WHEN HORROR CAME TO SHOCHIKU: THE X FROM OUTER SPACE - ECLIPSE SERIES 37

It wasn’t my intention to watch Ridley Scott’s new film The Martian on the same day as The X from OuterSpace, the 1967 Japanese sci-fi monster flick directed by Kazui Nihonmatsu, but it made for a funny little double-feature. Accidental symmetry.

In Scott’s film, Matt Damon plays an astronaut on a mission to Mars who ends up stranded on the planet after a dangerous storm forces his crewmates to leave without him; in The X from Outer Space, the leading film in the Eclipse set When Horror Came to Shochiku, the Japanese expeditions to Mars suffer from a pre-emptive peril. Namely, something is destroying their ships mid-journey.

Thus it is that the AAB-Gamma is launched with a three-man, one-woman crew to try to find out what’s going on. They acknowledge that this is kind of a risky solution because why won’t the hypothetical UFOs also destroy this “astroboat” and all who sail on her? Never mind, this is science and bravery!

The X from Outer Space is fun and ambitious, while also clumsy and strange. Plot points don’t always connect, nor do the explanations for what is happening at any given time. Nihonmatsu’s picture, which was heavily guided by Shochiku, Japan’s second-oldest film company, is clearly designed to hit certain popular trends. Its rubber-suit monster, Guilala, is little more than an alien cousin to Godzilla, and would be perfectly at home on Monster Island. Its sci-fi setting seems a little too late for the 1950s space race pictures that Hollywood gave us (The Day theEarth Stood Still, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Forbidden Planet), but it provides the movie’s best segments. While Guiliala’s stomping around miniature cities and battling off toy armies is pretty silly, the outer space effects, particularly the AAB-Gamma itself, are kind of cool. Someone had fun building those ships and making them fly.

There are also some intriguing character dynamics, namely between the two women in the movie, blonde American Lisa (Patricia Neal), a biologist that is part of the Gamma flight crew, and Japanese astronaut Michiko (Itoka Harada), the ship’s main point of contact at the extensive moon base that serves as a pit stop between Earth and Mars. While Neal’s casting seems like a cynical ploy to appeal to certain audiences (no need to cast Raymond Burr in the American version!), the dynamic between her and Michiko is kind of fascinating. They are friends, but both share a certain affection for Captain Sano (Shunya Wazaki). Michiko’s annoyance at Sano’s blind indecision is obvious from her first scene, when she blatantly cold-shoulders him.

But Lisa is not the only white face in the cast, and though The X from Outer Space’s warnings against dangerous science are muddled (we are far afield of the original Godzilla [review]), one could interpret the presence of Americans in a variety of ways, reflecting the difficult relationship between the Japanese and the occupying forces following World War II (see also: Suzuki’s Gate ofFlesh). On one hand, the helpful Dr. Berman (Franz Gruber) is a symbol of international cooperation; on the other, the reluctant astronaut Dr. Stein (Mike Daneen), is a boorish complainer who only does what’s required of him begrudgingly. Everyone may have one purpose--figuring out how to destroy Guilala--but they aren’t always working together (once again, not dissimilar to The Martian). Though Lisa is instrumental in unraveling this riddle, spoiler alert, Michiko gets her man.

As commentary, it’s not very sharp; likewise, as speculative horror, there is zero that’s terrifying about The X from Outer Space. The film is schlocky fluff, but if it’s the kind of distraction you’re looking for, and if you’d rather crack wise than jump in your seat, than this little sci-fi curio can be entertaining.

MASAKI KOBAYASHI AGAINST THE SYSTEM: THE THICK-WALLED ROOM - ECLIPSE SERIES #38

Japanese movies made after World War II that deal directly with the post-War conditions following the country's defeat and grappling with the U.S. occupation offer a unique glimpse into a particular time and place that you can't really find anywhere else. I'd suggest the closest equivalent is American-made movies about Vietnam and the climate of unrest that existed as a result of that conflict. Perhaps if movies had been around after the U.S. Civil War, a Southern cinema might have emerged that would have been akin to what Masaki Kobayashi, Seijun Suzuki, and others created in the 1950s and 1960s. They engaged their nation's shame and struggles honestly, rather than the self-mythologizing that we see in American westerns that feature former Confederate soldiers as protagonists.

