FIGHTING ELEGY (1966)

Seijun Suzuki's youth-in-revolt epic is a devil's brew of youth tropes that'll look familiar to American audiences, but may taste bitter together. One part tender romance, one part j.d. expose, one part ribald comedy almost in the American Pie mode -- this is a film in which the hero plays a piano with his organ -- this adaptation by Kaneto Shindo, a director in his own right, of a popular novel is also an exercise in tragic nostalgia. It's set in 1935, which would be like setting an American film in 1940 or anytime in the Vietnam era, and it seems to point to paths not taken by Japanese youth. One path leads to sex and love, but on top of all the peer pressure on young males to shun love for violence, Nanbu Kiroku (Hideki Takahashi) is a Christian and thus inclined to view his yearning for Michiko (Junko Asano) as sinful. For his exceptional reason he's drawn to the same paramilitary gang life that attracts so many other boys and is probably the Japanese equivalent of American team sports. He develops a talent for the "mace," a barbed weapon he can swing and catch on an enemy's clothes or his face. He also develops a strong individualist streak in spite of his attempts to fit in, flaunting his personal logo in defiance of dress codes -- curiously, if not prophetically, it looks like a bald eagle rampant atop Mt. Fuji.

Kiroku acquits himself honorably in the abortive big rumble, but ends up transferred to another school in another community, where he upholds his old school fighting spirit against his new "monkey" classmates. He ends up leading them to victory against their crosstown rivals, but as he triumphs in student combat he loses in love. Michiko first refuses to prove her love by kissing the circle he draws in a letter, then informs him that she's putting herself in a nunnery because some physical issue prevents her from making love. As she barely escapes trampling by a highly symbolic formation of militants marching into a tunnel, Kiroku learns that one of his mentors is a leader of the 1936 coup attempt in Tokyo. The film closes with him en route to Tokyo, presumably to join the insurrection. The sequel that would follow him through the war with China was never made.

Like many non-American directors, Suzuki tries to synthesize a range of moods that would seem mutually exclusive in most U.S. films. He wants to be hilarious, sentimental, satirical, scandalous and sensational, and to wrap the whole package up as a historical tragedy. Doing so isn't as hard as some may imagine, and Suzuki's strong pictorial sense holds it all together. This is a late black-and-white film for him, and the monochrome cinematography by Kenji Hagiwara is nearly as attractive as the vivid color in so many other Suzuki films. The film abounds in romantic, almost poetic imagery, from the illuminated trees Kiroku and Michiko walk beneath to the poignant snow through which Michiko trudges at the end. It's also full of broadly comic stagings, especially in Kiroku's new school where his classmates torment the hapless "Professor Duck." Suzuki even plays with the frame in New Wave style in this scene, alternating rythmically between isolated shots of the humiliated teacher amid widescreen darkness and the students chanting their taunts across a screen from which the teacher has been cut. Of course, there's violence aplenty, though this is an exceptional Suzuki film in that the violence isn't lethal. On a tangental note, if the warlike conflicts of student gangs seem exaggerated here, my own research in American history shows that annual ritual combats between classes (usually freshmen and sophomores) in colleges were fairly common in the U.S. a century or so ago, and could get pretty brutal.

Working in black and white, Suzuki can't be accused of letting color do the work for him emotionally or symbolically, as sometimes seems to be the case, and as  a result Fighting Elegy may be his most pictorially assured as well as his most heartfelt film. None of his experiments or excesses undercut the emotional core of the story. If anything, he probably plays too much for pathos in the tunnel scene, which is punctuated rather heavily with a shot of Michiko's cross being trampled by the marching cadets. But you can understand his feelings as he restages his generation marching toward an abyss. That parts of the film are funny or outrageous only makes the finale more sad.  The tonal sprawl of this movie conveys the breadth of possibilities for youth to better underscore the horror of so much potential twisted and wasted. That may not be what everyone looks for in a youth movie, but to the extent that the label fits this film, Fighting Elegy is one of the best youth movies I've seen in some time.

