First on Five Reels

The Films of Seijun Suzuki
In his documentary-memoir A PERSONAL JOURNEY, Martin Scorsese celebrates directors such as Raoul Walsh, William Wellman, Alan Dwan, Phil Karlson, Budd Boetticher, and Anthony Mann, directors who labored in the studio system from the 1930s through the 1950s. Their names scattered across the categories of Far Side of Paradise and Expressive Esoterica in Andrew Sarris's still-influential 1969 book AMERICAN CINEMA, these were men who labored in the mid-to-lower levels of Hollywood storytelling. Often they inherited both the script and the cast; they were woefully under-budgeted and always pressed for time; yet remarkably they all managed to instill in their films, regardless of how near to Poverty Row they were born, with some grain of their own distinct personality. As Sarris wrote of Boetticher, "One wonders where directors like Boetticher find the energy and the inspiration to do such fine work, when most critic are so fantastically indifferent."

These directors are no longer as anonymous as they once were, in part thanks to Sarris. In fact, modern movie buffs are director crazy. They have the filmographies of everyone from Dorothy Arzner to William Witney memorized. They can tell you how many films John Alton shot for Anthony Mann. But can they tell you how many films Jo Shishido made with Seijun Suzuki? Probably not. Right now, Japanese directors from the same era as Sam Fuller and Budd Boetticher have about the same status as those two American directors did back in the 1950s. They weren't unknown, but they weren't admired as much as now. Suzuki and his contemporaries worked for somewhat less prominent, more troubled and more middlebrow studios such as Toei, which played host to Kenji Fukasaku, and Nikkatsu, which was where Suzuki was the Roger Corman to its American International style exploitation. Suzuki and Fukasaku were the Corman and Fuller to the Ford or Hitchcock or Wyler of Kurosawa, Ozu, and Mizoguchi.

Chris D. makes a similar point in his new book OUTLAW MASTERS OF JAPANESE FILM (I. B. Tauris, 262 pages, $19.95, ISBN 1 84511 086 2), which I caught up with after starting this column. Seijun Suzuki is a member of a group that is as unknown and unheralded today as Karlson and Mann were in the 1950s. D defines them as "directors coming out of the Japanese movie production lines of the late fifties, the sixties, and the early seventies: genre filmmakers who made genre movie usually labeled as samurai, yakuza, horror, pink, etc., but who pushed the envelope beyond the usual conventions in some way, either in style or content; or filmmakers who simply, in the tradition of great American pulp directors like Samuel Fuller, Anthony Mann, Don Siegel and Phil Karlson, just made damn fine, fast-moving pictures that could hit you squarely between the eyes and leave you breathless."

I am probably exaggerating these filmmakers' credentials as maudit directors. However disparaged their product, Suzuki and Fukasaku weren't utterly unknown or even disliked. Many of their films were quite popular and in some cases acknowledged as groundbreaking, otherwise they wouldn't have had such long careers or find themselves heralded in their twilight years, though in the west that is partially thanks to the influential enthusiasm of Tarantino.

Another aide to modern appreciation of these masters is the Criterion Collection, and its parent company Home Vision Entertainment, which have issued parallel sets of DVD by these filmmakers. Currently there are 10 Suzuki DVDs available on Region 1 discs, and nine of them come from Criterion/HVE (the exception is Suzuki's late film, PISTOL OPERA, available from Media Blasters).

For the record the discs start off with the 1999 releases of TOKYO DRIFTER (No. 39, 1966) and BRANDED TO KILL (Criterion Collection No. 38, 1967, both nonanamorphic, by the way, like most Criterions around this spine number and before). In 2004, HVE released UNDERWORLD BEAUTY (1958), KANTO WANDERER (1963), and TATTOOED LIFE (1965) (which I reviewed at the time of their release).

So far in 2005, Criterion has released YOUTH OF THE BEAST (The Criterion Collection No. 268, 1963, $29.95, January 11, 2005), GATE OF FLESH (The Criterion Collection No. 298, 1964, $29.95, July 26, 2005), STORY OF A PROSTITUTE (The Criterion Collection No. 299, 1965, $29.95, July 26, 2005), and FIGHTING ELEGY (The Criterion Collection No. 269, 1966, $29.95, January 11, 2005). As is the practice with Criterion, YOUTH was paired with FIGHTING, and GATE with PROSTITUTE. Tracing Suzuki's career for eight years, arguably the high point of both his popularity and influence, these eight discs offer the chance of a major revaluation of Suzuki's career.

