitute Tamon hoped to interview. Despite the obvious danger around her, Tamon finds himself falling for her while still struggling to figure out whether she's trying to help him or kill him.

Who done it? Could it be ... the dame with the bow?

Take Aim is definitely not a youth movie in the way the Ishihara vehicles are -- not with a star in his late forties. But there's still a generational conflict in play as we come to suspect that Yuko is scheming to supplant her father. Tamon also has to deal with the younger generation in the form of a quasi girl-gang, one of whose members may have important information for him, and all of whom are in danger of being recruited into the "talent agency." But the focus here isn't on someone waiting for his life to restart -- Tamon is too proactive and maybe too mature for that. He's older than the typical American noir protagonist, but comes closer to their spirit than do the younger heroes of Nikkatsu's "borderless" films.

This 1960 films finds Suzuki not yet bursting the bounds of genre convention as he'd begin to do in Youth of the Beast and Gate of Flesh. The extra sleaze factor (photographs of topless dancers, the arrow in a woman's breast) may be Suzuki's special contribution, but this is pretty much a straight crime film with elaborate suspense sequences. Besides the titular van attack, the other highlight is a scene out of a cliffhanger serial, as Tamon and Yuko are tied up in the cab of a tanker car which is sent down a road with the fuel cap off. Their enemies light the puddle left behind, starting a race between the truck and a line of flame that could blow our protagonists sky-high. Suzuki cuts ever more rapidly between the fire and the truck from a variety of angles (including the fire seen from the rear-view mirror), as inside Yuko ironically struggles to burn her bonds apart with a cigarette lighter. It's really a silly scene but Suzuki's pacing keeps you interested in how our stars will escape.

For that matter, how will this guy escape?

While Take Aim is the most nearly noir of the Nikkatsus so far, it's also the weakest of the three I've seen. It gets too bogged down in a convoluted plot while keeping us guessing about Akiba's identity, and it isn't as character-driven as the two Ishihara vehicles. But it is a modestly effective thriller, and like the two previous films, the story could easily be translated into the American idiom. Crime-film fans of global cinema will probably like this one perfectly fine, and now that's a majority of Nikkatsu Noir I can recommend, with two films to go.

Nikkatsu Noir: RUSTY KNIFE (1958)

The director is different, but the second film in Criterion Eclipse's Nikkatsu Noir collection shows some consistency in the work of screenwriter Shintaro Ishihara, who co-scripted Rusty Knife with director Toshio Masuda. It has in common with I Am Waiting not just stars Yujiro Ishihara (the writer's brother) and Mie Kitahara, but a particular doubling approach in which two storylines mirror one another, metaphorically reflecting on each other. Given the fatalism of noir, this doubling or echoing of story details seems like a valid approach to the genre.

This time around, Ishihara the star is Tachibana, owner of the little Camarade Bar ("It means buddy," someone explains) and an ex-con who served time for stabbing to death the man who raped his girlfriend -- who hung herself out of shame. Like Ishihara's character in I Am Waiting, Tachibana is trying to make a fresh start, this time by keeping his nose clean and steering clear of cops and criminals alike. Unfortunately, for all the talk about two separate worlds, criminal and civilian, there's really no neat border. The Katsumata gang knows that Tachibana is one of three small-timers who witnessed the murder of a politician, which the gangsters staged to look like he'd hung himself.

The cops believe it because Katsumata paid the trio hush money, but now one of them is writing anonymously to both sides, demanding more hush money from the gangsters or a payoff from the cops for a confession. The culprit is actually another guy (Joe Shishido) who gets killed for his trouble, but the episode makes Katsumata interested in Tachibana and the other witness, Tachibana's bartender Makoto, while the cops know those two as the victim's cronies. Katsumata offers them hush money and Makoto takes it while Tachibana tries to remain aloof. This leads to a falling out with Makoto, who tells him off by explaining that the rape that provoked Tachibana to kill a man didn't play out the way he thought -- and that he'd killed the wrong man.

A symbolic honor killing? Tachibana throws his (t)rusty knife at a flashback apparition of his violated girlfriend.

So we have a tale of two hangings. The cops believe that the politician (the father of the journalist character played by Mie Kitahara) committed suicide, but Tachibana knows the truth. Tachibana believes he knows why his girlfriend hung herself, but Makoto knows some of the truth, and Katsumata knows more. As Tachibana plunges back into the criminal milieu in search of the ultimate truth, he realizes the need to tell the police the truth about the politician's "suicide." And wouldn't you know? The person behind that hanging and the one ultimately behind the death of Tachibana's girlfriend are one and the same.

Above, dramatic moments from Rusty Knife. Below, Mie Kitahara can't stand the suspense.