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.

DETECTIVE BUREAU 2-3: GO TO HELL BASTARDS (1963)

Nikkatsu noir this isn't. It's the same studio, and a lot of the same personnel, but Seijun Suzuki's film takes us about as far from noir -- or its putative Japanese equivalent -- as a crime film fan can imagine. Designed to launch a series (there was only one sequel), it presents Suzuki protege Jo Shishido as Tajima, a private detective who convinces the cops to let him infiltrate a new gang that's been robbing yakuza weapons smugglers. Our chipmunk cheeked protagonist (frequent readers will recall that Shishido had himself surgically, er, enhanced to make himself more distinctive looking) is given the identity of a prisoner, with all the resources of the police dedicated to backing it up. That's a good thing, since the gang proves quite diligent about background checks.

Jo Shishido (right) gets pretty cheeky with the cops, as only he can.

Tajima attempts to ingratiate himself to the gang by rescuing an imprisoned member from a yakuza lynch mob lurking outside the local jail, but the crooks never fully trust him. Complicating things further is his budding romance with the gang leader's moll and the fact that the star performer at the nightclub frequented by the gang is Tajima's ex-girlfriend. She's in the picture to justify some song-and-dance numbers, one of which our hero joins in. It's that kind of film.

Christmas in Japan

To be more precise, there's a kind of Rat Pack vibe to the whole project. If they remade it in America I could see Dean Martin as the detective. No one really takes it seriously, and the picture is pretty overtly comic, anyway. Tajima has a couple of comic sidekicks, one of which is a mannish female who doubles as a scandal-sheet publisher. The production numbers are purposefully tacky, all the more so given the Christmastime setting. The Japanese celebrate the holiday with one of the world's ugliest trees and a chorine performance of "When the Saints Go Marching In." There's a bemused engagement with Christian culture throughout, as when Tajima must explain why his alter ego "Tanaka Ichiro" lives in a Catholic church. The priest there is his father, he explains, and no one bats an eye.

Did I mention that there was violence in this movie? Hell yes there is!

The story isn't really that engaging once you realize you can't take it seriously, but if style trumps substance you can still enjoy the movie. Suzuki toes the line between taste and tackiness, and his strong sense of color keeps him in a state of candy-colored balance. The urban locations are an added attraction for time-traveling tourists like me. Detective Bureau 2-3 gives you a definite feel for a specific moment in Japan's pop-culture history. It's not in the same league with Suzuki's more intensely dramatic films like Youth of the Beast or Gate of Flesh, nor is it as nuttily inspired as his bridge-burning Branded to Kill, but it'll do for a 90 minute pop diversion to an exotic stop in the wild world of cinema.

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.

YOUTH OF THE BEAST (1963)

Seijun Suzuki's color noir for Nikkatsu studio is stuck with an inexplicable title in its present day English edition. Most of the cast isn't especially young, and many of them are beastly enough to force the question of which beast and what youth we're talking about. It's also been called Wild Youth but that gets even further away from the real thing, making it sound like a juvenile delinquent film when it really is a film noir, albeit in vibrant color, with a story that could easily be transplanted into an American setting, if the vice versa hasn't already happened.

It's about a guy named Jo (Jo Shishido) who we meet while he's muscling in on the local vice operations. His appearance follow a black-and-white intro in which detectives discover an apparent double suicide: a prostitute and her john. The john proves to be a police detective himself. The film shifts to color to tell Jo's story, and at first I thought that the color stuff would all be flashbacks. Not so, for in the course of establishing himself with the local underworld and proving himself such a tough guy that the mob would rather hire him than punish him, he pays his respects at the home of the late detective's wife. The widow asks him to tell her a story, any story, about her husband, but there isn't time for that now. As it happens, Jo does have a kind of story about the guy; he thinks the man was murdered. And what's that to him? Well, the detective took care of Jo's wife while Jo did time in jail, so Jo feels that he owes the detective, and now his widow, a moral debt. Jo himself is an ex-cop. The ex part has to do with his jail time; he was framed for malfeasance by the mob. Now he's going on a private undercover vendetta, determined to find out who killed the detective if he has to take the yakuza apart in the process. But his hunt will end up taking him back virtually to where he started.

