Seijun Suzuki

[senseabove]

Thanks for the update, feihong, and the bonus Suzuki info. Very glad to hear it looks good.

No idea about actual UHD playback software for Mac, but per a guide you should be able to dig up with all of the keywords in the rest of this sentence, I put an ASUS BW-16D1HT in an OWC Mercury Pro 5.25" external enclosure, flashed it, and have used it to rip UHDs and BDs on a Mac.

EDIT: It's up on backchannels so here're the closest matching shots of the remux from those sources and available caps (from DVDBeaver's Arrow set review) I could find, and wow:
Zigeunerweisen
Kagero-Za 1, 2

[fdm]

Regarding the player link above in nicolas's post, skimmed through the listing and its user reviews:

"For the MacOS there is no runable official playback software for purchased UHD movies! " per that player's amazon listing.

However, one user review claims that Leawo Blu-ray Player "plays blu-ray and 4k uhd without problems" (macOS Sonoma). Whether that means directly playing movies, or…

Another user review indicates using makemkv and vlc as a possible solution…

And senseabove's post seems to confirm (?)…

Those and maybe a virtualized Windows solution (one of my own thoughts) for direct playback ?? …

Maybe I'll get some time to pursue this further, though later in the year.

[nicolas]

Regarding the player link above in nicolas's post, skimmed through the listing and its user reviews:

"For the MacOS there is no runable official playback software for purchased UHD movies! " per that player's amazon listing.

However, one user review claims that Leawo Blu-ray Player "plays blu-ray and 4k uhd without problems" (macOS Sonoma). Whether that means directly playing movies, or…

Another user review indicates using makemkv and vlc as a possible solution…

And senseabove's post seems to confirm (?)…

Those and maybe a virtualized Windows solution (one of my own thoughts) for direct playback ?? …

Maybe I'll get some time to pursue this further, though later in the year.

The player is compatible with both Mac and Windows. I have a Mac setup and a Parallels virtual machine and you can seamlessly switch inputs to “move” the player between macOS and Windows for everything you do. On Mac, it works for ripping purposes (MakeMKV) and in my case if you want to burn discs, I’ll use Windows and that works just as well. It’s not the quietest device but I don’t mind.
I had to replace the first model I received as I kept getting an error when attempting to import discs but the manufacturer’s customer support is above and beyond friendly in getting this sorted out. I immediately got sent a brand new set and got a free mailing label for returning my damaged one.

I don’t have a disc playback software / app for both Windows and Mac as I only use the player for ripping discs. Around 10 years ago, I had good experiences with CyberLink on Windows for BD playback.

[feihong]

Thanks very much for all the suggestions! I have the software, but I couldn't find a player that worked for Mac until now, that I didn't have to flash (just don't want to deal with that kind of stuff any more). I'm gonna try that German drive.

[feihong]

Behind the curve on the Nikkatsu sets, here's what I've got on Fighting Elegy. The info I got off the disc said that the Trailer for the film was Progressive, and that the feature was interlaced. So I'll compare some shots. Some of these won't be 100% matches, because, as it turns out, the trailer seems to use some alternate takes! Pretty interesting to see the differences.

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Where you see different matches, it's because the footage in the trailer seems to be either from a section of the shot which was edited out of the final film (i.e., the finger-biting closeup, the prostitute standing under the canted roof), or, in the case of the shots where Kiroku sits on the tower, the one of Kiroku pulling Michiko along, or the more subtly differing shot of the youth gang meeting in the forest, these are alternate takes with adjustments of camera positioning and with different amounts of debris in the air. But I think you can see the differences we were talking about earlier in the thread. It looks to me like the trailer has much better grain, much better contrast, and is without the pastiness in skin tons and other gradient textures (the shine on the closeup of the sword tip, for instance). My impression is that in the "Seijun on Women" boxset, the transfers looked better––though they are still listed as interlaced. I'll post shots from Kanto Wanderer from that box next., then maybe Love Letter, with its 4k scan and progressive encoding (not sure I'm using the terms right––I'm doing my best to learn how you experts judge these things).

[feihong]

Incredibly, Nikkatsu is putting out a third blu ray boxset now, due out September 4th: "Seijun on Wanderers." The emphasis seems to be much more on color films than the previous releases, and the box art reflects that, with an emphasis on the intense color of Tokyo Drifter.

I had a hard time finding all the films listed online, and I can't tell if any of them have 4k scans this time around, but the films being released mostly correspond to what is already available in 1080p and has already been released in other regions, and what has been traveling around the internet in 1080p transfers recently:

Tokyo Drifter
Tattooed Life
Detective Bureau 2-3: Go to Hell, Bastards!
The Flower and the Angry Waves
Hi-Teen Yakuza
Fighting Delinquents aka Go To Hell, Youth Gangs!
An Inn of Floating Weeds.

Hi-Teen Yakuza and An Inn of Floating Weeds are the only black-and-white films in the group. Disappointing, of course, that I'll be double-dipping on Tattooed Life, all things considered. I've seen a gorgeous 1080p version of The Flower and the Angry Waves already (also saw it in 35mm at the Egyptian one time), and I've seen a very nice hi-def version of An Inn of Floating Weeds. Flower and the Angry Waves and Fighting Delinquents are the ones I'm most looking forward to––cinematographer Shigeyoshi Mine is generally held up as the great color cinematographer of Suzuki's Nikkatsu career, but these two films offer samples of Kazue Nagatsuka's color cinematography, which I really love. Mine does great color schemas, especially in Tokyo Drifter, Kanto Wanderer and Gate of Flesh, but I remember particular colors and scenes from Nagatsuka's color work so vividly––scenes from Zigeunerweisen and Mirage Theater that just ripple with incredible color choices. Fighting Delinquents previously had a very poor DVD transfer, which didn't wow me, but seeing the film on 35mm was a revelation––the colors just vibrate with intensity––it literally makes the movie better, and changed my impression of the film in general. I don't know how I'm going to swing the price tag on this box, and it's likely the interlaced transfers will continue to be a problem (so far they've done two 4k transfers per box––if they keep it up, I would bet Tokyo Drifter and either Tattooed Life or Fighting Delinquents would be the second one), but it somehow must be done.

I can't imagine this is anything but the last of these sets from Nikkatsu––even though there is unreleased Nikkatsu material that they have in HD, like Singing Rope: Innocent Love at Sea, A Hell of a Guy aka Living By Karate, and, apparently, Blue Breasts. But I don't think they have another film from the Nikkatsu era that is a headliner for a fourth box, unless you want to get down to something like Underworld Beauty or The Wind-0f-Youth Group Goes Over the Mountain Pass. I'd say that, except for the other Koji Wada movies, they've mostly covered all the color pictures. In that sense, they've covered the color pictures that are considered the major cannon.

[feihong]

I found the more in-depth writeup on the upcoming Suzuki box, and, in a bit surprise, it looks like now there are 3 films getting 4k scans. They are:

Tokyo Drifter
Fighting Delinquents aka Go To Hell, Youth Gangs!
An Inn of Floating Weeds

The Tokyo Drifter 4k scan is also being advertised as a "digitally restored version," as was Branded to Kill on the first boxset. That disc in the first set looked great––probably the best of any of the discs in these sets so far––so hopefully this bodes well for Tokyo Drifter. I love the 4k scans that haven't been restored, with all the pops and scratches, like Carmen from Kawachi––and I wish all of these had this treatment––but Tokyo Drifter on Criterion had room for some tightening and improvement, so I feel like this could be a real revelation. Like the other Suzuki movies shot in color by Shigeyoshi Mine (Kanto Wanderer, Gate of Flesh, Our Blood Will Not Forgive), there is a range of subtle lighting effects that could look a whole lot better with improved picture quality.

I didn't expect that, but this should be pretty cool. Even though I can't really afford it, I'm hoping this will result in a 4th Suzuki boxset, maybe with a 4k of Satan Town, Underworld Beauty, and/or Blue Breasts. William Carroll's analysis of Blue Breasts makes it sound like a really intriguing movie.