The Eclipse boxed set Masaki Kobayashi Against the System, as its name suggests, is meant to collect early Kobayashi films that wrestled with difficult and sometimes controversial subjects. The set leads with his third film, the 1956 drama The Thick-Walled Room, a prison story written by acclaimed novelist Kobo Abe (The Face of Another). In particular, The Thick-Walled Room casts its eye on men who have been tried as war criminals and sentenced to an indefinite stay in Sugamo Prison. A handful of them share a bare cell, the thick-walled room of the title, under guard of the American soldiers who run the place. They dream of their eventual release, and a righting of the wrong that was done to them.

Kobayashi and Abe tell their stories through a narrative that alternates between the day-to-day of prison life and flashbacks. As we get to know the characters in the present, we also see their past. Most importantly, we are shown the so-called crimes that got them incarcerated. The bitter sting of their predicament is that, for the most part, these are soldiers who were pushed into heinous acts by bullying officers. The higher-ranking men got away scot-free, leaving their subordinates holding the bag. The resultant anger that this naturally causes is stoked further as a peace treaty with the U.S. granting Japan further independence uses these poor souls as sacrificial pawns. They will stay in jail and do a nation's penance. (The Thick-Walled Room did penance, as well: though made in 1952, it wouldn't see the light of day until 1956 out of fear it would offend the lingering Americans.)

As with any such ensemble drama, The Thick-Walled Room presents a diverse cast of personalities. Kimura (Tsutomu Shimonoto) is a poet, while Nishimura is a smartass. There aren't just Japanese men in Sugamo: Kyo is a Korean soldier who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Others shun him for being a Communist, particularly as the news of the conflict between North and South Korea filters into to the prison, but as The Thick-Walled Room progresses, others subtly shift toward Kyo's position. Ultimately, the prisoners form their own union, and began to organize to lobby for their release.

The two main stars of The Thick-Walled Room are Yamashita (Torahiko Hamada) and Yokota (Ko Mishima). Both are sensitive men who still have family waiting for them in the outside world. Both are haunted by the brutality they were forced to inflict on the enemy. Yokota is a romantic who dreams of a girl he hopes to reconnect with when he's free. Little does he know that Yoshiko (Keiko Kishi, The Makioka Sisters [review]) is now a prostitute. In the flashbacks, we see that she is fascinated by American servicemen, and while Kobayashi doesn't address the plight of women in post-War Japan as directly as Seijun Suzuki does in movies like Gate of Flesh, there is some understated commentary here. If a country can be judged by how it takes care of its women and children, Japan is failing. Just beyond Sugamo's fence, women sell themselves and little kids hustle to shine the boots of their occupiers.

Yokota serves as a sort of social conscience for the film. He is literally a translator, being the one who speaks English, but symbolically this carries over to his being the character who theorizes about prison life and whose ideology evolves. He is the one who explains the experience to his comrades and, by extension, the audience. "Everybody's turning to dust little by little," he tells his brother. He sees the men who are locked up as growing more desperate, doing things they should otherwise be ashamed of to survive and inventing justifications to assuage their guilt. In the case of one of his roommates, Kawanishi (Kinzo Shin, Youth of the Beast), the shame is too much. In The Thick-Walled Room's most visually memorable sequence, Kawanishi is left alone with his hallucinations. Holes are punched through the walls, like shotgun blasts coming from outside, and through each opening, the man sees his sins and the judgment of his fellow citizens. It's like he's under siege from his own memories. Suicide is a looming presence, and more than one man tries it as a means of escape.

Yamashita has the most direct example of injustice. His superior not only bullied him into murdering an innocent man, but he then testified against him in court. Interestingly, the crime the Americans treat as the most severe is his allegedly having stolen food. Yamashita is to be punished for stealing a loaf of bread, not unlike Jean Valjean in Les miserables [review]. There is a poetic connection between Yamashita and Yokota in that the American that Yokota was forced to beat was also being punished for stealing food to survive. The two men deal with things differently, however: Yokota is given to external expression, while Yamashita internalizes. It's somewhat ironic, then, that The Thick-Walled Room's major climax is Yamashita getting to confront his persecutor directly. The incident brings some closure, and his brief taste of freedom brings the man some peace, but at the same time, it provides no real answers.

