Another One Rides the Bus

Their train is delayed so a handful of strangers decide to take a bus across a dangerous mountain route. Director Seijun Suzuki squeezes every drop of tension possible from this premise in 1957's Eight Hours of Terror (８時間の恐怖).

Suzuki's instincts for cutting fat from every scene are always admirable. The film begins with the chaotic situation at the train station as people swarm the station master with various complaints about the delay. One man must get to a board of directors meeting, one is a student who assures everyone the meeting he needs to get to is important to the future of Japan. One young woman needs to get to an acting audition.

There are two young Communists, a man and a woman. The man is revealed later to be wearing women's underwear, something that's never explained but may say quite enough about Suzuki's thoughts on Communism. One woman with a child is looking to find a suitable means of suicide.

Everyone's motives and commonplace delusions are established efficiently. There's also a detective transporting a handcuffed murderer and a world-weary prostitute called Natsuko (Harue Tone), who turns out to be the film's heroine.

As if the mountain roads aren't dangerous enough, there are also two dangerous bank robbers on the loose. So much is going wrong, so many improbable things are coming together, it might have all been too much to establish credible tension. But Suzuki manages to make it a kind of rapid opera of editing, framing, and bizarre vignettes.

Eight Hours of Terror is available on The Criterion Channel.

Maturity of the Beast

When I first saw Seijun Suzuki's experimental 1967 film Branded to Kill (殺しの烙印), I hadn't seen any of the typical yakuza movies of the 50s and 60s it was riffing off of. Now I've seen more than I can count so I decided to revisit this New Wave landmark of Japanese cinema.

In my 2014 review, I talked primarily about the film's postmodernism and how its commentary on action and suspense films functioned as a reflection of Western films of the genres. The same love triangle system, for example, is apparent--the male protagonist torn between the pretty available girl and the mysterious femme fatale.

This time it struck me how much this triangle supports the central idea of human nature being a conflict between the bestial and the sublime. It reminds me of Vertigo more than anything--where Midge is the more familiar, talking frankly with Scottie about bras like sex has all the glamour of feeding chickens and pigs, versus the dreamlike Madeleine representing an ideal of beauty.

The protagonist's wife in Branded to Kill, Mami (Mariko Ogawa), is almost always naked, or in one scene wearing only fur and heels, and is always energetically rushing about their house. She tells her husband over and over that the two of them are merely beasts. Misako (Annu Mari), on the other hand, the mysterious woman who hires him for a contract killing, is rigorously stylised--a raincloud follows her most of the time and the screen becomes littered with butterflies reflecting the dead little beasts she keeps pinned to the wall.

And she almost never moves, unlike the constantly scampering Mami. Joe Shishido as the protagonist, Goro, is perfect in the role, his trademark, weirdly artificial cheeks implying the attempt to effect a triumph of ideal aesthetics over nature.

What does it mean that he's the number two hitman in the world? It's a mark of professionalism, something that should elevate him above the mere animal, but it's in a fundamentally savage field. There's also his absurd obsession with rice. When Misako is quietly seducing him, he weirdly starts begging her to give him rice, his fundamental animal appetite somehow aroused by her careful artificiality. Of course he keeps asking her to undress but, cruelly, he doesn't see her naked until she's seemingly captured by the enemy.

Although she wears a cool smirk the whole time, he immediately proclaims she's been raped, yelling the claim over and over as he kneels before the footage of her. As though he compulsively construes the situation as loss in a fundamental struggle.

Watching the movie now, I feel much more a sense of it as dreamlike than subversive. All of those yakuza movies Suzuki made for Nikkatsu at a breakneck pace, churning out multiple movies in the same year, with many of the same plot elements, sets, and actors mandated again and again. It must have become ritualistic and I certainly wouldn't be surprised to learn the career did very strange things to his dreams.

Branded to Kill is available on The Criterion Channel.

Twitter Sonnet #1281

A severed fraction turned divided whole.
The present cat controls arithmetic.
Entire worlds could fill the magnet bowl.
The sneezing sun expels the turmeric.
A finished film rewards reflected shows.
Another cat replaced the merry girl.
At home, the book became a list of rows.
A pebble sure was swapped for rarest pearl.
The amber push enclosed a winding tree.
Electric tracks conduct the music slow.
The empty hive admits the captain bee.
An island rock begins to softly glow.
Diverting paths convert the space to blue.
A paper swamp arrests the flowing glue.