[ryannichols7]

the new Tokyo Drifter restoration is playing (or has played) at least one western festival too. I'm hoping Criterion see it fit to bring to UHD stateside - their Branded to Kill disc remains one of the best/coolest surprises they've put out on the format so far. while I hope to see more Suzuki restorations come to disc in the west (especially for films without Blurays so far), Tokyo Drifter remains my favorite, so I do hope to see it happen...Suzuki's use of color in 4K is something I really need to see!

[feihong]

Life came crashing down around my ears in the last couple of months, and I stopped posting screencaps from the various Suzuki blu ray releases. I imagine this will go slowly, but I hope to keep it up. It's a way to celebrate my favorite filmmaker, and his centenary, I guess. Disappointing that neither Criterion nor Arrow did anything in that regard.

Time to share some stuff from the second blu ray collection, Seijun on Women; here's probably my favorite of the Nikkatsu movies, Kanto Wanderer. This movie had a DVD release from way back, via HomeVision, which was good enough for the time, but not really adequate to convey the subtle virtues of the movie (a Japanese DVD proved to be pretty much the same in that regard). Seeing the film in 35mm at the Hammer Museum revealed a lot of the sophistication of the image––especially in lighting. But there was depth to the image as well, and boldness to the colors. Peter A. Yacavone talks quite a bit about Kanto Wanderer in his incredible new book on Suzuki––he identifies it as the film on which the sort of creative brain trust of Suzuki's later films really starts to cohere.

The disc scans like the other non-4k scans in these collections, as 1080i, with a 1080p trailer attached. In those cases on the previous set, Seijun on Men, the result was pretty clear across the board––in each case, the trailer had a sharper image, with more depth, and things like movement looked more dynamic overall. Kanto Wanderer, however is quite different. For starters, the trailer seems more damaged than those on the other films. But secondly, the feature on this disc looks great, in spite of technical limitations. Perhaps because previous versions were quite poor, I'm weighting it more favorably. But this is one of the discs in the set where the feature looks most special. Color and contrast are improved from the trailer, but there is also a cleaner grain structure, which looks finer to me. While it's playing, the feature has a lot of depth and visual sophistication. It isn't as sharp as the 4k transfers, to be sure, but it looks beautiful all the same.

Here are my comparisons to the trailer. Another note needs be added here for the comparisons––as with Fighting Elegy, it was impossible to match most of the captures exactly, because the trailer uses a lot of alternate takes of shots. In terms of Kanto Wanderer, virtually every shot was an alternate, with subtle adjustments to camera position and with the actors delivering different timing.

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You can see right away that the trailer is softer and that the colors frequently bleed.

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This persists throughout the comparison. The saturation of colors on the feature is much closer to what was presented when I saw the film in 35mm. In fact, all of Suzuki's color films from Nikkatsu which I've seen in 35mm have at least this saturated a color scheme (I haven't seen a lot of the more muted–seeming color films in 35mm––neither of the boxing movies, for example, or A Hell of a Guy, which seems to have a strong blue/yellow bias––but I did see Our Blood Will Not Forgive, which is more muted and blue than the other films of this era, and the more blue-and-grey color palette of that film was still quite saturated. There were some differences between the films with Shigeyoshi Mine as cinematographer––which tended to foreground these big panels of saturated color––and the ones where Kazue Nagatsuka shot them––he tended to highlight smaller, more subtle color expressions––and then there was some difference with films shot by other cinematographers, like Tattooed Life and Story of Sorrow and Sadness). To my eyes, the feature has much more depth-of-field here––maybe partly due to the broader range of contrast present in the feature transfer.

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Who is the "Kanto Wanderer" of the title? The yakuza in this movie, including Katsuta, our alleged hero, tend to hang out in the back-alleys of Tokyo. I think the titular wanderer is actually Hanako, played here by Sanae Nakahara, as an eternal imp. Nakahara was a contract player at Nikkatsu, making lots of movies with their biggest stars, including Yujiro Ishihara, and later Jo Shishido and Tetsuya Watari (she's in the purportedly awful sequel to Tokyo Drifter). For Suzuki she is in this film and Smashing the 0-Line. Probably the other most noteworthy films she did at Nikkatsu, besides Kanto Wanderer, were Red Pier, with Yujiro Ishihara, and Farewell to Southern Tosa, also starring Akira Kobayashi. Later she moves on to make a lot of movies with Kinji Fukasaku (she is in a couple of the Battles Without Honor and Humanity movies), and she is in two Tai Kato movies. She is probably the most memorable murder victim in I, the Executioner (she's Keiko, the bourgeois one with the short-cropped hair, I believe), and she plays the main female role in By a Man's Face You Shall Know Him (though the fact that I can't remember her character at all says something about how important a role it probably is). Hanako is the peripatetic driver of Kanto Wanderer's fractured plot, and when the yakuza do leave Tokyo it's to try and find her. The screengrabs constantly remind me how well she plays this role. Suzuki is known to have preferred these very physical performances, and Nakahara plays the part with a lot of different registers of physicality. You can tell when Hanako is playing a role for someone else––in fact, she's always playing a role, and I think it's to Nakahara's credit that she is able to convey not so much a central logic to the character as the implication that there is, somewhere, a central logic to the way Hanako makes decisions. From the outside, she is a very amusing chaos gremlin.

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Here is the famous scene, where hipper critics and fans started to take note of Suzuki. I think it looks great in both versions. Interestingly, this was also an alternate take in the trailer.

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So Daizaburo Hirata here, playing Diamond Fuyu, calls to attention that Kanto Wanderer is, in fact, a remake, of a film called Song of the Underworld. Both movies are taken from the same novel. Song of the Underworld is a black-and-white Nikkatsu Akushon picture, starring Yujiro Ishihara. It was directed by Suzuki's mentor, Hiroshi Noguchi, who was at the time pioneering a kind of Japanese answer to film noir which was at the time called "Hado-Boirudo"--a phrase adopted from the English-language "hard-boiled." Suzuki was, in fact, Noguchi's assistant director on the previous film. Suzuki was told by his producer that was why he was chosen to direct the remake, though in one of the two Enlglish-language books on Suzuki that came out this year, either Peter Yacavone's or William Carroll's, it was suggested that Akira Kobayashi requested Suzuki for the project, remembering him fondly from their work a few years before on The Boy Who Came Back and Blue Breasts.

It's hard to see Song of the Underworld––I could only find the first five minutes of it online (though in Japan you can stream it through Amazon Prime). But it seems to be a significantly different kind of movie, and this is obvious when you consider that Ishihara in the original film didn't play Katsuta, but actually played Diamond Fuyu as the lead character. The movie seems to be completely different if cast from Diamond Fuyu's point of view. Ishihara was still playing rough young men at the time, and the story from Fuyu's eyes is one of a sort of introduction into the yakuza, and a romantic tragedy. Hiroshi Nawa plays the character that Akira Kobayashi plays in Kanto Wanderer, as a supporting character––sort of a romantic model for the Ishihara character who is more ensconced within the gang structure. Nawa's character's lost love is a subplot in Song of the Underworld, rather than the plot which supercedes the main story in Kanto Wanderer. At the time Kanto Wanderer came out, Toei's yakuza movies were starting to dominate the box office, and Kanto Wanderer was one of Nikkatsu's early forays into the yakuza genre, recasting an earlier teen-action-movie hit as a gangster film. It's very interesting what happens to the Fuyu character in that transition––he becomes, in Suzuki's and the screenwriter's eyes, an absolute loser, mocked at every turn for not being able to fit into the gang structure he so obviously admires. Of course, Suzuki also seems to despise Katsuta, the yakuza hero of the movie––who far more effectively embodies the yakuza ethos. There aren't really that many characters in this movie who escape mockery.