It's a bittersweet conclusion. Yamashita returns to his cell ready to embrace his new family. The men who share his fate have made their own community, one that will provide them succor as they forge ahead while also reinforcing the sad truth that they are exiles in their own country.

KENJI MIZOGUCHI'S FALLEN WOMEN: WOMEN OF THE NIGHT - ECLIPSE SERIES 13

Okay, so maybe Kenji Mizoguchi's 1948 drama Women of the Night wasn't the best choice for a Saturday evening's entertainment. Particularly since I hadn't even started drinking. Correcting that now.

The third film in the Eclipse set Kenji Mizoguchi's Fallen Women has some years distance from the previous entry in the box, 1936's Sisters of the Gion. Damn, a whole war actually happened during the time from one production to the next, so it's fairly understandable that Women of the Night would be so tragic and bleak. The director kept making movies in that time, including his masterwork The 47 Ronin, but Women of the Night is his first significant return to the theme explored in this collection.

World War II informs everything about the drama of Women of the Night, which was based on a contemporary novel about life in Japan at the time. Though, unlike the post-War films of Seijun Suzuki, Mizoguchi never addresses the problem of occupying U.S. troops, the effects of the combat are both felt and seen in the rubble and poverty that pushes his characters to the brink. Fusako (Kinuyo Tanaka) is struggling to get by and hoping her husband will return from Korea. She lives with her mother-in-law and tries to care for her sick child. The only man we see in this early portion is her alcoholic brother-in-law, who did return from service and does not like what he did or the outcome. His little sister Kumiko (Tomie Tsunoda) lost her husband to the fighting, as did many other women her age.

Fusako has been selling clothes to make ends meet, and though the red light district is just around the corner, refuses to degrade herself. She suffers the one-two punch of finding out her husband is dead and finally losing her son to illness, but she maintains her dignity and even manages to secure a job with her husband's former boss. In fact, things are looking up when she is reunited with her own younger sister, Natsuko (Sanae Takasugi), who she thought lost. Natsuko has returned from Korea a widow, and she bears her own scars from the fighting. Currently, she works as a hostess in a dance club.

The good times don't last. Natsuko and Fusako both strike up an affair with Fusako's boss, and when the older sister finds out, she leaves home and becomes a prostitute with the intent of punishing all men by spreading sin and disease. She believes that the men of Japan are seeking to destroy her and all women like her, so why not pre-emptively take advantage of their base desires? Her point of view is a little hard to argue with. The boss man turns out to be less than a stand-up guy, and when Kumiko tries to leave home to make her way in the world, she is taken advantage of by young male pretending to want to help. The naïve girl is deceived, raped, and pushed into prostitution herself.

Apparently Kenji Mizoguchi had been inspired by the movies that began coming out of Italy after WWII, and there is a definite influence of the Neorealist movement in evidence in Women of the Night. The choice between honest work and dishonest gain is not that far off from De Sica's father/son drama Bicycle Thieves [review], and much like similar ruins set the scene for Rossellini's Germany Year Zero [review], Japan's war-ravaged landscape provides a perfect backdrop for Mizoguchi's cautionary tale. Civilization has been ruined, and with it, any balance of right and wrong. The ladies in the movie will suffer all manner of humiliation and loss. Gone is any whiff of the hypocritical judgment of the common populace that made the struggles of the characters in Osaka Elegy and Sisters of the Gion [review] so difficult to traverse; replacing it is a moral obligation to set things right, one that few engage with, and those who do seem inconsequential in the face of so much decay.

Mizoguchi's cast is excellent. They play their characters with nuance and, even in the worst cases, empathy. They appear to be more than simple "types," regardless of how insignificant their function in the narrative. Of particular note is the obvious divide between the sisters. Fusako is more compassionate at the start of the film, making her rejection of her previous life all the more drastic. Kinuyo Tanaka, whom Mizoguchi would use again in both Ugetsu and Sansho the Bailiff, could have easily resorted to a cartoonish transformation. There are plenty of examples of how she might have made Fusako less sympathetic; most of the other prostitutes look like the prototype for bad girls in 1950s juvenile delinquent exploitation pictures. Instead, Tanaka relies on weariness and disappointment more than bravado. She plays Fusako as a woman who has given up, and her whole demeanor changes as a result--she goes from humbly slumping in deference to her social betters to defiantly displaying who she is.