A Frustrated Spring

A young social worker finds it's not so easy to reform a handsome young delinquent in 1958's The Boy Who Came Back (踏みはずした春 "Stepped On Spring"). All the love and encouragement she shows to him have little effect when he feels devalued by the culture at large. This early work by Seijin Suzuki is a sweet and effective teen issue melodrama.

Of course, it's not simply altruism or devotion to duty that ultimately compels Keiko (Sachiko Hidari) to stand by Nobuo (Akira Kobayashi). When the staff at her organisation review an exchange diary she keeps with Nobuo, several men express disapproval for the affectionate language she uses. One of the older women explains, of course, it's natural for women to become more emotional than men when shepherding a youth like this but this is deemed even more reason to discourage the level of Keiko's dedication.

It's hard to see how Nobuo could ever be reformed. We watch as he tries to look for work and each potential employer turns him away for having no experience or a bad reputation or both. The one employer who seems willing, thanks to a connexion through Keiko, Nobuo walks out on when one of the employees smirks at him. How can Nobuo go from a position of relative respect as a proto-yakuza to the repetitive humiliation of the legitimate workforce? Maybe a mature, emotionally stable youth could get past it but Nobuo's life has made him fragile and confused, desperate for clear situations and roles.

Even so, when his old friends try to re-enlist him into the petty gangster lifestyle, he refuses them and reminds them they all agreed to go straight. It soon becomes clear only Nobuo was sincere in his intentions on this point. Meanwhile, Keiko tries to talk the more respectable of Nobuo's girlfriends, Kazue (Ruriko Asaoka), into going back with him.

Kazue works with schoolchildren and seems to have a similar, dedicated caretaker personality to Keiko's. But Kazue's affections haven't been tested the way Keiko's have. We never see Nobuo hit Kazue as we see he hits Keiko now and then. He just stays away from Kazue, apparently because another boy kissed her.

Whether or not Keiko should give up on Nobuo for the way he treats her is a question complicated by the fact that she's the only one who seems to have any real interest in his reform. But when her colleagues and even the police start to see her as crazy as Nobuo, one might justly ask if her quest is quixotic.

The plot takes some improbable turns in its final act but Suzuki's compositions and the raw performances of the actors make the film consistently captivating. The Boy Who Came Back is available on Amazon Prime.

Twitter Sonnet #1277

Ephem'ral pins'll drop the notice pad.
Another night devolves to flickered screens.
Assorted eyes can drive Medusa mad.
In numbered rows we count the watching beans.
Insistent pages press the inky truth.
Ideas regressed to pulp adorn the shelf.
A grinning plastic sleeps within the booth.
A tiny shell could sate the hungry elf.
The better line conformed to make a jaw.
On rested chin the pout implies a note.
Ascending pants the cat deploys a claw.
In scratchy words the sleeping writer wrote.
Behind a rock the beach awaits address.
Diverted days consume a pleated dress.

Inconsistent Voices

A young woman accidentally hears the voice of a killer over the phone. She tells the police but they never catch the man and she's left to live her life knowing a killer is on the loose, whose face she doesn't know, who might consider her a threat. This is a perfectly good setup for a suspense film but it's a concept that only fuels the first half of 1958's Voice without a Shadow (影なき声). One of Seijun Suzuki's earlier films, it has the kind of fast pace that suggests rapid changes during a quick production. This leads to a feeling of rootlessness and fractured point of view but Suzuki's persistent inventiveness is more than enough to captivate the viewer.

The film begins with Asako (Yoko Minamida) working as a telephone operator for a newspaper. When attempting to call a university professor she accidentally dials the number of a pawn shop where the phone is answered by one of the yakuza knocking the place over. The voice jokingly tells her that she hasn't reached a university but a crematory.

A lot is said about Asako's sensitive hearing, her job has conditioned her to distinctly recognise at least 300 voices. Time passes and she gets married to Kotani (Toshio Takahara) and we find her tormented by the sounds of Mahjong tiles because her husband starts bringing guys home from work every single night to play. Among the guys who come home with Kotani is a very young Joe Shishido, the actor with the peculiar cheek implants who'd become one of Nikkatsu's most recognisable stars.

He seems to pay an inordinate amount of attention to Asako, almost leering at her. Suzuki places us in Asako's point of view with close-ups of her ear and shots of her listening carefully on the other side of the wall while the men play. And of course there's the sound of those tiles played up on the soundtrack. The film also features a few hallucinations--in one scene, Asako seems to run into Shishido's character in every room, sitting cool and calm, playing with a cigarette lighter. Typical of Suzuki, particularly much later on, he wastes no time having anyone explain that these are hallucinations or dreams, he simply shows them as being physically impossible. This helps bring the viewer in to Asako's disorientation.