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In the program for the first Suzuki retrospective in Europe there is an essay Suzuki wrote about the filming of Kanto Wanderer. He recalls that he offered up several actresses to play Tatsuko, Katsuta's long-lost lover––and the studio shot them down. The day before filming commenced, art director Takeo Kimura suggested Hiroko Ito. "I liked her long face," says Suzuki, "and I've had to reconcile myself to her sweet, nasal voice." This actress has always seemed a little bit unexpected in this role, but the truth is I've found her really attractive in this ineffable way. Apparently she is the love interest of the younger brother in Tattooed Life, as well––and the IMDB lists her as a maid in Kagero-za––which I really must have missed. She has had a strange movie career––only 14 films on imdb––though her career spans from 1957 to 2016. Apparently she is the entomologist's wife in Woman in the Dunes––another role of hers I absolutely do not remember.

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There are also a number of shots in the trailer which don't appear in the final film, and it looks like in several cases these would have expanded what had been much smaller roles in the completed film:





This guy! The old-school crime boss from Youth in the Beast. He didn't really feature in Kanto Wanderer much, though he gets a credit line in the trailer.



Boss Yoshida here apparently had at least one more scene. It's really hard to make much sense of this guy in the finished film––he is Fuyu's boss, and he's nominally at odds with Katsuta's boss, Izu, for most of the film. But he doesn't really appear until the end of the movie, when Katsuta intimidates him and then he gets Fuyu to kill Katsuta's boss. I might have liked to see him earlier on, but there is something to how dizzying and diffuse the plot of Kanto Wanderer is when he is withheld until the end.

Now some more caps from the feature. Kanto Wanderer has such extraordinary compositions in it, they always blow my mind:























I love this last image of Katsuta, alone with his unimpeachable honor. Suzuki plays up his haughty isolation so splendidly. If there was any doubt this film was a comedy, I think this last shot makes it very clear how silly Suzuki finds the giri/ninjo conflict, and what little regard he has for these gangsters and their pride.

The Suzuki-gumi were, for my money, the most sophisticated location scouts at Nikkatsu, and Kanto Wanderer is the movie where the locations become a co-star of the picture. Everything seems to be some sort of back-alley or side-view; and in effect, the characters live a back-alley existence, a fully distinct society, grown around the margins of the actual one. The actual society the film depicts is modern for the film's time, but for the gangsters, it's like they're still living in the Taisho era.















My favorite setting. What is this place? It's like some old neighborhood, butted-up against some nondescript hills. Here Noro Keisuke's character is setting up Hanako and planning to sell her.



This shot struck me when seeing the theatrical presentation––the detail in the shadow of the building was profound. I can't say the blu ray renders it with the exquisite sensitivity of the 35mm version, but the shot looks so very much better than it did on DVD. On DVD this shot looked very unremarkable.





This shot is where I felt I began to "get" Kanto Wanderer, where I began to realize that the film is a magnificently casual paean to procrastination. The way the story works is that Katsuta's underling sells Hanako, Boss Izu's daughter's friend, into prostitution. To make it right, Katsuta and his underling head off to this city, where the underling took Hanako to be sold. Only the underling can't remember where he sold her. This shot intervenes, with Katsuta and his underling leaning against a bridge––the town on one side, spilling over with people engaged in a festival. The two of them mope around as the shot holds. On the other side is the river, adventure, the wild. They begin to realize they'll never find Hanako in the city. Foiled, Katsuta goes to visit Diamond Fuyu, lowly member of a rival gang, who considers himself cuckolded in the selling of Hanako. The idea is that maybe Katsuta can get his clan out of hot water with a direct apology. But Fuyu isn't home. Instead, Katsuta finds Fuyu's sister, and realizes with a shock–––why, it's the long-lost love of Katsuta's life! The woman he endured his prominent scar for! Here she was the whole time, just a couple degrees of separation away. But, what's that? She's married? To a famous gambler? But she still loves Katsuta? Maybe he can beat the gambler. And like that, the film digresses mightily, Katsuta ventures into a dream world, where he may or may not rape Tatsuko––or maybe it's his boss's daughter that he molests? Katsuta can't be sure. Things go from bad to worse for Katsuta's diminutive, pathetic yakuza clan. There are only three of them in the clan, counting the boss. They are facing extinction, and the problem of Fuyu and Hanako threatens the clan's future. Katsuta's boss is too old and greedy and checked-out to do much. Katsuta's underling sucks, and is the reason all this has gone wrong.



I figure, Katsuta knows from the very beginning that it's on him to make some bold, violent, honorable gesture to redeem his clan. Right away in the beginning we see his boss's poetic edict, that the yakuza will end up wearing prison clothes or funeral clothes; Katsuta is devoted to the yakuza life––maybe the only gangster in the film who takes what he's doing seriously. But ultimately, he ends up putting off the sacrifice that is expected of him, almost the entire runtime of the movie. Katsuta hems and haws, going through the motions to maintain the status of the gang; he is alert to any possible distraction, eventually becoming embroiled in an incredibly byzantine romantic entanglement––all to avoid, I think, facing his fate and redeeming his clan. At the end, he does the deed, and goes to prison––resolving his romantic conflict and absurdly clutching on to his meaningless honor (his boss is dead, extinguishing his clan anyway) as he prepares for decades in prison––a dinosaur of traditions Suzuki seems to be saying are not only outmoded, but were always bullsh*t to begin with. Meanwhile, Hanako, the titular wanderer of the Kanto plain, climbs higher and higher within the yakuza structure, never becoming cornered like Tatsuko, never being disrespected, like Fuyu, and never being forced to enact a fate like Katsuta's. She can move so seamlessly through the yakuza system because she thinks of it all as amusing, faintly ridiculous, and not worth getting caught up in. Hanako's mobility is liberating to the viewer, and anarchic, too––all this trouble, after all, is due to her cheeky curiosity and daring, and she doesn't really care. One imagines if any of the mobbed-up characters in the movie understood what Hanako had done, they would be horrified by the way she steps upon their sense of tradition and their own sense of importance.





Suzuki handles the themes of this movie so very deftly. This thread is a consistent visual motif, marking the boundary between the world of the yakuza and the larger society. Here a detective stands at the foot of the stairs leading up to the gambling den where Katsuta and Tatsuko's husband are squaring off. Does the detective actually see the thread? Is it real? Later on, when Katsuta pleads with his boss, the thread vibrates right in front of the camera lens. This effect is plain to see in the theater, but was very obscured on dvd. The blu ray makes it easy to perceive.



Lastly, Suzuki isn't Von Sterberg (though Yacavone goes into a striking comparison of the von Sternberg Dietrich movies and Suzuki's Flesh Trilogy), but god-damn, is this film filled with really exquisite close-ups:



Apparently Kobayashi chose to have his eyebrows made up extra-thick for the film. According to Suzuki, he took the blame when the studio disliked the choice, though he tried to convince the executives Kobayashi had insisted upon it.









Katsuta enters the Taisho-styled dream world in the midst of Kanto Wanderer. This is Suzuki's first movie to feature to utilize dream in order to evoke a level of narrative ambiguity––there are dreamlike moments in earlier pictures, like Passport to Darkness and Nude Girl with a Gun, and in the later Story of a Prostitute, but those isolated shots or sequences are mostly revealed to be real, or the demarcation between dream and reality is much clearer. Kanto Wanderer first presents us with the kind of ambiguous sequences which run between suggestive dream and possible erotic reality––something we'll see again in Branded to Kill, a little bit in A Mummy's Love, Fang in the Hole, and Story of Sorrow and Sadness, and then emerging full-force in the Taisho Trilogy movies and in Suzuki's early video project, Cherry Blossoms in Spring. As in Zigeunerweisen, the passage into the dream world is marked by non-diegetic lighting choices––here an eery blue light contrasting with the yellow of the street light.