Sanae Takasugi is equally as good when it comes to establishing the subtle distinctions between Fusako and Natsuko. Despite the hardships she has already endured, Natsuko has not given in to despair; rather, she has gotten crafty and she masks her troubles with an erudite manner. She is a woman that is used to being taken care of and having things paid for. Takasugi (who later worked with both Ozu and Ichikawa) plays her as borderline haughty. She carries herself differently than the actress playing her sister. Again, you can make out their approach to life just in how they present themselves, and by the end of the film, their stance has pretty much swapped. For all her good posture, however, things don't go much better for Natsuko. There are no good choices left for these ladies.

Women of the Night is an unrelenting tragedy. The downward spiral of its main characters is both dizzying and deep. Unfortunately, I think Mizoguchi tips the balance too far. In its final 20 minutes or so, Women of the Night becomes comically overwrought. Everything goes wrong, and instead of just letting the bad stuff happen, Mizoguchi and his longtime collaborator, screenwriter Yoshikata Yoda, inflate the aforementioned moralizing, however flailing it might be, and resort to cornball histrionics. Fusako and Kumiko are reunited in a bombed-out Christian church, complete with stained-glass windows depicting the Virgin Mary and the Baby Jesus. A brawl breaks out amidst the rubble, as prostitutes who are angry that Fusako would try to rescue herself and her friend from this way of life descend on them in a frenzy of violence. It might have actually worked had Mizoguchi just let them take their beatings. Instead, Fusako's protests move her attackers to tears, and the film ends with labored wailing and cries to the heavens. It's a bit much. The director seems to have lost his restraint in direct proportion to his main characters' loss of dignity.

Goddammit, pour me another drink.

NIKKATSU NOIR: TAKE AIM AT THE POLICE VAN - ECLIPSE SERIES 17

As 2012 comes to a close, this trio of reviews of Seijun Suzuki movies actually catches me up for the weeks I missed in November. This marks four full years of providing one new review to this blog a week. That's a lot of writing and a lot of movies.

I picked Take Aim at the Police Van from the Eclipse Nikkatsu Noir set because it was the only remaining Suzuki film in my collection that I had not yet watched. It's interesting that my viewing over the past two days has gone in reverse chronological order. I am not sure why Criterion decided to number Tokyo Drifter [review] and Branded to Kill [review] the way they did, but with this 1960 mystery/drama thrown in, the effect for me was to see Suzuki's style get more normal as I progressed.

Coming some six years before Tokyo Drifter, Take Aim at the Police Van is a more conventional genre exercise than the director's later films. It begins with a violent attack on a prison transport van. Suzuki builds tension by having road-sign warnings repeat over and over, moving faster and making the viewer nervous with all their cries of "Caution!" It also doesn't help that we know that up ahead a sniper is waiting. When the van approaches his hillside vantage point, he opens fire, killing two of the prisoners. It was a concentrated attack.

The guard on that run, Daijiro Tamon (Michitaro Mizushima), is held responsible for the assault, and he is put on six months leave. Rather than stay at home and sulk, Tamon decides to look into what really happened all on his own, thus transforming himself into a traditional fictional investigator, doggedly pursuing his goals despite the warnings and the dangers. Suzuki and scriptwriter Shinichi Sekizawa see Tamon as belonging to a western tradition, and even make reference to Ellery Queen and other mystery writers who concocted similar stories with equally committed characters. Tamon begins his case by finding one of the shooting survivors, a low-level crook named Goro (Shoichi Ozawa) who was due to be released on bail the day of the incident. Goro's behavior during the attack makes Tamon think he knows something.

Naturally, pulling on this first thread causes many others to unravel. Tamon follows Goro out of town, where the mistress of one of the dead prisoners and Tsunako, the girl who bailed Goro out (Mari Shiraki), are working as strippers in an illicit brothel. Their involvement leads the prison guard to a human trafficking ring with ties to a mysterious, possibly fictitious big boss named Akiba. More people end up dead, some thought dead end up alive, and Tamon maybe has a thing for one of the possible suspects (Misako Watanabe). Yuko's father runs the "talent agency" that books the girls, and she's taken charge of the business since her old man got sick. She also knows archery, which is interesting since the dead stripper was shot in the heart with an arrow!

