The Warped Ones (Koreyoshi Kurahara, 1960)

Tamio Kawaji in The Warped Ones

Akira: Tamio Kawaji
Yuki: Yuko Chiyo
Masaru: Eiji Go
Kashiwagi: Hiroyuki Nagato
Fumiko: Noriko Matsumoto
Shinji Kumaki: Kojiro Kusanagi
Gill: Chico Roland
Yuki's Mother: Chigusa Takayama
Neighbor: Reiko Arai
Woman in Atelier: Yoko Kosono

Director: Koreyoshi Kurahara
Screenplay: Nobuo Yamada
Cinematography: Yoshio Mamiya
Production design: Kazuhiko Chiba
Film editing: Akira Suzuki
Music: Toshiro Mayuzumi

The TCM programmer who scheduled Koreyoshi Kurahara's The Warped Ones right after Michael Haneke's Funny Games (1997) evidently has a dark sense of humor. Both are fine examples of movies about people doing bad things and getting away with it. Funny Games ends with its mass murderer smirking at the camera, and while the bad-boy protagonist of The Warped Ones doesn't get away with murder, since as far as we know he hasn't committed one, he does get away with rape, theft, and assault. The film ends with Akira and his prostitute friend, Fumiko, laughing it up at an abortion clinic, amused that they are there with the virtuous Kashiwagi and Yuki because the former has impregnated Fumiko and the latter is pregnant with Akira's child. The Warped Ones belongs to a genre known as taiyozoku, or "Sun Tribe" films, portrayals of the undisciplined youth of postwar Japan. Among them are movies like Ko Nakahira's Crazed Fruit (1956) and three released the same year as The Warped Ones, Nagisa Oshima's Cruel Story of Youth and The Sun's Burial and Masahiro Shinoda's Youth in Fury. But even hard-edged directors like Oshima and Shinoda couldn't resist putting a moral spin on their portraits of wayward youth. Kurahara could, and The Warped Ones is all the more fascinating for its willingness to see the world the way Akira sees it. Tamio Kawaji gives an amazing over-the-top performance in the role, never quite standing still for a moment. He doesn't walk, he dances, prances, skips, and contorts, and Yoshio Mamiya's camera swirls and jogs along with him, ever restless, ever kinetic. Even in closeups his face is constantly in motion, often with a cigarette stuck between his lip and teeth or in the corner of his mouth. He is the embodiment of a certain kind of existential freedom, so self-centered that he refuses, unlike his friend, Masaru, to join a gang that might multiply his opportunities for mayhem. The only thing on Earth to which he pays obeisance is jazz, provided by Toshiro Mayuzumi's score. But even without punishing Akira for his considerable crimes, the film manages to make the point that he's no role model. Instead, he's an object lesson in the impossibility of achieving pure freedom.   

Tokyo Drifter (Seijun Suzuki, 1966)

Tomoko Hamakawa and Tamio Kawaji in Tokyo Drifter

Tetsuya (Tetsu the Phoenix) Hondo: Tetsuya Watari
Chiharu: Chieko Matsubara
Tatsuzo the Viper: Tamio Kawaji
Kurata: Ryuji Kita
Kenji Aizawa: Hideaki Nitani
Tanaka: Eiji Go
Mutsuko: Tomoko Hamakawa
Keiichi: Tsuyoshi Yoshida
Umetani: Isao Tamagawa
Otsuka: Eimei Esumi

Director: Seijun Suzuki
Screenplay: Yasunori Kawauchi
Cinematography: Shigeyoshi Mine
Production design: Takeo Kimura
Film editing: Shinya Inoue
Music: Hajime Kaburagi

Imagine if The Godfather had been made in the mid-1960s with someone like Frankie Avalon as Michael Corleone, interpolated pop songs ("An Offer He Can't Refuse," perhaps?), and sets in comic book colors that look like they were designed for a Freed Unit musical at MGM in the 1950s. Then you have something like Tokyo Drifter, a jaw-dropping Japanese gangster movie directed by the irrepressible Seijun Suzuki. There's no summarizing a plot that has so many wild excursions, but it basically follows the attempts of a young hitman who has his yakuza boss's approval to go straight -- or so he thinks, until the boss changes his mind. None of this suggests where the movie's going to go, including the shootout between Tetsuya and his almost Doppelgänger nemesis Tatsuzo on the railroad tracks with an approaching train in a snowstorm. Or the free-for-all fistfight in a bar designed to look like a saloon set for an American Western, during which the bar is almost completely demolished. For most of the film, including the train track shootout, Tetsuya wears a robin's egg blue suit with white shoes, though he later changes into other pastels. Those who find Tokyo Drifter a bit much (as the studio that employed Suzuki did) dismiss it as style over substance, but it's undeniably fascinating.

Cruel Gun Story (Takumi Furukawa, 1964)

Joe Shishido and Yuji Kodaka in Cruel Gun Story

Togawa: Joe Shishido
Rie: Chieko Matsubara
Takizawa: Tamio Kawaji
Shirai: Yuji Kodaka
Keiko: Minako Katsuki
Matsumoto: Hiroshi Nihon'yanagi
Kondo: Hiroshi Kondo
Okada: Shobun Inoue
Saeki: Saburo Hiromatsu
Yanagida: Junichi Yamanobe

Director: Takumi Furukawa
Screenplay: Hisatoshi Kai, Haruhiko Oyabu
Cinematography: Saburo Isayama
Art direction: Toshiyuki Matsui
Film editing: Masanori Tsujii
Music: Masayoshi Ikeda

My first impulse on watching Takumi Furukawa's Cruel Gun Story, with its whiplash double-crossings and piled-on violent deaths that reminded me of Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Pulp Fiction (1994), was to call it "Tarantino-esque." But that's getting it backward. Tarantino has said that he's "enamored with" the films of Nikkatsu, the studio that made Cruel Gun Story a good 30 years before Pulp Fiction, so by rights we should be calling his films "Nikkatsu-esque." Furukawa's film stars Joe Shishido, who was as essential to Japanese gangster films as James Cagney or Edward G. Robinson were to Warner Bros. gangster films of the 1930s. His glowering, jowly mug, usually with a cigarette plugged in its middle, is the essence of the tough guy. And like most tough guys, Shishido's Togawa has a heart of gold, devoted to his sister, crippled when she was struck by a car. She's the reason why, fresh out of prison, he signs on to a caper that involves the heist of an armored car. It's so elaborate a scheme, involving road detours and sabotaging the police radio and using a winch to pull the car onto a larger truck, that anyone who has ever seen a movie knows that it's going to go wrong. But even when it does, Togawa is able to come up with a Plan B, and then a Plan C, and so on, as double-crossers emerge from all corners. There's a sultry femme named Keiko to add a little sex to the plot, but not enough to deter Togawa from getting revenge on the big boss who got him into this mess. The whole thing ends with more corpses than the last act of Hamlet, but it's done with such stylish efficiency that if feels like a better film than it probably really is. Which, come to think of it, is also Tarantino-esque. 

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.