Chieko Matsubara was often paired with Akira Kobayashi around this time. She is always treated as a sort of virginal beauty in these films, but as a person she comes across as an absolute workhorse actress. She has 170 credits on the IMDB, 100 of which were made at Nikkatsu. She has never really impressed me in these movies, though she never exactly disappoints. But I think her particular look and presence always seems a little vague. Suzuki makes the best of this, normally. In the four films she makes with him, he most frequently casts her as someone who is sort of "out of it," a character walking a different path, outside of the main milieu of the story. In Tokyo Drifter she plays a character so remote from the rest of the movie her boyfriend would rather take to the open road than be with her. In The Flower and the Angry Waves she is the secret wife Kobayashi's character keeps hidden away, who can never really be part of his world, the way the prostitute, Manryu can be (and in that film, Manryu seems a more deserving love interest for Kobayashi's character). Our Blood Will Not Forgive is the outlier in this group of movies, where she is almost unrecognizable playing Kobayashi's mobbed-up girlfriend. This is her least-believable role in a Suzuki film. In Kanto Wanderer, she is the boss's daughter, and Suzuki really underlines how disengaged from the yakuza drama she is. She has a vague crush on Katsuta, but is also shown mocking his seriousness, playing in piles of leaves, and clowning around in schoolgirl fashion. When she tries to romance Katsuta, he appears to rape her, half-dreaming and believing she is actually his love, Tatsuko. She disappears from the movie after this, presumably deciding she doesn't want any more to do with these filthy yakuza. I think she comes across as most animate in this film and in Flower and the Angry Waves. In Tokyo Drifter she is kind of the hero's unwitting "beard."



Here's a tiny bit of damage on the feature. This hardly happens; the film looks exceptionally clean of the kind of scratches and debris you see on many of the other transfers in these sets.

[Jean-Luc Garbo]

This is really terrific! Thanks for posting all these. It really makes me excited for the upcoming Radiance release.

[feihong]

Yeah, I'm looking forward to the Radiance disc as well! Glad these are interesting.


The third volume of these Suzuki discs arrived today. This one is "Seijun on Drifters," or "Seijun on Wanderers." The previous box sets were monochrome black-and-white (Seijun on Men) and duochromatic black and red (Seijun on Women). This third set, the box is in full color, biasing white and yellow tones. The previous boxes featured full-body cutouts of Jo Shishido and Yumiko Nogawa as artwork; this third box features glamour shots and screencaps from Tokyo Drifter. In fact, the box is covered in them, including the top and bottom. There's a decided emphasis on the color productions of the majority of the films included this time around. There is a booklet, as in the other boxes, featuring a whole lot of scans of Suzuki's shooting scripts––though this time around there are a lot of sketchy little diagrams Suzuki has apparently drawn all over the scripts––one imagines he's illustrating shots for his crew. A lot of these sketches look like football plays, top-down diagrams of actors' movements. The previous volumes each included an additional disc of interviews with Suzuki, but this set doesn't include that. I've been a little surprised that none of the three sets so far have included a significant extra that was on the two DVD sets of Suzuki films Nikkatsu released back in the day: a significant number of the films in those sets had audio commentary by Suzuki. These sets don't feature anything like that. I haven't been through all the features on the discs here, but so far they look like those in the other sets: pretty bare-bones, with maybe just a trailer and the feature. As before, there are no english subtitles.

This time there are three films scanned in 4k: Tokyo Drifter, Fighting Delinquents (aka Go to Hell, Hoodlums!), and An Inn of Floating Weeds. Tokyo Drifter is the one where a restoration has been done. The results are interesting. The image is a lot brighter in many places than was true of the Criterion blu ray. The pre-credits scene, shot on the expired monochrome film stock, is much more readable on the Nikkatsu disc. The shootout in the warehouse in Hokkaido improves as well, with the kind of visibility that makes this scene make sense (it was surprising back in the day to see a lot of these films in 35mm and realize that a lot of the confusion of the action had been the result of poor-quality home video presentation). Closeups look awesome. But in general the long shots look a little suspiciously soft, especially towards the front of the film. In the closeups there is a grain structure that looks much finer than on the Criterion disc, but the long shots seem to have been compressed in a way that makes it hard to see any grain structure. Later on in the picture, the image looks pretty darn great. The color and contrast seem altogether better resolved across the whole film. But I think the Criterion blu ray, even though the grain isn't as fine, has a sharper presentation, with more depth-of-field. This movie needs a UHD release.

The other two 4k scans look amazing. There is dirt and there are scratches. Fighting Delinquents, which I saw in 35mm about 8 years ago, looked a lot more scruffy up top than what I recalled. But both of these have superb contrast, and the color in Fighting Delinquents (Suzuki's first color picture) is luminous. Fighting Delinquents is a movie that uses a lot of deep-focus cinematography, and the results look very sharp. These 4k scans make the films look great, and the lack of cleanup on them makes watching the disc a little more like attending a screening. Both films feature a lot of depth and visual delineation, which are the things I want most out of viewing these pictures.

The rest of the set looks the way the non-4k-scanned discs look like in the other boxes. There is a mix of softer-looking material and very nice rendering of admittedly lower-quality source material than is to be desired. The Flower and the Angry Waves––the other film besides Fighting Delinquents that sold me on the set––looks as good as Kanto Wanderer. The film is very different, shot by Kazue Nagatsuka instead of Shigeyoshi Mine. The result is color that is concentrated in small sections of the screen, with a lot more heavy shadow, and usually none of the greys that Mine likes so much. Flower and the Angry Waves has a burnished look. Having seen this one in 35mm as well, I can say the disc isn't up to that presentation level (there's a crispness to the 35mm version that isn't quite totally there on this blu ray), but it looks really great all the same––especially considering that the only home video option previously available was the awful Yume Pictures DVD (same for Fighting Delinquents). Tattooed Life looks very good as well, with it's more naturalistic color palette. The film was shot by Kurataro Takamura, a real go-to cinematographer for Nikkatsu productions, who shot I Am Waiting, Rusty Knife, Stolen Desire, The Rambling Guitarist, Tokyo Mighty Guy, The Velvet Hustler, and a whole lot of Nikkatsu's yakuza movies, including Symbol of a Man and most of the Outlaw Gangster VIP series). I think this guy has shot most of the Nikkatsu movies I hate the most, honestly. He seems responsible for the etiolated look of the Buichi Saito films. Later on he shoots a ton of pink films for the company, including some notable Chusei Sone pictures. There is just no yellow tone in this guy's palette; nothing glows. Tattooed Life looks better than most of his movies, and really does go far to suggest that Suzuki's visualization of these movies is more of a conscious, auteurist element of his pictures; the different cinematographers do different things, but the films always look like Suzuki films, because of the framing and camera movement, because of the lighting and color Suzuki wants in the films. Tattooed Life followed the apparently unprecedented failure of Our Blood Will Not Forgive, and it seems Suzuki began the film with admonishments and restrictions; according to Chusei Sone, he was prohibited from working with star Akira Kobayashi any more, and one imagines the replacement cinematographer might have been an experiment to see if Suzuki's style could be reigned in by the guy with the blandest cinematographic style in the whole company. That's my hunch, anyway. The way Tattooed Life plays it relatively straight right up until just before the climax really speaks to the way Suzuki was either deliberately reigned in, or he was consciously trying to tow the line. The explosion of the film's ending earned Suzuki another reprimand, leading Suzuki to feel he might be fired at any time.

The other color film in the set is Detective Bureau 2-3: Go to Hell, Bastards! I have the Arrow blu ray of this movie, but I haven't looked at it in a while. My impressionistic comparison is that the new Nikkatsu disc seems varied on a shot-by-shot basis in terms of sharpness and visible grain structure––especially as compared to the Arrow disc––whereas there seems to be a lot more warm colors in the Nikkatsu version. The Arrow version always looked pretty cold to me. Here there are a lot of reddish/yellowish closeups, especially. In general, all the films in the set have a slight bias towards red tones (though Tattooed Life comes through with a lot of bluer-looking shots as well). I imagine the colder, more desaturated look of the Arrow disc is probably closer to correct, since the film itself is one in Suzuki's oeuvre which seems most like those of his mentor, Hiroshi Noguchi––who loved that cold, grey look.