Take Aim at the Police Van takes a tried-and-true approach to building its mystery. For every answer Tamon finds, he also uncovers a few more questions. More players join the story, and the cast builds to the point where he doesn't really know who is going to pop out from which shadow next. Mizushima plays the role pretty straight. He's always looking forward, rarely indulging in sentiment or any emotion that might alter his course. He's an older man, and seeing him tangled up with so many young girls creates an amusing incongruity. Tamon is no white knight, but he will get the job done.

By the time we get to the climax, just about any of the crooks could be Akiba. Tamon has formed an uneasy alliance with Yuko, particularly after the two of them are nearly burned alive in a gasoline truck by the sniper, and he also takes a liking to Tsunako and wants to get her out of whatever trouble Goro might have gotten her into. Motor vehicles and motorways prove dangerous throughout the film. There is a chase on a cliffside highway and later Tamon is nearly run down by coordinated vehicles coming from two different directions. Goro also humorously provides the movie with its second roadside omen: he has a backpack that says "No U-Turns." There is no turning around, there is only forging ahead.

It makes for a sublime kismet, then, that the final shootout in Take Aim at the Police Van goes down in a trainyard. Buses and cars are unpredictable. They crash and they roll, and their course is subject to human control. Trains follow a track. They are reliable and they are sturdy. Their destination can't be changed easily. For some, this will be fatal; for others, salvation. Trains are also the industry of an older generation, one that Tamon can identify with. And perhaps that is why he is as reliable and as dedicated, as well. The young hoods have their flashy cars, but he identifies with the rails, getting the job done and never deviating from the predestined route.

BONUS SEIJUN SUZUKI REVIEWS:

* Detective Burea 2-3: Go to Hell Bastards! (1963)
* Tanuki Goten (Princess Raccoon) (2005)

And one from the archives, part of a group of reviews I did for my old column "Can You Picture That?" on OniPress.com. This one was reviewed alongside Onibaba, and that portion was reprinted here.

Underworld Beauty (1958): Speaking of cover art, I initially thought that Seijun Suzuki's 1958 yakuza movie, Underworld Beauty, would be a perfect companion to Onibaba. A beautiful woman dramatically posing with a machine gun! Yes! Only the cover art is entirely misleading. Akiko (Mari Shiraki) never picks up a gun inUnderworld Beauty. I was fooled by marketing!

Thankfully, Underworld Beauty is an entertaining film even without a pretty young thing shooting up the bad boys. Released by Home Vision Entertainment along with a spate of other Suzuki films, Underworld Beauty hints a little bit at the scattershot editing style that, a decade later, got Suzuki fired and branded "incomprehensible" (the way sometimes the story jumps from point A to point C pales next to the supersonic speed Branded to Kill travels at). Overall, though, it's a pretty straightforward crime picture with a cynical edge reminiscent of Sam Fuller.

The plot is simple: Miyamoto has spent three years in prison. In that time, he has managed to keep his mouth shut, giving up neither his yakuza bosses nor the hiding place of the jewels he stole. Feeling guilty about his partner, Mihara, who was partially crippled in the heist, he decides to work through his old boss and sell the diamonds, giving the money to his friend. Only someone attempts to steal the stones at the sale, and Mihara ends up swallowing the jewels before leaping off a building to escape. In the wake of his death, Miyamoto and Akiko go up against the yakuza and Akiko's effete, mannequin-manufacturing boyfriend, working through a maze of double-crosses to establish ownership of the three shiny jewels.

What sets Underworld Beauty apart from standard crime films of the period is the clash of the old school gangster (Miyamoto) and the wild-child, idealistic teenager (Akiko). It's never more clear than when the dark-suited hoods step into the bossa-nova rock-and-roll nightclub filled with kids dressed in light colors. The crooks are like brick walls, while the teenagers are much more petite. At one point, one of the bad guys shoves the fresh-faced bartender away from the bar and he practically launches into the air. Thus, the central conflict becomes whether or not Akiko can step up and act maturely. Can she and Miyamoto find common ground, and will it carry them through the classic crime-doesn't-pay ending? (Side note: It's interesting to compare the rather milquetoast version of a rock club in Underworld Beauty to the seedier nightclub in Akira Kurosawa's High and Low [review] five years later. The former is definitely the bobby-soxer '50s version we see in a lot of period entertainment, whereas the latter's sweaty opium den vibe showed the false innocence was already crumbling.)