Rusty Knife maintains the "borderless" character of the Nikkatsu noirs, as nearly all the characters are thoroughly westernized and the gangsters look and behave more like American hoods than yakuza. Indeed, the one character who conspicuously wears traditional dress turns out to be a bad guy. The movie consciously deals with modern crime, explaining in an opening narration that post-war reconstruction attracted organized crime to the site of the story. And the emphasis on modernity identified with westernization seems fitting for a cycle of movies that are intended as youth films. For someone who's done five years hard time, Tachibana is quite a baby faced felon, and Yujiro Ishihara is a good deal younger than most American noir stars. Still, it's a story that could easily be translated into an American setting, though then it might be cast with older actors. These Nikkatsu films aren't classics in the league of the acknowledged Japanese masters, or even genre masters like Fukasaku or Suzuki (who directs the next film in the set), but they are structurally and thematically interesting, as well as well made, in a way that justifies the Eclipse collection.

Nikkatsu Noir: I AM WAITING (1957)

To be specific, Joji Shimaki (Yujiro Ishihara) is waiting for word from his brother who left Japan for Brazil a year ago to purchase land. Once the brother confirms the purchase, Joji's going to close down his Restaurant Reef diner and join him in South America. Until then, Joji sees no risk in striking up a conversation with a young woman standing pensively, almost as if contemplating suicide, on the dock. He invites her back to the diner for an after-hours bite to eat, and she tells him that she thinks she just killed a man. He notes that she doesn't know for sure (and we see a flashback showing that she struck the man a good blow on a head, but not necessarily a fatal one) and invites her to stay overnight (chastely, of course) and wait for the morning papers to see what really happened. That overnight stay turns into a waitress job for Saeko (Mie Kitahara, later Mrs. Ishihara).

Kurataro Takamura's cinematography achieves some classical noir effects, especially the fence-shadows across Yujiro Ishihara's back.

Time passes and Joji waits, ever less patiently. If he has issues, so has she. She apparently didn't kill the guy, but she has a hangup: she was a classically trained singer who tried out for opera, but became "a canary who can't sing," or at least can't anywhere but in an American-style cabaret from which she ran away, violently breaking her contract. In a way, she's waiting for something to happen as well. Things really start to happen when Joji gets all his letters back from Brazil; they were undelivered because there's no such person as his brother in the country. At the same time, Saeko (or is that Reiko's?) employer aggressively reasserts his right to her vocal services. That would seem to end things between Joji and Saeko, except that his investigation into what happened to his brother brings him to her cabaret....

Joji sees Saeko's true face at the nightclub -- or does he?

Koreyoshi Kurahara's thriller is the first film in Criterion Eclipse's Nikkatsu Noir series, which I rushed to seize when Barnes & Noble announced its latest 50% off sale on Criterion discs this week (the sale ends on Nov. 24, by the way). Nikkatsu apparently had the initiative in crime cinema during the 1950s and 1960s, before Toei took over (thanks to Kinji Fukasaku) in the 1970s. Seijun Suzuki was Nikkatsu's star pupil in posterity's eyes, and he's represented here by 1960's Take Aim at the Police Van. But first things first.

In his liner notes for I Am Waiting, Chuck Stephens notes that the Nikkatsu Noirs are, to a considerable extent, youth films as much as crime films. Ishihara (brother of a prolific screenwriter and future politician) was one of the "Sun Tribe" of young movie stars who were probably equivalent to James Dean's generation in Hollywood, embodying rebellious youthful vitality. While Waiting looks like a throwback to the Hollywood Forties to these American eyes, in the Japanese Fifties the iconography of noir, not to mention the English language, clearly represented novelty to young audiences. Joji doesn't seem to cater to foreigners, yet his diner has an English name, and there are English translations of restroom signs and other details all over this movie's cityscape. Stephens says that Nikkatsu Noir aimed for a cosmopolitan or "borderless" style, and Waiting proves him right. I think I saw one woman in a kimono in the entire picture, and apart from the emigration angle this could just as well be an American noir, and a halfway decent one at that.

Just as there's more to Saeko than meets the eye (though she never rises, if that's the word, to femme fatale status, but remains sympathetic), that's true for Joji too. He's the archetypal boxer who killed a man, albeit in a bar fight instead of in the ring. Once a promising welterweight, now he's running a modest diner that attracts other distressed people, including a drunken doctor who helps out with the exposition. Brazil represents escape from his past, and he's waiting not just for news of his brother but for his life to restart. The movie gives him a way to vicariously exorcise his demons by creating a parallel, almost mirroring plot thread. He'll learn that, just as he killed a man with his bare hands in a bar fight, his brother was beaten to death in a bar by gangsters who'd cheated him out of his money for the Brazil trip. By confronting the killer in a rough climactic nightclub fistfight he avenges his brother and expiates his own guilt for the man he killed.

I Am Waiting isn't really violent by future Japanese crime standards, but the final fight scene gives Ishihara and Ken Hatano quite a workout.

I Am Waiting is an effective, atmospheric crime film with appealing performances by Ishihara and Kitahara. Stephens describes it as a "masterwork," and justifies its inclusion in the Eclipse collection by arguing that it defined the "borderless" genre. I want to see the other four films in the set before I give Waiting such laurels; at first glance it's almost too much like an American noir for me to evaluate it as a Japanese film. But it's definitely good stuff, and anyone who enjoys the American films or noirs of all nations should appreciate this one.