If Fukasaku is Japan's Samuel Fuller, as I somewhat fatuously suggested recently, than Suzuki is his 1950s shadow, Douglas Sirk. Give me a moment to try and make that case. Fukasaku, directing movies over at rival studio Toei, during this same time period made action and crime films characterized by his signature habits of bleak narration and freeze frames (often in black and white) that turn his fast paced tales of gamblers, criminal youths, and yakuza into quasi lectures of social protest. If Fukasaku "rebelled" against his corporate masters in the boardroom it was to show a surprising sympathy for the motivations and anger of his teens and yakuza.

But if there was anything explicitly rebellious about Suzuki's films it was stylistic. Where Fukasaku uses freeze frames, Suzuki uses slow motion, but also often highly artificial sets and outlandish background enhancers such as storms and thunder of foreground action. Not that you could get him to talk about his views if he were; Suzuki was from the old school of tight lipped directors like John Ford, who kept their trap shut and misdirected interviewers with monosyllabic answers that stressed the technical challenges of moviemaking over the moral imperatives. In interviews for several recent books on Japanese film, including D's, Suzuki's attitude verges on tight-lipped indifference to the wealth of films he made since the mid-1950s.

Whereas Fukasaku's jangly bebop films put me in mind of Samuel Fuller, Suzuki is more in the spirit of Douglas Sirk's subversiveness, his social concerns or criticism hidden beneath a surface artificiality that risks inviting derisive laughter. And his social concerns are weaved into the fabric of the world he is portraying.

Here's an example of Suzuki hiding his ideas in plain sight. Everyone likes to mention the famous scene of the gangster's office in YOUTH OF THE BEAST, housed behind a one-way mirror that allows gazing into the nightclub where, in this case, a burlesque dancer is preening before drunken revelers. But no one asks why Suzuki uses this set up in the first place. For one thing, it fits in with the film's general suite of images that emphasize spying, people peeping through house windows or car windows or standing on the other side of doors as dire things transpire on the other side, of lookouts and peeping. The elaborate set up of the "classy" Nomoto gang's night club office sits in deflating contrast to the impoverished setting of the rival Sanko gang, whose office resides back behind the screen of a movie theater (showing Nikkatsu movies, of course). Sankoans "see" nothing important when they peer out of their office but the fantasies of movie studios about how crime works, because they are on the reverse side of a screen showing those stock images. Only the Nomokans can "see" anything, in a one-way direction. None of this moral fine tuning is made apparent because the surface segregation is so outlandishly distracting (curiously, YOUTH OF THE BEAST is similar in plot not to a Sirk film, but to a Sam Fuller film made in Japan in 1955, HOUSE OF BAMBOO, itself a remake of THE STREET WITH NO NAME, although in broad strokes it is more like YOJIMBO and RED HARVEST).

Take another example from YOUTH OF THE BEAST. In a central scene Nomoto the gang leader (Shoji Kobayashi) is incensed over a suspected betrayal of a concubine. He whips her mercilessly in the living room of his western style house, while the gang looks on. Later a character tells the films main character Mizuno (Jo Shishido) that such brutality is characteristic of the villain, who is a sadist, though you wouldn't think so from the way he fawns over his white Blofeld-style cat, with whom he trades kisses. While he is whipping the girl a sand storm rages outside the broad windows of his home, and when she tries to flee out the sliding or French doors he follows her, the red sand, as if from the planet Mars, whipping the planet. But soon spent of sadistic energy, Nomoto falls upon his concubine in the dunes, his passion now aroused. The stormy background is just the kind of distracting overemphasis that unsympathetic critics view as overkill, redundancy, excess underlining. But is it? The sand storm is not a reiteration of Nomoto's whipping frenzy (and there is a lot of whipping in Suzuki's films, but we'll get to that in a minute) but a natural synecdoche of his inner turmoil and passion, usually kept tightly locked up beneath a bland surface to such a degree that only a whipping frenzy can bring it out. The contrast between the storm and the bland surface could very likely be a critique of Japanese social repression.

Critics have asked Suzuki why he uses such things as storms as a background for a love scene in a car and so forth, and he demurs, suggesting that the choice was a way to make an otherwise boring scene interesting (the way Lynch's scattered moose heads on tables ["It fell down"] enliven otherwise conventional scenes in TWIN PEAKS). He is tightlipped, as tightlipped as Nomoto: perhaps his villains are also an auto-critique.