And then the film takes a sharp left turn and it becomes a different film entirely. The protagonist is Ishikawa (Hideaki Nitani) who worked for the newspaper where Asako was a phone operator. He's been in love with her since before she was married. Now her husband has been implicated in a murder and he has to unravel the truth. We meet the yakuza among whom, surprisingly, is a woman, Mari (Midori Ishizuka) a model as well as a gangster. We're introduced to her fantastic bare legs while she cackles over a comic book she's reading.

This second half of the film is mostly a procedural murder mystery and while Asako is still an important character she slips out of the point of view role. The movie still has very dreamlike moments but it's no longer her dream. It never quite gains the traction of some of Suzuki's best films but it's still a fascinating, delirious ride. Voice without a Shadow is available on Amazon Prime.

Twitter Sonnet #1238

The knots contrive a kind of corse of silk.
The extra limbs would strike the walls about.
For room the space prefers to thin the milk.
So creatures plan or scurry round the route.
The ink recalls belated pens to bed.
In sheets of paper bugs were warm to sleep.
What's written last in books was firstly said.
Or soda rumbled up from darkest deep.
A summer pumpkin softly rolls along.
Selections sink behind the squash at night.
At eight appeared an angel's mint sarong.
The moon illumes a face to ravish sight.
A sound but rarely casts a shadow shape.
A language flies when writ upon a cape.

In the Jungle of Guns and Opium

A man claiming to be "a hunter" wanders into a remote mining town with a shotgun in Seijun Suzuki's 1961 film Man with a Shotgun (散弾銃(ショットガン)の男). A tale of yakuza, bloody revenge, and a surprising amount of moral confusion, it has some beautiful locations and is an early example of how Suzuki's impatience with the genre led to some amusing and fascinating editing choices.

Hideaki Nitani stars as Roji, who's immediately set upon by toughs in the woods who pummel him heedless of the shotgun he carries over his shoulder. After they've given him what looks like a good thrashing, he laughs, gets up, and punches out two of them who stand in his way. Suzuki is off-handedly subverting the conditioned expectations of audiences to establish Roji's preternatural skill. Suzuki then goes for something more extravagant, having a bridge suddenly give out while Roji's trying to cross it.

An impossible instant after the thugs are laughing at his fate, Roji is seen napping on a nearby rock in his underwear, his clothes hanging up to dry. He musters just enough energy to ask the thugs to let him sleep.

Things get more serious when Roji gets to the mining town where the yakuza boss, who runs the town, almost immediately offers him a job. The sheriff is a pathetic, ineffectual man who took his position to avenge his dead wife. The yakuza are really in charge, a fact underlined when the local business owners and some outside investors arrange a meeting to ask the boss to bring in more "security" after it turns out there's a killer on the loose. After this, Roji, who initially seemed happy to take the job offer, suddenly decides to strike out on his own. It turns out he's been hunting the man who raped and murdered his wife in the Japanese Alps.

Confusion arises when it turns out several people are hellbent on endeavours with contradictory perspectives. There's the current sheriff who's willing to kill anyone else who tries to act as sheriff, there's a rival almost as skilled as Roji who also wants to hunt the killer for unclear purposes, and there's also the younger sister of the sheriff (Izumi Ashikawa) who's constantly trying to get everyone to stop fighting.

There's also the boss' wife, played with a magnetic, saucy insolence by Yoko Minamida, who demands Roji hand over his shotgun to her for safe keeping. When Roji's told her relationship to the boss, he surmises this is the only reason the rowdy bar thugs haven't assaulted her. She pushes her precarious authority to the edge--the bar scenes in this film, which feature a lovely musical number performed by Nitani, are marvellously grimy and reeking of desperate, ruthless folks. It comes off as a more dangerous version of the tavern in Only Angels have Wings. The jungle environment gives this yakuza film a nice adventure vibe. Man with a Shotgun is available on Amazon Prime.

Just a Lonely Teenager in Crime

Some choose the gangster life, some are gently pressed into it by well-meaning neighbours, the latter being the case for Jiro, the hapless protagonist of 1962's Teenage Yakuza (ハイチイーンやくざ). Director Seijun Suzuki turns this simple, highly improbable tale into a captivating burst of kinetic filmmaking, taking a moralistic screenplay by Mamoru Okusono and Nozomu Yoshimura and turning it into a weird, slightly embarrassing slice of human experience.