TOKYO DRIFTER (Blu-Ray) - #39

Seijun Suzuki's 1966 yakuza picture Tokyo Drifter starts as a black-and-white film. Tetsu (Tetsuya Watari), a former gangster looking to go legit, is set upon by a bunch of toughs from a rival gang. They are determined to test Tetsu's dedication to the straight-and-narrow while their boss, Otsuka (Hideaki Esumi), watches from a nearby car. Tetsu, who is nicknamed "The Phoenix," has an explosive temper, and our first dose of color comes when Otsuka imagines it going off. It's a quick flash of gunplay reminiscent of the opening of a James Bond film. Except, it's all fantasy, Tetsu doesn't take the bait. The world stays black-and-white.

At least until the credits begin. Then Suzuki's full-color version of Tokyo comes to life, accompanied by strains of the Tokyo Drifter theme song, sung by Watari himself. Like the anthem from High Noon [review], this will accompany the gunslinger as he wanders, underscoring his manly adventure by making explicit the lonely path this lone wolf chooses to follow. There is much to Tokyo Drifter that is like a cowboy picture, actually. Bar fights, quick-draw showdowns, even a little Ennio Morricone-style whistling. Tetsu certainly takes the same kind of punishment as Sergio Leone's Man with No Name. Still, Tokyo Drifter is pure Seijun Suzuki.

The plot here is fairly basic. By going legit, Tetsu's boss, Kurata (Ryuji Kita), has left a power vacuum. A loan coming due for the old man gives Otsuka an opening, and he moves in to take Kurata's debt and a valuable piece of property he owns. The scheme is partially successful, but two people are left dead and there is blood on both boss' hands. Tetsu becomes the sticking point in the middle, so he leaves town to avoid further trouble. Otsuka sends his goons after him, while also angling to take Tetsu's woman, a nightclub singer by the name of Chiharu (Chieko Matsubara). The Phoenix turns out to be harder to kill than Otsuka thought, and after the gangster sets up a double-cross, he finally forces his enemy to return to Tokyo and settle all scores.

Tokyo Drifter is a crazy battlefield of violence and color. Suzuki is clearly having fun playing with the cinematic hues available to him. Cinematographer Shigeyoshi Mine plays with background lighting to create great washes of color that he can turn up or down as he sees fit. Likewise, production designer Takeo Kimura crafts a specific color scheme for the various characters. Just as they might have specific musical movements to announce their presence, here they have signature pigments that indicate who they are. Tetsu wears powder blue, a cool and calming color, while Otsuka's jackets are a fiery red. In between is Kenji, a.k.a. "The Shooting Star" (Hideaki Nitani). He was once Otsuka's top gunman, but he has since struck out on his own, not unlike Tetsu, but to pursue his own ends rather than fulfill a misguided sense of obligation. He serves as a voice of reason, and so he is represented by a more earthy green.

Chiharu has her own color, as well. The songbird is, fittingly, a canary yellow. This yellow doesn't just show up in how she dresses, but as she sings, the whole nightclub turns to match her hue. Fittingly, in the movie's intense final sequence, she is an angelic white, matching Tetsu's heroic bearing. All of his enemies--and indeed their whole world--have gone black without him, and it requires his return to illuminate the landscape. The nightclub becomes abstracted, turning into an open space, a more fitting area for Tetsu and Otsuka's gang to have their standoff. The choreography here is fantastic, with the Phoenix really getting a chance to show his skills.

The finale also plays long and without tricky cutting, differentiating it from earlier, choppier action scenes, many of which take place out in the open. A dual on snow-covered train tracks between the Phoenix and the Viper (Tamio Kawaji) has the added pressure of a locomotive barreling up the hill toward them. A lone red rail lays between them, marking Tetsu's kill zone. He runs for it, dives to the ground, and then--cut to the train passing. Did he shoot the other man? Did either get run over by the train? We don't know right away, and in Tokyo Drifter, anything is possible.

And I do mean anything. Suzuki is not yet quite as out there as he would be in Branded to Kill [review] the following year--though, to be honest, I found the first 20 minutes or so of Tokyo Drifter to be way more confusing--there is already an anarchic "anything goes" quality to Suzuki's work. This is a movie, after all, that stops twice for commercials for blow dryers. It also has a hero that is not just prone to having a running interior monologue, but tends to burst out and sing his own anthem. A little skullduggery in the editing bay doesn't seem like much next to those sorts of shenanigans.