YOUTH OF THE BEAST (the title makes no sense, so don't bother; it's also called THE BRUTE and a few other titles) is the earliest film in this latest quartet of releases, 1963, and comes in an anamorphic widescreen presentation (2.35:1), with what the box says is restored mono sound and improved (optional) subtitles. Extras consist of video interviews with Suzuki and Shishido, plus the trailer, and an eight page insert with cast and crew, transfer info, stills, chapter titles, and an essay by Howard Hampton on the film. YOUTH tells the story of a man who appears out of nowhere and starts beating up and shaking down hoods. This draws the attention of the Nomoto gang who instead of punishing him, make him an offer of employment. Soon he starts to play the Nomoto gang off the Sanka gang, but about halfway through the film we find out why. I don't want to say any more about the plot in case you are unfamiliar with it. I'll say here that I found the end powerful in a pulpy way, and can register that if you can only afford to buy or rent one of the four Suzuki films new to DVD mentioned here, let it be this one.

The extras are crisp and brief. The trailer for YOUTH, like those offered on the other discs, makes outlandish and provocative claims for the movie. The interviews are interesting. Suzuki is cagy as usual. Shishido is an interesting character. In an effort to make himself more handsome or masculine back in the mid 1950s he underwent collagen surgery which gave him odd if distinctive puffy (which Suzuki cruelly presses up against a glass window in one scene). The strategy appears to have worked. But today the actor, still working, shows the scars of the surgery down the front of his face. I'd sure like to know what Japanese audiences thought of this whole escapade, which appears to be not unlike Barbara Hershey puffing out her lips. His brother, also an actor, named Eiji Go, appears in this and several other Shishido and Suzuki collaborations.

Next in order is the newly released GATE OF FLESH. From 1964, it is the first of a trilogy of films about wartime and post war prostitution. It was the first Suzuki film I'd seen, way back in the 1990s when the local Northwest Film Center showed a package of Suzuki's films. It's outrageousness appealed to me but I couldn't follow, or didn't attend to, the plot (the NWFC, like many of its institutional brethren across the land, should be acknowledged for on many occasions being ahead of the curve when it comes to introducing viewers to interesting filmmakers. Others whom the NWFC introduced me to were Tsui Hark, Bela Tarr, and Guy Maddin, long before they became known elsewhere in the land).

GATE OF FLESH recounts the adventures of one Maya, played by Yumiko Nagawa, the actress who appears centrally in all three of Suzuki's hooker films, two of which are based on novels by Taijiro Tamura. The third film in the loose trilogy, not out on disc in the US yet, is CARMEN FROM KAWACHI. GATE OF FLESH has been adapted a total of four times. Maya, a rape victim with no living family members, is trying to survive in a teeming den of pimps and thieves and corrupt American soldiers. She winds up with a group of women who have banded together to get by without a pimp, but to do so they must have hard hearts and a strict code from which they must not deviate. Their solidarity makes them spit on outsiders (literally) whom they think are either soft and privileged or weak in some fashion. Punishment for deviating from the band's rules, which include (or maybe consist only of) giving away sex, is a severe whipping and then public banishment from the club.

Another newcomer to the group is Shintaro (Shishido), a "returnee" or ex-soldier getting by through muggings and the black market. He becomes the pet of the group. All fall in love with him for different reasons, Maya because he reminds her of her brother, the group's unofficial leader, the tattooed Sen (Satoko Kasai) because he appears to be as tough as she is, and so forth. In an intricate pattern of almost operatic intensity, the loyalties and betrayals lead to unnecessary tragedy.

In color like YOUTH OF THE BEAST, GATE is equally elaborate in both its melodrama and its outrageously artificial sets and lighting. A scene in which an African-American sky pilot succumbs to Maya's temptations is shot as if it were taking place in Oz. All the girls in the band are color-coded in dress and light effects. Critics pinpoint Suzuki's abrupt changes from "realistic" exteriors to artificial interiors as a sign of his sloppiness. They also pinpoint his flouting of the sightline rule, which frankly I don't even understand, despite pouring over the salient pages in the FIVE CS OF CINEMATOGRAPHY. However, this blithe attitude to the rules of the tradition of quality has lead more sympathetic viewers to liken him to Godard (for his part, Suzuki admits to having seen only one Godard film).

Missing from Godard's films, if they are similar, is Suzuki's fixation on scenes of bondage of whipping as necessarily adjuncts to his settings' landscapes of depravity and violence. This perhaps does not explain the care that Suzuki takes with these passages, which are sensually lit in a fashion at variation with the presumed intended meaning (horror at the debasement of human beings trapped helplessly as victims in power situations) communicating instead a delight in the visual impact of bound wrists, arms stretched over heads, sharp tips striking nude female backs. If the bondage scenes cannot ultimately be reconciled with the main thrust of the text this is no doubt because they reflect disharmonies at odds both in Suzuki's aesthetic and in Japanese culture.