The final black-and-white film in the set is, for some reason, Hi-Teen Yakuza (nowadays people seem to prefer to call it "Teenage Yakuza"). This came out in one of Arrow's Early Seijun sets, and I remember it looking pretty sharp there––but I haven't gone back to check. This new version seems softer to me, and sometimes a little grungy-looking. It's not as soft as Story of a Prostitute––which really desperately needs restoration, I guess (though again, 8 years ago I saw a great, crisp 35mm print, but that's not what was used for the Nikkatsu disc, or for the French disc from Elephant). I'll have to compare this one to the Arrow disc and see what the results are.

A little disappointing that there are so many double-dips in this set––Tokyo Drifter, Tattooed Life, Hi-Teen Yakuza, Detective Bureau 2-3––but to my mind the exceptional Flower and the Angry Waves, Fighting Delinquents, and An Inn of Floating Weeds makes up for that. All three of these pictures look great––and each of them is an underrated gem from Suzuki's back catalog (though Flower and the Angry Waves was very popular in its day, and was frequently referenced in Suzuki's defense as part of his lawsuit against Nikkatsu). I don't expect we'll see a better version of Fighting Delinquents, ever. So there it is!

[Godot]

Wow, feihong, what a wonderfully thorough essay. I have missed your posts, they are visually delightful and thought-provoking. I wanted to buy the three Japanese Suzuki sets, but the lack of English subs dissuaded me. Please post more disc images and your observations!

I have to pinch myself that we live in a time with so many books analyzing Suzuki (Yacavone, Carroll, Vick). For many years I only had a well-worn copy of Simon Field & Tony Rayns’ slim Branded to Thrill to cherish as I was exposed to his work via Criterion.

[feihong]

I also loved the Branded to Thrill catalog. The new books really go a whole lot farther, thankfully, and deservedly so. I'm glad these movies are starting to attract more scholarship and understanding, instead of just trading off their earlier "gonzo" reputation. Also occasionally available on ebay, and still a relevant book to have (it is a source for all the other writers on Suzuki in English so far) is the Rotterdam Film Festival booklet, tijgerreeks 5: Suzuki Seijun The Desert Under the Cherry Blossoms. This has in it Shigehiko Hasumi's essay A World Without Seasons, and a whole bunch of Suzuki's own writing on his films, as well as interviews with Japanese critics like Koshi Ueno. The book is bi-lingual, with Dutch on the left side of the page and English on the right throughout. It's a great source of a lot of material––including my pet theory on what Mirage Theater was originally going to be like.


Switching gears, let's do another one of these discs. I realize I haven't covered any of the non-restored 4k scans in any of the sets yet, so here's my first one. This is Carmen from Kawachi, the third film in Suzuki's "Nikutai" or "Flesh" trilogy. My impression is that not many people have seen this movie. When I finally saw it at the Hammer Museum's Suzuki retrospective, I was surprised it didn't seem to rate with people, and I've always wondered why Criterion didn't try and market these films as "Suzuki's 'Nikutai' Trilogy" and bring more people to this group of movies. Carmen doesn't have any of the action you see in Story of a Prostitute or Gate of Flesh, perhaps––the film seems to be modeled more after the emerging American sex comedies like Tom Jones and What's New, Pussycat?, cut with Suzuki's subtle skill with melodrama (a very underrated aspect of Suzuki's craft)––but it's not like the other movies in the "Flesh" trilogy expect you to enjoy the action they present. And Carmen features some of the more startling surreal stylisms to this point in Suzuki's career.





In terms of Suzuki's career at Nikkatsu, the variegated fates of these pictures really underscore Suzuki's changing fortunes at the company––they are like a hinge, which facilitates the turn towards much more active antagonism between the studio and Suzuki, auguring an era where the studio offers Suzuki fewer resources and Suzuki responds with increasing outrages against traditional narrative filmmaking, where Suzuki offers more avant-garde pictures and Nikkatsu struggles to figure out where to fit him. Gate of Flesh––a risky picture, and Nikkatsu's first big foray into sex films––is Suzuki's biggest financial success at the studio. The milieu of the film––the sex trade in the postwar Tokyo black market, blithely ignored in the recent Godzilla: Minus One––allows Suzuki to explore his own war experience in, ironically, a more direct way than in past movies. And the picture makes a minor star out of its lead, Yumiko Nogawa. She is Suzuki's discovery (unlike Mari Shiraki, who had a pretty long career at Nikkatsu before and after her Suzuki pictures), an actress chosen specifically to appeal to and involve the audience, in spite of the raw sexuality she would create on-screen. Story of a Prostitute follows, but in between that film and Gate of Flesh is Our Blood Will Not Forgive, which seems to have a detrimental effect on Suzuki's career. Our Blood Will Not Forgive doesn't seem to do incredibly badly––it plays for a little longer than a week, which is standard for a lot of Nikkatsu films in that era. But it has two significant stars in it, and perhaps it costs a bit more than the standard Suzuki film, is my guess. For whatever reason, the film is considered a failure, and Suzuki is prohibited from working with star Akira Kobayashi afterwards. When Suzuki arrives on the set of Story of a Prostitute––which the Suzuki-gumi assumes will be another brilliant color follow-up to the very successful Gate of Flesh, they discover they've been given black-and-white film stock. Story of a Prostitute is also meant to be a taboo-breaking picture. Gate of Flesh offered what is supposedly the first full nudity in a studio film of the era, Story of a Prostitute begins as a movie meant to acknowledge the existence of "comfort women." Harumi, the heroine played by Yumiko Nogawa, is Korean in the script––but this salient detail is clawed back from the filmmakers during the shoot, apparently. Still, the film is excoriating of the military mindset, and explores an era of Japanese history many would have liked to forget with eyes wide open. The film is a failure, with very bad reviews and a very short run in theaters––though I have to wonder how much of that failure reflects Nikkatsu's lack of confidence in the product. Nowadays, this looks like one of Suzuki's greatest films.







The third film, Carmen from Kawachi, takes place in what was modern-day Japan. It is possibly not as intense a movie as Gate of Flesh or Story of a Prostitute; it's battlefield is contemporary capitalism, but Suzuki continues to treat that background as a kind of war-zone. Tsuyuko––the main character, a third role for Yumiko Nogawa––is a modern girl, a factory-worker, who is in love with her childhood sweetheart, Bon. It's hard not to spot Bon's discomfort around Tsuyuko, and it's implied emasculation.









Koji Wada, formerly the youngest of Nikkatsu's "diamond guys," plays this role, following upon an adroit performance as a different kind of dope in Gate of Flesh. Wada had been a star as a teenager (his rise to stardom runs parallel to Suzuki's increased cache as a director at Nikkatsu), but as he became a young adult that star power had pretty much evaporated. As a teen, Wada looked like a young Yujiro Ishihara (I believe one of the main reasons for the diamond guys was for Nikkatsu to have stars molded in the Ishihara image, ready to take center stage if Ishihara had too public of a scandal or meltdown); as an adult, his pubescent cuteness was largely gone. His move into character roles marks a pretty impressive evolution of his acting skills; He is really good in Gate of Flesh, and in this movie, especially.











The film reflects a lot of the changing gender dynamics in modern Japan. Tsuyuko is hardly the Carmen of the Bizet opera, or the Dorothy Dandrige character in Carmen Jones. The character trait than endears us to Tsuyuko is her big-heartedness; the doom she augers for various men in the picture hurts her, and is something she doesn't intend. But every straight man in the film who ruins themselves over Tsuyuko seems to be wrestling with a perilous socioeconomic flux. Tsuyuko's confident sense of self and her steadier-climbing fortunes grate against these men's idea of their own moribund social roles. What does it mean if they can't find success, but Tsuyuko loves them all the same?







The film features two queer characters, and––just like treatment of the trans policewoman decades later in the anime of You're Under Arrest--the result is a mixed-bag. There is some progressive representation––I'd say Tamio Kawaji's gay painter is treated fairly well. But since the predominant theme of the film is one of confused or compromised gender roles, Tsuyuko's encounter with a lesbian fashion-designer is more...complicated. All the characters who court Nogawa's Tsukuyo are objects of ridicule in the movie––the priest is a greedy lecher, the salaryman pathetic and shrinking away every day––and Bon's emasculation is driving him literally insane. The fashion designer is probably closer to the salaryman, who gets only a very gentle critique from Suzuki, in spite of the fact that he's embezzled a ton of money from his oppressive company (righteous). The designer nurses what initially seems like a sort of shy desire for Tsuyuko, which gradually flowers into more overt overtures.






