Branded to Kill (Seijun Suzuki, 1967)

Annu Mari and Joe Shishido in Branded to Kill

Cast: Joe Shishido, Mariko Ogawa, Annu Mari, Koji Nanbara, Isao Tamagawa, Hiroshi Minami. Screenplay: Hachiro Guryu, Mitsutoshi Ishigami, Takeo Kimura, Chusei Sone, Atsushi Yamatoya. Cinematography: Kazue Nagatsuka. Art direction: Motozo Kawahara. Film editing: Akira Suzuki. Music: Naozumi Yamamoto.

Seijun Suzuki' s favorite leading man, chipmunk-cheeked Joe Shishido, plays a hitman who gets sexually charged by the smell of boiling rice. He also falls afoul of the yakuza and a mysterious woman who is fascinated by butterflies. And that's only the beginning of Suzuki's wildly fascinating cult film, which got the director fired from Nikkatsu Studios. Inspired in part by the James Bond movies, Suzuki's film has been cited as an influence on directors like John Woo and Quentin Tarantino, but it's very much its own thing.

Fighting Elegy (Seijun Suzuki, 1966)

Hideki Takahashi and Junko Asana in Fighting Elegy

Kiroku Nanbu: Hideki Takahashi
Michiko: Junko Asana
Turtle: Yusuke Kawazu
Takuan: Mitsuo Kataoka
Principal: Isao Tamagawa
Kaneda: Keisuke Noro
Ikki Kita: Hiroshi Midorigawa
Kiroku's Father: Seijiro Onda
Yoshino Nanbu: Chikaku Miyagi

Director: Seijun Suzuki
Screenplay: Kaneto Shindo
Based on a novel by Takashi Suzuki
Cinematography: Kenji Hagiwara
Production design: Takeo Kimura
Film editing: Mutsuo Tanji
Music: Naozumi Yamamoto

Seijun Suzuki's Fighting Elegy is a coming-of-age story, ostensibly about a hormone-crazed teenager who tries to sublimate his lust for the pretty Michiko and to expiate his Catholic guilt for that lust by joining one of the warring gangs in his town. But what's really coming of age, as we find out at the film's end, is the militaristic imperialism of prewar Japan. So much of the film depends on Suzuki's mastery of tone as he shifts from the mostly comic story of young Kiroku's plight to the wholly tragic outcome. Kiroku becomes increasingly adept as a fighter, and his rebellious antics at school are not punished so much as increasingly tolerated -- even his father refuses to punish him, taking a boys-will-be-boys attitude. When he's forced to go live with his uncle and transfer to another school, he only gets more bellicose, but although the school has a motto that stresses the necessity of "seemly" behavior, at the end of his stay there the principal is so impressed by Kiroku's fighting skills that he removes his coat and challenges Kiroku to a duel. The scene ends with the two squaring off, suggesting that part of the reason for the military's takeover lies in the older Japanese generation's admiration for the violence of the young. The film ends with Michiko going into a convent, but not before she is forced off of the path she is traveling by a troop of jogging soldiers and her crucifix is trodden into the snow, and with Kiroku on the train to Tokyo, where he plans to join the fight for control of the government. It's not clear from the film which side Kiroku will fight on this time, although the novel on which it's based has him joining the army and dying in China. Suzuki scripted this part of the novel and planned to film it as a sequel before he was forced out of his job at the Nikkatsu studios. Fighting Elegy is an exhibition of Suzuki's original and innovative technique, which audiences loved but studio management thought was out of control.