Criterion's GATE OF FLESH comes in an exquisite anamorphic widescreen presentation (2.35:1), with adequate restored mono sound (which sounds occasionally shredded at higher pitches) and improved (optional) subtitles. Extras consist of video interviews with Suzuki and production designer Takeo Kimura, plus the trailer and a stills gallery, and a 10-page insert with cast and crew, transfer info, stills, chapter titles, and an essay by Chuck Stephens on the film.

Instead of Godard I'd nominate Bunuel as Suzuki's European equivalent, and not just because of the Bunuelian hand that lies in the dust near the end of STORY OF A PROSTITUTE (1965), the second in Suzuki's prostitution trilogy. A black and white film, STORY recounts the tale of a woman (Nagawa again) seeking to escape a foiled love affair by becoming a prostitute serving Japanese soldiers in China. Instead (if I follow the plot correctly) she falls in love with a soldier whose loyalty to militarism and authority foils her yet again.

Suzuki's film isn't funny as Bunuel's would be in the same setting, but there is both a critique of totalitarian culture (militarism here, clericalism in Bunuel), and a barely concealed sympathy with anarchy. Suzuki's anarchism infiltrates his style, with its slo-mo passages, abrupt switches from fantasy to reality, and spare setting, suggesting the desiccation wrought by militarism. STORY is the Suzuki film closest to the kinds of art house imports seen in the late 1950s and '60s, titles such as THE HARP OF BURMA or WOMAN OF THE DUNES. STORY OF A PROSTITUTE is sort of an "official masterpiece" from Suzuki, which is not to denigrate it, but it has very little of the flavor that makes him attractive to film buffs today.

STORY OF A PROSTITUTE comes in another anamorphic widescreen presentation (2.40:1 in this case), and again with what the box says is restored mono sound and improved (optional) subtitles. Extras consist of a video interview with Suzuki, Kimura and film critic Tadao Sato, who all provide background of the film, Suzuki's career, and the times. There's also the trailer, and an eight-page insert with cast and crew, transfer info, stills, chapter titles, and an essay by David Chute on the film (the anxiety of influence prevents me from reading these things before writing my own review).

Like YOUTH and GATE, STORY also reveals the essential narrative template observed in the Suzuki films in this set. Each film unveils a tale in which a neophyte or newcomer must adapt to a new group, band, or club.

This is sort of true also of TOKYO DRIFTER, which I was delighted to find in a used DVD bin for only eight dollars the day before I wrote this review. DRIFTER shows a slight variation in the Suzuki template by showing the main character, a disgraced yakuza, in the weird bind of having to fit into mainstream society while working on earning back his rightful place.

You can see why Tarantino loves this film (I haven't seen its companion, BRANDED TO KILL). It's got the wackiness of BREATHLESS, the remake that Tarantino also loves — if you haven't seen BREATHLESS, you will be floored by how much it influences the Tarantino sensibility.

FIGHTING ELEGY is chronologically the last of these new releases and it is another late variation on Suzuki's standard story. In this case, the main character Kiroku (Hideki Takahashi), a randy lad thwarted in sexual congress by his puritanical girlfriend, trades chronic masturbation for the sublimating virtues of fisticuffs before joining up with a right wing militaristic organization. A student throughout the beginning of the film, he only joins the new group, into which he must try and fit, in the story's later stages. It's set earlier than most of the films under review, back before WWII, and as a profile of a budding facist is part of a small coterie of works that include Sartre's THE WALL and Louis Malle's LACOMBE, LUCIEN.

Another black and white film, FIGHTING ELEGY (released in 1966, and made just before BRANDED TO KILL, the film that resulted in his final firing by Nikkatsu and a 10-year exile from the big screen) comes in an excellent anamorphic transfer (2.35:1), with restored mono sound and improved (optional) subtitles. Extras are sparse on this disc, just the trailer, plus an eight page insert with cast and crew, transfer info, stills, chapter titles, and an essay by Tony Rayns and a "note" by Ikki Kita, who gives the historical background to the film's story.

Besides Chris D.'s books, other volumes that helped me enormously to grasp whatever meager knowledge I now have of Suzuki's career include Tom Mes and Jasper Sharp's THE MIDNIGHT GUIDE TO NEW JAPANESE FILM (Stonebridge Press, 365 pages, $22.95, ISBN 1 880656 89 2), Donald Richie's A HUNDRED YEARS OF JAPANESE FILM (Kodansha, 312 pages, $30, ISBN 4 7700 2682 X), and Mark Schilling's CONTEMPORARY JAPANESE FILM (Weatherhill, 399 pages, $24.95, ISBN 0 83480 415 8) and THE YAKUZA MOVIE BOOK (Stonebridge Press, 335 pages, $19.95, ISBN 1 880656 76 0). I found them all excellent and addictive.