Night of the Hunter, anyone?

Tsuyuko gets progressively more uncomfortable with this, leading to the "dollhouse" scene, which is probably what the movie is most known for. Suzuki would recreate this even more lavishly decades later in his segment of the omnibus "Marriage" film.



Tsuyuko has become the maid in the designer's house, leading to a friendship with the designer's pal, the gay painter played by Tamio Kawaji. As Tsuyuko drifts out of the designer's orbit, towards the painter, who is the only person in the film who treats Tsuyuko like a friend, the designer summons up her courage and makes her move.



Previously, the designer tried a sort of ambiguous come-on in Tsuyuko's attic room, leading to a regrettable shot of Tsuyuko furiously trying to wash the taste of the designer's kiss out of her mouth. Obviously, Tsuyuko doesn't do this with any of her male suitors, no matter how grotesque; that said, the salaryman and the other patrons at the bar in the beginning of the picture do disgust her in similar ways, so it's hard to say with certainty that the designer is being coded as "gross," in the way that is commonly referred to in yuri fiction, for instance.



It's hard to read what's happening here. The designer's overtures to Tsuyuko definitely have a rape-y vibe to them––but so do a lot of the males coming on to Tsuyuko, as well. When the romantic kiss finally happens––that's in the shot where Tsuyuko is holding all the high-heeled shoes out––when kissed she squeezes them, pushing the points of the toes up like an erection––we get the sense that Tsuyuko is, finally, receiving the designer's feelings. She doesn't push the designer away––and the high-heels seem to indicate she is, in fact, turned on. But she doesn't stay in this situation––her painter friend is outside the door, attempting to bust it down and rescue her. Then Tsuyuko emerges, her bags packed, confidently striding down the stairs and out of the dollhouse on her own terms. The first time I saw this sequence, it felt as if the designer was being done pretty dirty by the picture. Seeing it this time, I wasn't quite so sure. There is the sense that Tsuyuko has, in some way, returned the designer's affection––the structure of the film is such that in every new situation, Tsuyuko has to figure our how to return her romantic pursuer's offer of passion––she can never really escape making love, and in fact, it's part of the film's thesis of the modern woman that she doesn't actually want to. But every situation involves Tsuyuko devising a different ratio of passion -to-payment, and it seems that in the sequence of the assault and the kiss, Tsuyuko feels the negotiation is complete at this point. What can I say? It remains a hard sequence to parse.

On the other hand, Tamio Kawaji's character is mocked only gently, for his artistic pursuits.





The return of Bon to the film is a great example of Suzuki's subtlety with melodrama. Bon's fragile male ego has been decimated in the capitalist machine by this point. Tsuyuko's earning potential vastly outpaces his own. He clings desperately to a dream of striking it rich. All way too relatable. The film is especially clever here. Bon isn't an old-school chauvinist––or, at least, he doesn't think he is one. But without being on economically equal footing with his would-be lover, Bon's emasculation is intense and all-consuming. Throughout this sequence Suzuki frequently obscures our view of Bon. He turns away from the camera, trying not to have to face Tsuyuko––who really couldn't care less whether Bon made any money or not.





There is a remarkable sequence where Tsuyuko shows her painter friend around Bon's shanty, which she has moved into, and is keeping up as if she were a hard-luck, shantytown wife. Bon is out, and Tsuyuko and the painter share a laugh, marveling at Tsuyuko's new role. Tumbling in and out of fortune doesn't mean so much to Tsuyuko; her earning power in the economy of eros is, at this moment, paramount. Her options are only the limits of imagination. Bon, meanwhile, is punished by society for his problematized dreams, and is ultimately co-opted into fulfilling the tawdry, unimaginative dreams of a rich capitalist. In one of the most stylish scenes in the movie, Tsuyuko is press-ganged into an "old-Edo"–style porno shoot, starring herself as a noblewoman and Bon as a ninja.







Tsuyuko looks for love, and can only find money. Bon looks for money, and can only find love. The situation is untenable. But Tsuyuko's greater erotic power, and her facility with it (which grows very believably over the course of the movie) gives her greater earning potential, and with it, she can always buy another chance at happiness.









Oh yeah, and there's this whole subplot with a grotesque priest, which is interesting. This guy is clearly standing in for the exploitation of the patriarchy, revealing an inestimable font of personal greed and lechery behind his every action.











Until the end of the movie, this guy is shot with an ultra-wide-angle lens, making him an omnipresent phantom in Tsuyuko's mind. The priest has had a long affair with Tsuyuko's mother, and now is angling to move on to Tsuyuko's little sister. Tsuyuko becomes a bit of a mythological hero at this point, having a showdown with the priest in the woods and totally f*cking murdering him––lest you think this movie is all romance and caprices. Suzuki's bleak view of modern society and what would probably now be called his more anarcho-communist perspective is given as full a vent here as in the other films of the era.







To me the film is as rich a picture as the other films in the "Flesh" trilogy––though the then-contemporary setting probably throws off a lot of modern viewers of the trilogy as a whole. The performances in this series by Yumiko Nogawa are fantastic, the difference being that her role becomes more and more central in each successive film in the trilogy. Each time she plays a character who changes from Suzuki's version of an innocent (i.e., not sexually innocent, but maybe not really understanding the world around her) to the kind of passionate figure Suzuki seems to admire, freed from the prison of social assumptions, freed from ideology, really, and making the most of the situation handed her. Tsuyuko still believes in love, even if she can't find a soul strong enough to weather the pragmatic realities of it, the way she can.





In a way, she reminds me of Suzuki, Nogawa, and the other filmmakers invested in this trilogy; as the company made the economic reality of their project progressively more limited and bleak, they worked to surmount those limitations and deliver increasingly meaningful movies. I don't know why Story of a Prostitute and Carmen from Kawachi failed so decisively in the marketplace; clearly the studio felt after Our Blood Will Not Forgive that they should invest less in the director's prospects. Also, as Nogawa became more central to the movies, it seems clear the company was slotting her into a B-picture kind of stardom; her Cat-Girl Gambler movies, made with Suzuki's mentor, Hiroshi Noguchi around the same time as this, were also cheaper productions, shot in black-and-white. Nogawa was cast in Gate of Flesh partly for her willingness to be nude in the film––Nikkatsu starlets of the time didn't want that on their resume––and in a lot of ways that enabled Suzuki to cast the role as he seemed to prefer, outside of the bounds of what was "conventional beauty" for the time. So Nogawa has big ears, a big nose, and a broad, toothy grin that reads as "commoner" next to some of the beauties of the era. I think the very conventionally-minded top brass at Nikkatsu decided this rougher-featured sexpot should play only to the cheap seats, as it were. But Nogawa delivers a unique woman to the screen in each of these pictures (and is a convincingly fetching presence as this film's Carmen, to boot). Carmen is Nogawa's tour-de-force, a movie which demonstrates the enormous range of her acting. She is as funny as she is moving, and she provides the consistent thread of all the film's disparate episodes, even as her character imperceptibly evolves before our eyes. I think this movie is underrated; though perhaps it's because it's so severely under-seen. Hey, Criterion! This was a T-R-I-L-O-G-Y and you only released two of them! wtf!?!?