After Jiro (Tamio Kawachi) and his friend win a fight with three other boys in the street, Jiro finds himself being asked to work as security and bodyguard for a few local shops. The ukulele playing, hyperactive teen daughter of one shop owner vigorously puts together a sort of fan club for Jiro and other shop owners start giving him kick backs and before he knows it he's something like a yakuza.

This all happens over Jiro's protests but he does gradually start to enjoy the attention despite the grim disapproval of his mother and sister. But the real problems begin when real yakuza find out about this upstart moving in on their territory.

There's an existential commentary present in the film as Jiro is helplessly pushed through a lifestyle commonly seen as a consummately self-serving vocation. He doesn't really initiate anything for himself until the climax when he tries to convince his friend, who's chosen to be a yakuza with disastrous results, to leave the life so they can go back to being friends and innocent teens. The ultimate result is slightly absurd in a way that emphasises the unlikelihood of the whole premise.

Another of Suzuki's less distinguished films he churned out for the studio, it nonetheless features his trademark talent for expressive pacing and moving compositions and is always fun to watch. Teenage Yakuza is available on Amazon Prime.

From Gangster to Knight

The teenage son of a yakuza boss returns from America when his father dies and inherits the syndicate. But young Matsubara is only disgusted by the family business, preferring instead to become the de facto leader of a school club called the Tokyo Knights (東京騎士隊) in this sweet and slightly campy 1961 Seijun Suzuki action film.

Matsubara (Koji Wada) starts attending a Catholic school shortly after his father's funeral and becomes acquainted with some of the weird students and faculty, including a goofy American music professor (George Ruika). He seems to feel particularly attached to the students, despite upbraiding them for their lack of discipline, and feeling frustrated trying to instruct one would-be singer who inexplicably always talks like she's been inhaling helium.

Matsubara is informed of the Tokyo Knights by one of its less effectual leaders. Matsubara watches as the kid vainly stands protectively before the lovely Yuriko (Mayumi Shimizu), imagining a group of boys approaching mean trouble. Fortunately they just brush right past the two.

For some reason, though, Matsubara excels at everything, including martial arts, and proves it in nicely blocked action sequences throughout the film. In one of the stranger sequences, Matsubara sneaks into the club of a rival boss disguised in demon mask and cape and steals everyone's cuff links. Wada maintains a serious demeanour throughout and there's a vague connexion between the cuff links and his father's possible murder but Suzuki wisely avoids too much explanation and just lets the intense weirdness of the scene casually play out.

The climax is a very nice demonstration of creative lighting techniques and blocking. Set in a quarry in full daylight, Suzuki nonetheless employs artificial lighting, creating really cool, subtle effects to emphasise the significance of particular gunshots or punches.

Tokyo Knights is available on Amazon Prime.

The Trade and the Story

Two reporters from rival papers try to expose a drug and sex trafficking cartel in 1960's Smashing the O-Line (密航0ライン, "Stowaway 0 Line"). It should be a pretty straight forward story but director Seijun Suzuki, as he often did, took this poor innocent pulp script for a bizarre ride, making for a tough, dizzying, and tantalising experience.

It's hard to find much information on this movie. Even Japanese Wikipedia doesn't have an entry for it though somehow it's streaming for free on Amazon Prime. The imdb page has one trivia item, claiming the film was "written, shot, edited and released in 16 days." I find that impossible to believe though it does use a lot of location footage that might've been taken without getting permits.

But when I think of a movie shot within a few weeks, I think Ed Wood and Roger Corman, movies filled with bad sound, aimlessly long takes--films in dire need of proper post production. Smashing the O-Line is filled with powerful, communicative cuts and elaborately executed visual ideas. I suppose it could very well be Suzuki was that much of a genius at improvisation, he may well be the Charlie Parker of Japanese New Wave film.

The first half of the film is a little hard to follow--it demands a viewer pay close attention, not sparing time to explain very much. The journalists, Katori (Hiroyuki Nagato) and Nishina (Yuji Kodaka), are introduced as old friends, and then we get scenes in quick succession of prostitutes and drug caches. Quickly we see the difference between Nishina and Katori is more than the papers they work for; they operate under completely different ethical standards. One might say Katori doesn't have any.

Early on we see him getting out of bed with a prostitute, take a shower, and then call in the police from outside while she stands naked in the bath. And Katori clearly seems to get a sadistic pleasure out of it, even assuring her "It's just me!" when she hears the cops open the door. There's no reason for him to do that but to toy with her.

Nishina, on the other hand, has a strong sense of morality and balks at misleading his sources or going places without the proper permits. He's frustrated that Katori consistently beats him to stories.