Jo has a way with the ladies (above) and a different way with the opposite sex (below).

This film has a more western feel than a lot of the Japanese crime films I've seen. It's detached from the usual yakuza genre trappings or any real social context in its focus on the lone-wolf antihero. Jo's surrounded by a variety of eccentrics, including his moronic sidekick Minami who abhors women and booze in favor of guns (we later learn that this was wise while it lasted) and a gang leader who hates being reminded that his mother was a whore. Bring that up and he acts like you'd said "Niagara Falls" and gets into a stabbing mood. This actually matters to the movie, since one of the ultimate villains is disposed of by being tricked into discussing this person's parentage in his presence. That was corny but overall Suzuki gives the film a hard-boiled quality that Shishido expresses quite effectively. The novelty of the Japanese setting and Suzuki's colorful style actually made what should have been a predictable noir plot twist more of a surprise for me.

If you think that Jo was mean to the people in the pictures above, consider these scenes his comeuppance.

Yaju no seishun is a sensory treat, from Kazue Nagatsuka's vivid cinematography to Hajime Okamura's brassy, jazzy score. Karyo Yokoo contributes one brilliant piece of production design: the panopticon nightclub whose glass walls and floors allow the gangsters to observe everything from their own drab lair while allowing Suzuki to shoot shots through the floors to get unique angles on the action. As a matter of all-around style the film has that distinctive Sixties feel you might associate with the early Bond films or a lot of Italian product. Noir fans who aren't dogmatic about black-and-white will get a kick out of this Japanese variation on some familiar themes, and fans of Sixties pop culture should dig it too.

Scenes from a nightclub, designed by Karyo Yokoo

Compared with his more kinky (Gate of Flesh) or just plain weird movies (Branded to Kill) this is probably the most accessible Suzuki film I've seen to date. The later, crazier stuff is probably more characteristic but taking a look at Youth of the Beast might make people more willing to give the rest a try.

The badass trailer (with English subtitles) was uploaded to YouTube by rodazi.

GATE OF FLESH (Nikutai no mon, 1964)

Seijun Suzuki is a rare international example of the sort of director you usually associate with Hollywood: a victim of the studio system. He spent a decade in the Japanese cinematic wilderness after his home studio Nikkatsu fired him following the release of his surreal yakuza saga, Branded to Kill. That was in 1967. Suzuki's offense was that his films had become too gratuitously artistic and were alienating and confusing the genre audience. Branded definitely is a weird film, and it has the same effect in our time. I found it in a used book store a few years ago. You don't usually find a Criterion DVD in such a place, and since I found Suzuki's Tokyo Drifter there at the same time I can only assume that someone had decided that the director wasn't his or her cup of sake. So you can see where Nikkatsu was coming from -- but on the evidence of Gate of Flesh, the studio had more tolerance than they're given credit for.

Nikutai no mon follows the struggles of Maya, a young homeless woman in early postwar Japan who joins a little autonomous guild of prostitutes. With yakuza protection they can do without pimps, and they depend on themselves to enforce their territory between Yurakucho and Kachidoki Bridge. They cater to the American occupation troops and those Japanese with money to spare. The arrival of more troops inspires a spirited display of wares from the women of the shantytown near the U.S. base.

Each of the ladies dresses in a particular color -- one in red, another in purple, a relatively zaftig one in yellow -- and Maya's color is green. Her new pals are cynical and irreverent, determined to "spit on everything," but they keep one rule very strictly: no freebies!