As for the disc itself, it looks fabulous to me, and I think you can see some of the beauty of the film and its presentation in the screencaps. Carmen from Kawachi was shot by cinematographer Shigeyoshi Mine––more famous for Suzuki's Tokyo Drifter, Kanto Wanderer, Detective Bureau 2-3: Go to Hell, Bastards!, etc.––in other words, the color pictures. Mine was a disciple of the cinematographer Suzuki inherited from his mentor––Kazue Nagatsuka––and Mine would usually be the cinematographer when Nagatsuka went to photograph one of Hiroshi Noguchi's movies. While Nagatsuka used a typically high-contrast look in black-and-white, Mine was known for a broad range of softer grey tones, and those tomes get a full assaying on this disc. Initially I thought there was some visual disturbance in some of the shot-to-shot cuts in the movie, but on rewatching I haven't seen that. There are occasional moments where some scratches appear, along the baseline of the image––that might have been what I was seeing initially––but those aren't constant. There was no need for comparison here; the film is 1080p, and the trailer on the disc is visually inferior. What's more, the only alternative source is the DVD from the almost 20-year-old Nikkatsu DVD Suzuki box sets. That disc looks like nothing by comparison.

I wish more people could see this movie. It's one of the fullest early examples of what Suzuki could do without traditional action or suspense as a selling-point. I suppose it could be called a comic melodrama? Artistically, it goes as far as many of the other Suzuki films from this time––I'd put it on a level with, say, Youth of the Beast, Gate of Flesh, and Kanto Wanderer. Maybe one day an English-language company will do a trilogy box for these pictures.

[feihong]

Let's f-in gooooooo!!!! On to another disc from Nikkatsu's recent Suzuki blu ray bonanza. This time I'm sharing Our Blood Will Not Forgive. Of Suzuki's rarer mid-career titles (It appears right in the middle of the era of films Suzuki is most known for), Our Blood Will Not Forgive has a unique situation; It was given an official DVD release––but not in Japan; it was released in Hong Kong.





I had this Hong Kong disc at some point. It had no English subtitles (unlike the Shunji Iwai films released in Hong Kong, for instance), and the quality was astoundingly terrible. Importantly, the low-light, day-for-night cinematography in the opening and closing scenes of the picture were, crucially, entirely unseeable. They were just black screens, with occasional flashes and sound effects and Japanese-language dialogue. The official DVD of the film looked worse than most of the bootleg versions of Suzuki movies I've seen over the years, like Million-Dollar Smash-and-Grab and Blood–Red Water in the Channel, the aforementioned Passport to Darkness, and Satan Town. I saw this film at the Hammer Museum as well (These Hammer screenings were put together to coincide with Tom Vick's book on Suzuki, and included a lot of still unreleased titles from Suzuki's filmography, like Passport to Darkness and Capone Cries Hard), and the movie was a visual revelation. But it was also, one has to say, the only disappointment of that screening series (which included 21 films). Later, When I saw a smaller retro for Suzuki at the Egyptian, Chris D. presented the movie Satan Town, assured everyone it would be good, and then paused to reflect that he'd never seen a bad movie from Suzuki. I almost shouted "Our Blood Will Not Forgive!" to him, but held my tongue. In later years, I've come to appreciate more of what's going on in the movie, without liking it any more than previously, and allowing me to move Take Aim at the Police Van into the spot as Suzuki's true "worst movie" (though I suppose Good Evening, Dear Husband: A Duel might get that spot, just for being so toothless, if we considered the TV movies as well). Our Blood Will Not Forgive is still one of a small handful of Suzuki's movies that aren't either a) entertaining (like Fighting Delinquents, Naked Age, Passport to Darkness, A Hell of a Guy, Sleep of the Beast, Choice of Family: I'll Kill Your Husband for You!, Man with a Shotgun, etc.), or b) a great movie (like Gate of Flesh, Everything Goes Wrong, Eight Hourse of Fear, Tattooed Life, The Flower and the Angry Waves, Voice Without a Shadow, Underworld Beauty, Princess Raccoon, The Wind-of-Youth Group Goes Over the Mountain Pass), or c) an unprecedented masterpiece (like Kanto Wanderer, Story of a Prostitute, Youth of the Beast, Fighting Elegy, Tokyo Drifter, Branded to Kill, A Mummy's Love, Zigeunerweisen, Kageroza, Yumeji, Pistol Opera, Story of Sorrow and Sadness, Cherry Blossoms in Spring, and Capone Cries Hard).





Throughout, I'll share screencaps, but I'll start with some comparisons. The feature on the blu ray is in 1080i, and the trailer is in 1080p. The feature on this disc is very colorful, and the day-for-night scenes look readable for the first time on home video. But my overall impression is that the disc isn't quite as high-quality as Kanto Wanderer. The image looks a lot softer, and while I think the film is largely shot in slight soft-focus (probably to make the characters look a bit younger than they are––in the film Hideki Takahashi especially is meant to be quite young), the result is a lack of some of the depth that color contrast makes on the Kanto Wanderer disc. In addition, maybe this was shot at a humid time of year? Because everyone seems to be red-faced and sweating in this movie, more than in any other Suzuki film. You will see in the trailer screencaps a sharper image; but you'll also see a lot of rosy-looking faces and skin problems. The color on the film is very weird, on a general conceptual level. Often-times, the film's "green, grey and brown" color motif looks swimmy and insubstantial. There is a lot of deliquescent imagery in the film––and you hardly see a clear sky in the film. The shooting of the film seems to likely coincide with the rainy season in Japan, which explains it––but the movie is the only film of Suzuki's that seems quite this wet all over.








COMPARISONS

As with lots of the other films in these sets, the shots and takes used in the trailer are somewhat different from what is used in the feature, so some of these comparisons won't match perfectly. It tried to get as close as possible, but sometimes the timing just couldn't match too closely.

TRAILER


FEATURE


The feature looks scanned in just a bit in general, judging by the shots where I could get the screencaps to line up well.

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FEATURE

The difference between these two is pretty extreme. This single shot seems so far off even from the others in that scene in the feature. It looks like contrast-boosting to me, except that there are scenes in the beginning and end of the movie that needed contrast-boosting and didn't get it.

TRAILER


FEATURE

The contrast and color balance seems a lot more pleasing in the trailer, in general.

TRAILER


FEATURE


This closeup of the fingers taking the tie-clip looks really exquisite in the trailer––I feel like this is closer to what I saw theatrically, and it's certainly a more visually complex presentation. It's hard to replicate quite what Shigeyoshi does with lighting and color on home video. He loves to play in half-light and shading. It looks a tad insubstantial sometimes on home video. Theatrically, Mine's shots usually just look pretty good.

TRAILER


FEATURE


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FEATURE


These last two come from The climactic shootout at the end of the movie. The whole extended ending sequence is shot day-for-night like this. This has never been visible on home video before, so both versions we see here are an improvement––and detail can be seen in the feature version, in spite of how dark it looks here. The 35mm presentation I saw looks a lot more like what was in the trailer, though, and the darkness of the feature does make me pretty sad. Shouldn't somebody have noticed what was going on here? I am positive we're meant to see what's going on in the finale of the movie.



THE MOVIE

Most people have probably not seen this one, either, so here goes: I'll summarize in a very roundabout way.

The picture runs about ten minutes longer than the average Suzuki movie. Even more prestigious pictures Suzuki made––like The Bastard and Kanto Wanderer––run a tight 90 minutes. The additional ten minutes are somewhat conspicuous; Nikkatsu frequently seemed to let their A-pictures run longer than the B-pictures (William Carroll's book includes an exceptional look into the more complex ambiguities of how Nikkatsu structured their A-picture/B-picture setup––the results were often more porous than is suggested when you think of the schema––but for these purposes, we can say that Suzuki's career at Nikkatsu contains more films made to fill the bottom half of a double-bill than the top––which is not to say, though, that some of the B pictures didn't still rise to the top), and this runtime frequently marks the film out as more prestigious. An earlier prestige movie in Suzuki's career––The Boy Who Came Back, also starring Akira Kobayashi––also ran that extra 10 minutes. In spite of the extra implied prestige, Our Blood Will Not Forgive is still not the A-picture––It screened opposite a 2-hour Sayuri Yoshinaga movie, Gazing at Love and Death, directed by that hack, Buichi Saito. But the extra runtime still places Our Blood Will Not Forgive in another echelon of significance than Suzuki's usual picture of the time––at least, for the top brass at the company. Hence the presence of two stars in the picture, of roughly equal stature: Akira Kobayashi and Hideki Takahashi. Kobayashi is still the more prestigious actor, but Hideki Takahashi has already distinguished himself as the star of Nikkatsu's first big hit yakuza movie, Symbol of a man.