A lot of stories go by really quick--Suzuki does come up with a lot of fast ways to make things stick out, like when we're introduced to Katori's sister, Kumiko (Mayumi Shimizu), whose face we first see when she turns sharply away from Katori's fashion model girlfriend.

The last forty minutes or so are more straight forward as Nishina stows away on a ship in Hong Kong, posing as a Chinese man despite not knowing how to speak any Chinese. When some dock inspectors ask him to take his clothes off, it's revealed that he's wearing a woman's blouse under his coat for no apparent reason.

It seems like the kind of surreal idea Suzuki would have in his later films but, then again, there's a sense to it--if Nishina is in any way unable to prevent his behaviour from seeming suspicious or like he's hiding something, the blouse gives the inspectors an explanation for it. It's very typical of Suzuki to show something like this without any preamble explanation most filmmakers would feel it necessary to include. And it works great.

Katori is the far more interesting character, though, a man of absolute commitment yet full of contradiction. He really seems passionate about breaking up the trade of sex slaves, explaining he's willing to go to any lengths to do so, yet in one remarkable scene he refuses to cooperate with a brothel madam who has a bunch of her thugs molesting his sister in a car that's racing circles around the car where Katori sits. This scene is dizzying in more ways than one and the editing involved, since most of the shots are from near the characters' points of view, must have took considerable skill. It's not one of Suzuki's best films but it's pretty damned good for a quick work.

Lupin the Trip

A feverish gangster who dropped acid might have dreams resembling 1985's Legend of the Gold of Babylon (ルパン三世 バビロンの黄金伝説). The third feature length film in the Lupin III franchise, it differs significantly--some say notoriously--in tone from its much more famous predecessor, the Hayao Miyazaki directed Castle of Cagliostro. The Legend of the Gold of Babylon was co-directed by a man who made his name directing live action films in the 60s, the great Seijun Suzuki. I certainly liked it.

I came to Legend of the Gold of Babylon more as a Seijun Suzuki fan than a Lupin fan. I loved Castle of Cagliostro and I've enjoyed episodes of the old series I've seen but I haven't gotten around to watching through them all. Much of the 1985 film doesn't feel like so much of a departure from the norm that I've seen for Lupin (Yasuo Yamada), particularly his antics in the beginning of the film dodging the chronically inept Inspector Zenigata (Goro Naya).

But the chase occurring on motorcycles through the features of an enormous face does seem a bit more surreal than usual. The premise of Lupin is that he's a master thief who always triumphs against apparently impossible odds, usually by absurd means. Gold of Babylon takes his absurd to a more dreamlike level and often deploys his impossible or weird feats with less fanfare, like an extremely swift reveal towards the end of the film that Lupin's been wearing a toupee all this time and that it conceals gadgets.

Many of the moments where Lupin is made to look foolish or where Lupin is savouring another victory are cut short, leaving the viewer with more of an impression of their strangeness than of their emotional impact.

There's more of a dream logic to sequences of events, too. That Zenigata enlists the aid of a group of beauty pageant winners to hunt Lupin may be the sort of thing a cartoon would justify as a plot but Suzuki cuts out any attempt at justification. One moment, Zenigata's been reassigned to the beauty pageant, the next moment he's been assigned to hunt Lupin again but with the pageant winners as assistants. Lupin has a weak spot for beautiful women and presumably these pageant winners are skilled but the movie leaves it to us to think of these strained explanations. If the implicit agreement behind such storytelling is that the audience is willing to go along with an improbable idea if it's fun, why not skip the pointless explanation?

Suzuki made a career for himself making yakuza movies in the 50s and 60s for Nikkatsu until he was fired from the studio for making the extremely weird and experimental Branded to Kill in 1967. Suzuki was blacklisted for ten years and when he started making movies again they generally dropped any pretence of realism, being surreal, post-modernist experiments. So directing a Lupin movie was in one sense a step back for him but in another sense a world of cartoon logic fits perfectly with his trajectory. Most of his movies aren't quite so glib, though. Legend of the Gold of Babylon does have an oddly sweet musical number from the drunken old woman (Toki Shiozawa) who starts Lupin on the quest for the gold. The song even had a very dreamy 80s music video to go along with it.

The lyrics end up functioning as clues when Lupin finally gets to the buried Tower of Babel. Things start to feel very Indiana Jones at that point--I wondered if maybe this was because Spielberg was such a fan of Castle of Cagliostro. But a lot of the movie is set in New York where a mob boss who wields a poison fly swatter seems like he might be a reference to Brando in The Godfather.

It made me feel like Suzuki was poking some fun at the U.S. along with his irreverent take on Lupin.