DVD QUOTE OF THE WEEK: From the Criterion disc of YOUTH OF THE BEAST: Interviewer: "How is it that I really don't understand the title, YOUTH OF THE BEAST when I think about it now?" Suzuki: "It's not very clear what it means. It means whatever you make of it." Interviewer: "But with TOKYO DRIFTER, for instance, you know that it is about a drifter." Suzuki: "Who could the 'beast' be? I'm not sure who it is." Interviewer: "Youth sounds a bit odd, too." Suzuki: "Sure. We have to complain about this." Interviewer: "I never gave a thought to it when I saw the movie. But when I really started to think about it now, I wondered why it's called YOUTH OF THE BEAST." Suzuki: "Maybe because Nikkatsu's films are for young people." — Director Seijun Suzuki dancing around enquiries by an unidentified interviewer about the source of the film's title, beginning at timecode 00:04:04 in the Suzuki interview extra.

Letters

From Sean Burns:

"Just finished reading your Nocturnal Admissions piece on UNDEAD. Great timing! I just went to see it yesterday at the only theatre in a 50-mile radius showing the film. Sorry you didn't care for the film. I thought it was great tongue-in-cheek fun a la Jackson's BRAINDEAD. From the 50's style "watch the skies" credits onward, you can tell the Spierigs' main intention is a cheeky homage to their favorite films with a bit of a twist. I will agree that the plot seems a bit convoluted. This was the second time I've seen the film (the first being on import Australian DVD) and it took a bit of discussion after the first viewing to suss out exactly what was going on. I understood and appreciated thing much more the second time around. The plot point about Rene's farm is clearer in the Aussie version. About a minute of dialogue was snipped throughout the movie for the US release (not really certain why). She inherited the farm when her parents died, but is unable to make the payments (she entered the "Miss Catch of the Day" pageant for the prize money, but it wasn't enough) and so the bank repossesses the farm. My take on the whole plague is that the meteorite fragments are the cause of the zombification. The aliens are actually trying to contain and repair the damage caused by the meteorites. They isolate the infected city of Berkeley with the wall and create the storm clouds (which cause the blue lighting throughout the film) to make the rains. The rainwater is intended to cure the zombies, it causes itching and burning but nothing more harmful. Once a being is cured, the aliens "beam them up" for safe keeping until they can be safely returned to the town. The aliens are kind of like a crew trying to clean up an oil spill and the people are the oily seagulls. They don't really distinguish between species, which explains why they "beam up" grasshoppers and cows as well as people. Rene realizes this about the cure at the end when she's talking with Marion. Hence her guilt over the zombies they killed. If they left them be, they would've been cured. The aliens leave once the cleanup is complete. The next outbreak occurs because Wayne (the kid in the plane) got out without being cured (you see him coughing outside the wall) and spreads the infection again. He's the one who attacks Marion in the hospital. Rene managed to round up some of the survivors and keeps them sealed inside the farmhouse away from the infection. She also rounded up as many of the zombies as she could and keeps them penned up in the hopes that the aliens will come back and cure them again with the rains. It is more than a bit muddled, but if you are so inclined, give the movie a second chance when it comes out on DVD. You might like it a bit better. Its not a masterpiece by any means, but I still think it was a fun twist on the whole zombie genre."

And incidentally, if you are interested in KILL BILL, you might find my new book, KILL BILL: AN UNOFFICIAL CASEBOOK useful. It is now available in fine bookstores everywhere, or from Amazon.

Not only that, I've got a new book coming out in October (I hope) on an aspect of film noir I call film soleil, titled simply FILM SOLEIL. It is sure to alter film criticism as we know it to its very core. Order it now!

And if you are interested in what I sound like, I can be heard on KBOO radio (90.7 FM) the second and the fourth Wednesday of the month, at 9 AM in the morning (Pacific Standard Time) on Ed Goldberg's show MOVIE TALK along with Dawn Taylor. It's available via streaming audio (in 20 Kbps Stereo). The next broadcast is Wednesday, August 10th, at 9 AM.

COMING SOON:ME AND YOU AND EVERYONE WE KNOW, THE ISLAND, MY SUMMER OF LOVE, REMINGTON STEEL and other TV mystery shows, many STAR TREKS, and more!

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