The Suzuki method
In the field of studio filmmaking in 1960s Japan, few quite broke the mould like Suzuki Seijun (1923–2017). The director brought a unique flair to a string of crime and action B-movies whose titles, such as Take Aim at the Police Van (1960), Million Dollar Smash and Grab (1961) and Detective Bureau 23: Go to Hell, Bastards! (1963), were often as florid as their content. Hallmarks of the Suzuki style include a flamboyant approach to colour, baroque set designs, an unorthodox approach to staging and a kabuki-esque theatricality.
Suzuki’s comment that ‘in my films, time and place are nonsense’ in a 2001 interview for the website Midnight Eye has been taken on trust by some to give the impression of a director who didn’t take his work entirely seriously. His firing from Nikkatsu, the studio where he realized some 40 features, only serves to strengthen this impression. The reason given by the company president Hori Kyūsaku following the release of Branded to Kill (1967) was that Suzuki made movies ‘that don’t make sense and don’t make money’.
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Movies without boundaries
What is lost in the picture is that Suzuki operated within Nikkatsu’s house brand of what is termed mukokuseki akushon (borderless action) films. These were star-driven riffs on popular global staples, such as youth movies, romances, thrillers, spy or gangster films, comedies and musicals. Often the films took elements of all these genres. They were shot entirely in a Japan rendered as a sort of cosmopolitan no man’s land comprised of neon-lit cityscapes, exotic cabarets and smoky dive bars. Nikkatsu churned them out at a conveyor belt-like pace of around 50 films a year (Suzuki himself made six alone in 1961). Their target audience was a generation of pop-culturally savvy postwar baby boomers dreaming of a more colourful life beyond their nation’s shores. Tie-in records of their theme songs crooned by their iconic leading men – figures such as Ishihara Yūjirō , Kobayashi Akira and Watari Tetsuya – regularly topped the singles charts of the 1960s.
One might argue that the films of Nikkatsu’s other contracted directors were equally nonsensical in this regard. For example, there were the ‘Sukiyaki Westerns’ exemplified by Saitō Buichi’s Rambling Guitarist (1959) or Nomura Takashi’s Quick Draw Joe (1961). What is certain is that Suzuki took this approach that one step further and occasionally into quasi-abstract realms.
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With style to kill
That Suzuki gave his art designer, Kimura Takeo, co-screenwriting credits on a number of his works is proof enough that his was a style that prioritized the visual aspects of his cinematic worlds over conventional plotting. Suzuki’s final films before his sacking, Tokyo Drifter (1966) and Branded to Kill (1967), can be seen as representing two sides of the same coin. Both treat the screen as an area to be filled with as much visual interest as possible. In the former, Watari Tetsuya’s wandering yakuza roams across a plethora of gaudily colourful and highly stylized interiors and landscapes. He routinely bursts into impromptu song and at one point is caught in the midst of a riotous fistfight in a saloon bar straight out of the American Old West.
Branded to Kill similarly represents the apogee of the ‘borderless action’ ethos, although this time with dazzlingly beautiful monochrome cinematography and a cool jazz soundtrack. Its dream-logic narrative charts the course of an assassin, played by Shishido Jō, and his battle to rise to the top of the clandestine hierarchy of Tokyo’s hired killers. Its urban landscapes are rendered with a modernist chic that borders on abstraction, but the film also sees Suzuki at his most playful. The hitman hero gets in the mood for killing by sniffing boiling rice, while one assassination attempt is thwarted by the untimely appearance of a butterfly on his telescopic sights.
Branded to Kill cemented Shishido as the charismatic face of Suzuki’s films – and what a face, with his trademark chipmunk cheeks the result of cosmetic surgery aimed at bolstering his box office appeal. Shishido’s schtick was coarse, boorish and unpredictable: a combination of bull-headed and faintly ridiculous, exaggerated machismo and boyish petulance.
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A more serious side
Shishido is pitch perfect in Gate of Flesh (1964), adapted from an oft-filmed novel of the same name by Tamura Taijirō. He plays a black marketeer on the run from the Occupation forces after murdering a G.I. He is sheltered by a group of prostitutes, who have forged their own code of conduct to cope with survival in the shellshocked and rubble-strewn ruins of postwar Tokyo. Needless to say, his presence soon threatens to disrupt the fragile solidarity of the group.
This powerful drama puts paid to the notion that Suzuki’s films were more often than not frivolous exercises in style over substance. There were others too, such as his loosely linked trilogy of youth movies Akutarō: The Incorrigible (1963), Born Under Crossed Stars (1965) and Fighting Elegy (1966). Set in the late 1920s and early 1930s, these are among the most personal projects of a director born in Tokyo in 1923 – the year of the great Kantō Earthquake, as he would often joke.
The first two are nostalgic rite-of-passage tales featuring a wayward youth outgrowing his rural village roots. Fighting Elegy took on a more political aspect and is widely regarded as among Suzuki’s masterpieces. Its story follows an adolescent bruiser antihero as he is drawn into increasingly violent bouts of fisticuffs among rival school gangs. The casting of actors well into their 20s as teenage students underscores the message of the film, that war is essentially ludicrous. The brief appearance of the real-life historical figure of Kita Ikki, a nationalist ideologue who played a part in the infamous military coup of 26 February 1936, lends a further sting to the tale.
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Back with a vengeance
Suzuki’s firing from Nikkatsu saw him effectively blacklisted from the film industry for 10 years. His 1977 comeback with A Tale of Sorrow and Sadness (1977), about the terrifying costs of fame of a professional golfing model, was not a success. However, his return to the era of his childhood with his Taishō Trilogy finally saw Suzuki’s name on the lips of international cinephiles.
These independent productions saw Suzuki freed from the constraints of the studio potboilers on which he honed his considerable technical skills. In the atmospheric Zigeunerweisen (1980), Suzuki adopted a more languorous and cryptic arthouse style. In this ghostly tale set in the 1920s, the fates of two former colleagues intertwine over a scratchy gramophone record of the obscure Sarasate violin composition that gives the film its title and a mysterious geisha with whom they are besotted. Kagerō-za (1981) similarly conjured up the atmosphere of this artistically liberal epoch in a haunting but flamboyant tale of a playwright lured by a mysterious spectral beauty. Suzuki rounded off the trilogy with Yumeji (1990), based on the celebrated painter Takehisa Yumeji.
The cinema of Suzuki Seijun is many things: wild, eccentric, irreverent and occasionally incoherent, but always dazzlingly original and imbued with a playful charm.
The Japan House London film season The maverick visionary: the cinematic world of Suzuki Seijun provides a wonderful introduction to this mould breaking and ceaselessly entertaining filmmaker.
Jasper Sharp is a writer and curator specializing in Japanese cinema and the co-editor of the website Midnight Eye.