Yet, for all the fun that is to be had, Suzuki maintains a cynical edge throughout. One doesn't expect him to draw the hard line that the lyrics of the Tokyo Drifter theme suggest--all the elements of a romantic ending are there: a vindicated hero and the woman who loves him--but that's exactly what the filmmaker does. For all that he has sacrificed by sticking to his code of honor, Tetsu is prepared to sacrifice more rather than ever lower his guard. This is why he can never be true allies with Kenji, as he thinks Kenji is beholden to nothing. Tetsu is bound by his own belief in the way things should be, and while men all around him let him down and flip-flop, he has all the more reason to stay true, however that may be to his own detriment.

Please Note: The screengrabs in this review are from the DVD of Tokyo Drifter originally released by Criterion in 1999. The upgraded Blu-Ray comes with a phenomenal high-definition restoration. The colors on the newly minted print are vibrant and highlight all the subtleties of design that Suzuki originally intended. Even the black-and-white opening is like night and day between the two discs. Tokyo Drifter in HD pops like never before, so make sure you get the edition with the cover you see up top, whether it be the BD or the new version of the standard DVD. It makes all the difference.

This disc was provided by the Criterion Collection for purposes of review.

BRANDED TO KILL (Blu-Ray) - #38

"Beast needs beast. That is the beast way. You and I are beasts."

Goro Hanada is the #3 professional killer in Japan. He is a cold, calculated criminal, with all the kinks and emotional distancing that such a job requires. He's married, and after a job, he and his wife rut like animals, spurred on by Hanada's personal fetish: he is invigorated by the smell of boiling rice. Staying alive in the underworld is all down to rank, and so is getting killed. You can't get respected if you don't measure up, but when you rank high, other assassins may come gunning for you. How you get to be #1 is a mystery. Some say the man at the top doesn't really exist, he's just a myth.

The movie is Branded to Kill, and the man who embodies this murderous ideal is Joe Shishido, the unconventional matinee idol with the chipmunk cheeks. He plays Hanada as a cool customer, watching everything, saying little. It's a role he's played before, including several times for director Seijun Suzuki. You could say this is their joint masterpiece, the perfect crystallization of Suzuki's jazzy style and cynical worldview. His disjointed narrative manner had grown so jagged by this point, Suzuki was actually fired from the film during production. While the studio's claims that the movie had become "incomprehensible" don't really hold water, one does have to stay alert while watching Hanada run from his rivals. Suzuki and editor Matsuo Tanji's rapid cutting, some two decades before MTV would popularize similar techniques, removes all the cushioning between individual moments. If you look away to check your phone or play with your cat, you might miss something. (I know both of these to be true from experience!)

At the start of Branded to Kill, Hanada agrees to help a friend with a job. The other gunman has fallen on hard times and needs to prove he can be trusted. He and Hanada are supposed to escort an important person (Koji Nanbara) with a price on his head from the airport. Along the way, they are attacked. Hanada and the mark make it out alive, Hanada's friend is not so lucky.

Shortly after this deadly outing, Hanada meets Misako, a dangerous woman with a death wish. Played by actress Annu Mari, she bears an uncanny resemblance to Chiaki Kuriyama, and she could have easily been on Quentin Tarantino's mind when casting Kuriyama as Gogo Yubara in Kill Bill. Her poison needle routine, and the way these sharp objects symbolically upend traditional sexual imagery, may have also been an inspiration for the schoolgirl killer in Takashi Miike's Fudoh: The New Generation (though, naturally, Miike takes the delivery method to its most gruesome extreme, having the girl shoot the needles from her crotch). Suzuki displays Misako as a girl who almost literally has a rain cloud following her around. She and Hanada meet in the pouring rain, and her appearances are often accompanied by torrents of water, a signal of both fertility and change.

She brings both to Hanada, though he must struggle for the first and the second is foisted on him. Misako convinces him to take a nearly impossible job, and cruel happenstance causes him to fail. This means Hanada loses his rank and is marked for death. Both Misako and his wife (Mariko Ogawa) will try to kill him, blaming "the Organization" for forcing their hands. Hanada begins to suspect a greater conspiracy, and to save his own life, he must kill #1 and take his place.