Our Marriage (Masahiro Shinoda, 1961)

Noriko Maki and Chieko Baisho in Our Marriage

Keiko: Noriko Maki
Saeko: Chieko Baisho
Komakura: Shin'ichiro Mikami
Matsumoto: Isao Kimura
Father: Eijiro Tono
Mother: Sadako Sawamura

Director: Masahiro Shinoda
Screenplay: Zenzo Matsuyama, Masahiro Shinoda
Cinematography: Masao Kosugi
Art direction: Chiyoo Umeda
Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara
Music: Naozumi Yamamoto

It goes without saying (though I've said it often enough) that cultural differences are a hindrance to our understanding or enjoyment of films made in other countries, but Masahiro Shinoda's Our Marriage brought the point home for me in an unusual way. It's a simple, elegantly made film, scarcely over an hour long, about two sisters and the pressures on women to get married. That's nothing we haven't seen in films by Naruse and Ozu and others, but Shinoda is particularly focused on social and economic change -- not just in the role of women in Japan but also on a society in which upward mobility is becoming possible and desirable. Keiko and Saeko are office workers in a factory, the daughters of a man struggling to make ends meet by harvesting seaweed. His job has become more difficult because of industrial pollution, and his wife sometimes has to borrow money from the daughters to pay bills. So the parents begin looking for a husband for 22-year-old Keiko. The father wants her to marry the son of the union chief at the factory, a widower nearing 30, but another man, Matsumoto, who works for a dry goods company, also shows interest in her. The parents disapprove of Matsumoto because he traded in the black market in the postwar years, but he has since cleaned up his act. The complication is that Keiko has met a handsome young factory worker, Komakura. Saeko, who has a secret crush on Komakura, wants Keiko to marry him, and Keiko is certainly not averse to the idea except that Komakura doesn't make much money. Things work themselves out after some family drama, of course. But the cultural difference that mars the film for me is not the tension between arranged marriages and marrying for love -- that's familiar enough even in the Western tradition. The problem is that the music arranger has chosen the tune of the old spiritual "Michael, Row Your Boat Ashore" as the film's main theme. Anyone who grew up singing it around a campfire, or knows the recorded versions by Pete Seeger and Harry Belafonte, is going to have a hard time reconciling the music with the story.

Story of a Prostitute (Seijun Suzuki, 1965)

Yumiko Nogawa in Story of a Prostitute

Harumi: Yumiko Nogawa
Shinkichi Mikami: Tamio Kawaji
Lt. Narita: Isao Tamagawa
Sgt. Akiyama: Shoichi Ozawa

Director: Seijun Suzuki
Screenplay: Hajime Takaiwa
Based on a story by Tajiro Tamura
Cinematography: Kazue Nagatsuka
Production design: Takeo Kimura
Film editing: Akira Suzuki
Music: Naozumi Yamamoto

Seijun Suzuki seems to have been a kind of Japanese Samuel Fuller, a director initially dismissed by critics as a maker of B-movies, but re-evaluated by a later generation as an auteur with a distinct and innovative style. Certainly Story of a Prostitute is loaded with style, including unabashed subjective camera tricks like the moment when the prostitute of the title, Harumi, sees the brutish Lt. Narita enter her room and freezes his image until it's torn to shreds like a paper doll. Harumi is a "comfort woman" at the front in Manchuria in the 1930s, and the lieutenant is especially taken with her. But she favors his gentle, even initially virginal orderly, Pvt. Mikami. The two fall in love, but Mikami has been so brainwashed by the Japanese army's code bushido-like code of loyalty and honor that he is trapped in a suicidal spiral. When he is wounded and trapped by the enemy, Harumi, who has pursued him behind the lines, persuades him not to kill himself as honor demands. But then he is rescued by his own forces, who suspect him of treason and propose a court-martial. His superiors decide that instead of court-martialing him, which would lead to a conviction that would dishonor his family, they will execute Mikami and report that he died in battle, but in a great scene, Mikami insists on looking his would-be executioner in the eye, and the man refuses to follow through. Eventually, however, he chooses suicide and Harumi, who has procured a grenade for Mikami, who has told her he's going to use it to escape, dies with him. It's a rather florid and sometimes confusing wartime melodrama, but Suzuki transforms it into an effective statement about the absurdity of war and the foolish codes of militarism.