No such rule is enacted in the movies unless it's going to be broken, and in this sort of movie no such rule is broken unless someone's going to get punished for it. Machiko is the guilty party initially, giving the gals cause to discuss proper disciplinary technique. "You gotta beat her on the ass for it to sound good," one advises. Maya finds herself strangely aroused by the ritualistic caning, and seeks release by joining in on the punishment.

This shot is a good example of Suzuki's technique. Instead of cutting from Machiko's ordeal to Maya's reaction shots, he figures: I've got a pretty wide screen, so let's play with some superimposition. It's actually quite effective and expressionistic at the same time. You'll note that since it's still only 1964, Suzuki must arrange his lighting carefully to keep the naughty bits mostly in the dark. He doesn't succeed all the time at this, but it really enhances the stylized eroticism of the story. Here's another example from the same scene.

Think of Gate of Flesh as poised stylistically somewhere nearly halfway between Michael Powell (intense cinematography and art direction) and Russ Meyer (frenetically edited sleaze). The film could be seen as a kind of antithesis and ideal second-feature to Powell's Black Narcissus. In that film, a self-governing community of women (nuns) are disrupted by the presence of a man. In Gate of Flesh, the solidarity of prostitutes is threatened by the bull-in-a-china-shop presence of Shintaro ("Shin") Ibuki a veteran turned thief and smuggler who takes refuge in their headquarters after stabbing a GI. Disillusioned by Japan's defeat, Shin vows, "I'm gonna live for sex and food."

Joe Shishido also starred in Suzuki's Branded to Kill. He's noted for his chunky chipmunk cheeks, on display here.

Even wounded, he proves his mastery by shaking off a chair attack and beating up Sen, the red-clad de facto leader of the women. From that point, the women start competing for his favor, including the now-exiled Machiko. Maya has the hots for him, too. Thinking Machiko a demon for trying to seduce him, she says, "I'll become a demon, too." She practices by seducing the black Catholic priest who tends to the fallen women, ultimately driving him to kill himself.

Chico Roland, who plays the priest, will probably be best known to American audiences for his quite different role in The Street Fighter

Shin aspires to be the Harry Lime of the shantytown. He's allegedly hoarding some stolen penicillin, and he's capable of stealing a cow virtually from under the nose of its owner in order to prepare (gruesomely) a feast of beef for the ladies. Everybody gets drunk, Shin sings some old army songs, and the girls note with amusement that "Something's crazy when our bodies cost the same as beef [40 yen per pound, we learn]." Speaking of crazy, perhaps you can see where our story's headed. Maya is turned on by Shin. She's turned on by punishment. Everyone is drunk, hot and sweaty. But we're going to do this the Seijun Suzuki way. That is: Maya invites him to take her. He checks her out. Cut to black and white stock footage of batteries of rockets firing. Cut to him taking her in passionate soft focus.

Maya is willing to pay the consequences because she intends to rendezvous with Shin after he makes his big score. Meanwhile, the Americans and the yakuza are closing the net on the man who's made quite a nuisance of himself through a rapid-fire montage of muggings earlier in the picture. Maya does indeed pay the consequences, since Suzuki would hardly have a movie otherwise, but as for the rest...

Gate of Flesh definitely belongs to the "style over substance" category, but for a director like Suzuki the style is the substance of the movie. The story counts for less than the way it's told. Historically, producers tend to worry that style gets in the way of story and alienates the audience. But when you get to genre films (and I'd classify this one as such), genre itself is a style superimposed on events that might be portrayed differently by a documentarian or even a director of a different genre. A director like Suzuki takes style to the next lurid level -- one that isn't necessarily inappropriate for his material, which may be why Nikkatsu didn't fire him this time.

I think that students of style and students of sleaze alike would enjoy Gate of Flesh. Suzuki tried to make a work of art and a work of exploitation in one stroke, and it's a pretty good try. If you want to see some of the images above in motion, here's the trailer. I chose an untranslated one so the subtitles wouldn't get in the way, and I hope I've given you an idea of what you're looking at. If not, have fun and fill in the blanks yourselves.