This proves more difficult when the identity of the top killer is revealed. The trick this assassin uses most often is isolating the target and wearing him or her down. Hanada is placed in a cocoon, as it were, forced to wait out his would-be murderer, a task that taxes him mentally and physically. Suzuki is pushing his protagonist to transform, and butterflies, which are common symbols of metamorphoses, are everywhere. One is the cause of Hanada's failure; Misako also decorates her home with butterfly carcasses. Her signature pins are used to stick them to her wall. At one point in his struggle, when Hanada incorrectly assumes he has made it out of the gauntlet, he sees a battleship with a deck covered in planes. They look like butterflies ready to break free, but they only exist to remind Hanada that he is still a caterpillar crawling on the ground.

Branded to Kill is full of such visual flourishes, and Suzuki especially lends his creative mind to coming up with new ways to stage the sex and violence that make his film such a lurid pleasure. Hanada and his wife have a marathon love-making session in their apartment, each jump cut showing them in a different position. Likewise, each hit that Hanada undertakes before his mishap is increasingly inventive. Handa must kill three targets one after the other, and each time, he comes up with a new way to reach the victim without being seen. It's a famous sequence, best encountered without any foreknowledge so as to best experience the dark humor and gory punchlines.

Success in Branded to Kill is weighed on a rigged scale. Hanada submits himself to his passion for Misako, and he muscles up to tussle with #1, but in each case, his body is more treacherous than any of his colleagues. The desire for the flesh and the desire for fame undo Suzuki's hero. At the start of the film, a professional rule is offered: "Booze and broads kill killers." The true assassin surrenders no control, he masters his own impulses. In this, the success of the filmmaker is clear. His bosses may not have gotten what he was after, but Seijun Suzuki has marshaled the inherent chaos of Hanada's bloody lifestyle and pushed it as far as it can go. In doing so, he provides a way for Branded to Kill's audience to experience the intensity of the moment while also witnessing how such heat can melt the ice in even the coldest murderer's veins. Branded to Kill is exhilarating and strange, and yet never random. Suzuki is perfectly devoted to his own aesthetic intentions, and as the top gunslinger informs his #3, that is how you get to be #1: wear down all opposition with a dogged dedication to your own end goal.

Please Note: The screengrabs here are from the original Criterion disc released in 1999. The new Blu-Ray of Branded to Kill is better in every way imaginable. The image is sharper, brighter, and full of more detail than was apparent on the now ancient first release. Jumping from watching the BD to putting the old disc in my computer was like stepping off of a sunny beach and into a smoke-filled house. The difference is immediately apparent, so do yourself a favor and go for the upgrade, be it the Blu-Ray or the new DVD version. Look for either with the cover at the top of this post!

This disc was provided by the Criterion Collection for purposes of review.

SIDELINE: MORE REVIEWS FOR 04/09

IN THEATRES...

* Adventureland, a welcome surprise. So much more than the trailers suggest. Noah Baumbach meets Judd Apatow.

* Lymelife, another 1980s coming of age drama, this time starring the Culkins as the children of a failing marriage. Good performances, especially from Alec Baldwin and Timothy Hutton, overcome some familiar territory.

* X-Men Origins: Wolverine, wherein Hollywood undoes a character that was once supposedly invulnerable. Way to go, Hollywood!

ON DVD...

* 1612, a boring historical fantasy epic from Russia forces me to ask, "What hath Peter Jackson wrought?"

* Jean Genet's Un chant d'amour, the controversial French writer's 1950 experiment in cinema.

* Deadly Sweet, Tinto Brass' wild twist on crime thrillers is a pop-art, comic-book treat. Storyboarded by Guido Crepax, even.

Would make a good double-feature with...

* Detective Bureau 2-3: Go To Hell Bastards!, a loopy crime flick from Seijun Suzuki and his star, Jo Shishida.

* La Grande Bouffe, in which four Italian men try to eat and screw themselves to death. Not even Marcello Mastroianni can save this tepid shocker.

* Max Fleischer's Superman: 1941-1942, the classic cartoon shorts finally get a reliable packaging. I love these!

* Poil de carotte, Julien Duvivier's 1925 silent picture chronicling the troubled childhood of a freckle-faced redhead. May not sound like much, but it's a potent portrait of a rough life.

* Valkyrie, Tom Cruise plays a German patriot trying to save his country from Hitler in Bryan Singer's lukewarm WWII picture.