Suzuki had just come off a pair of hit yakuza movies starring Akira Kobayashi. Suzuki, like his mentor Hiroshi Noguchi, and like compatriot Ko Nakahira, tended to be handed riskier assignments Nikkatsu was trying out, and these early yakuza movies seems to have been an attempt on the studio's part to carve out some different, but hopefully equally-profitable terrain as Toei's successful yakuza movies. When Nikkatsu considers Our Blood Will Not Forgive a financial failure (I believe more budget was invested in this film than was standard for Suzuki––it is a slightly larger-scaled movie than his other Nikkatsu movies), Suzuki is forbidden from working with Akira Kobayashi again.



Hideki Takahashi, however, goes on afterwards to make Tattooed Life and Fighting Elegy with Suzuki.

On initial viewing, this is the only Suzuki movie I can recall where you really feel the runtime; those 100 minutes feel like two hours. I can only imagine the double-bill with a likely somnambulant, 2-hr. Buichi Saito-directed movie, must have dragged considerably. There are two large problems with this movie which don't usually afflict Suzuki's pictures. The first is that the film seems to be, for the most part, two movies of significantly different tone and purpose. Two movies––one aimed at Akira Kobayashi fans, made in a glossy, melodramatic and romantic vein, and one showing off the far more comic and physically dynamic Takahashi. And then these halves seem to have been jammed-together without an appropriate attempt to make the diverse tones of the different movie halves work together.



In the theatrical version I saw, a host of screenwriters were listed. We know more and more that Suzuki took a much more active role in editing and rewriting his screenplays than has previously been identified. But on this film, Suzuki's skill with writing seems to have deserted him. Suzuki never seemed to talk about this movie, and hated to recall films where the studio interfered; here it seems very possible, because the two stars' disparate storylines only occasionally succeed in meeting up, that there were two different stories crammed together, to account for the differing appeal of the two stars.





This compound story of two brothers (one a brash, young, extremely boisterous goofball who works in an office building, the other a suave businessman-seeming sort of guy), who are suddenly dragged into seriousness by the revelation that their yakuza boss father was betrayed and murdered by a member of a rival clan, never, ever comes together. The two brothers simply do not ever see eye-to-eye. Suzuki is a very adroit editor of his other scripts––this movie smacks of the studio insisting on particularly incongruous material being fit together, with no regard for the outcome. The main way this lack of cohesion shows up is the way in which the two brothers hardly interact. They are the main characters in the story, and the point is that they live in separate worlds, but that the truth of their righteous vengeance should bring them together. Fine, except...the truth of their righteous vengeance never brings them together. Instead, Akira Kobayashi has a plan for vengeance, and tries to execute it. Hideki Takahashi tries to warn his brother the yakuza are on to him, and Kobayashi won't listen. Kobayashi fights all the yakuza after him, to his ruin (the scene plays out like a suicide-by-yakuza, anyway––Kobayashi's character is already mad with grief over the death of his highly volatile girlfriend, the daughter of Kobayashi's mob boss––the boss who, it just so happens, was the one who had Kobayashi's and Takahashi's characters' father killed. Takahashi just sort of weirdly galavants throughout this entire showdown. His presence does not ultimately make a difference. He also seems to learn nothing about nothing over the course of the movie. Nothing really comes of his bearing witness to the death of his very different brother.





Initially, Nikkatsu seemed to want to find a way to differentiate their yakuza pictures from Toei's. Symbol of a Man worked a lot like a Toei picture, down to the browner, more muted color palette. But with the four Suzuki yakuza movies, Nikkatsu seemed to be reaching for a somewhat different kind of story. Kanto Wanderer is romantic, stylish, and dreamlike, presenting the yakuza as singular actors in a world where they are outmoded, mocking their lifestyle (Toei, allegedly at least partly established to launder money for the yakuza, has a much more romanticized view of the gangster life than Suzuki's––even in their supposedly de-romanticized movies, like the Battle Without Honor and Humanity series). The Flower and the Angry Waves adds intrigue and suspense to the mix, and also a muscular subplot about labor union struggles against the yakuza––to say nothing of the stylized recreation of the late-Taisho/early-Showa era Tokyo. Tattooed Life is a romantic adventure in which being a yakuza is a source of shame and regret, something the hero always has to hide (hard to picture that happening in a Toei movie––they'd rather frequently reveal characters to secretly be yakuza than keep the yakuza identity of the main character (one of the film's only yakuza until the end of the film).

By comparison, Our Blood Will Not Forgive does continue to deliver on Suzuki's obvious disdain for the yakuza (tiresome Scorcese fans, take note––Suzuki is able to disparage these characters in a way where there's no real ambiguity about his intent––and he does it with humor and grace––even in one of his only bad movies), but the look of the film is a lot closer to the Toei pictures. The visual is especially attuned to the Toei preference for zoomed-in telephoto, the penchant for dark brown interiors, the fixation on the yakuza chain of command (something that flitted by so swiftly in Kanto Wanderer, and was hardly an issue in the other two Suzuki yakuza films). There is a languor that would be somewhat louche in the Toei version of this film, which here is cut with a different sort of stroke of the knife. This is where the more Nikkatsu-like elements work their way in. There are a lot of cliches from the era of Nikkatsu Akushon teased in here. There is a mother, who loves one son better than the other (a la The Stormy Man).



There is a nightclub scene with a vocal performance, which ends in a fistfight (almost too common in the Nikkatsu Akushon movies to name any particular movies).





There is a focus on the new, postwar urban environment which is distinctly part of the Nikkatsu Akushon tradition. Hideki Takahashi works in this bizarre office setting. The place is a combination of Mad Men and How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, shot with a vaguely Tashlin-esque eye. Takahashi's boss and his peers at work are almost cartoonishly entertained by his antics This is one of those sections where the tone seems to be flown in from another movie, and Takahashi spends nearly half the movie in this sort of environment.







The film even follows Takahashi on a work retreat to another town, resulting in a vibrant fight scene in which Takahashi proves his mettle by scarily picking another actor up off the ground and throwing him over a stone jetty into the harbor.


So f*cking scary; that guy's head nearly connects with the concrete before he goes into the water. Crazy that Takahashi could pick a guy up and toss him that far, but also crazy that they tried it in the first place. In the take, Takahashi looks a little freaked-out by the toss.









When the yakuza plot starts to take over in the second half of the film, Takahashi still acts like he's in this posh workplace comedy, still, bouncing off the walls exuberantly and refusing to pick up what his elder brother is laying down for him, tonally.



Meanwhile, Kobayashi's storyline mopes in a heroin-chic haze of people smoking languidly, people drinking wine languidly, people handing their mothers fat stacks of cash languidly, etc. Nothing seems to puncture this veil until the mob boss villain––who we've barely seen to this point––buttonholes Takahashi and lets him know that––unbeknownst to Takahashi, unbeknownst to the audience as well, Kobayashi has secretly been working off-camera to bring down the mob-boss he's working for––the one who murdered Kobayashi and Takahashi's parents.



The boss's daughter, Kobayashi's girlfriend, has helped Kobayashi, but feels enormous guilt for betraying her father, and for her father's wrongheaded crimes as well. Her suicide puts a crimp in Kobayashi's plans, leading to a violent shootout in a shack in the mountains (the initial scene, a flashback where the brothers' father gets murdered––also takes place anachronistically, in a mountain cabin). Kobayashi, the good but secretive son, does horribly. Takahashi, the temperamental and impishly destructive son, occasionally bursts out to try and confront the villains, only to be practically dancing to the bullet ricochets at his feet. He makes no major contribution to this final scene, even though the script makes it exceptionally clear that the brothers must come together to resist the evil that led to their father's untimely demise. The goofball Takahashi really has no place in Kobayashi's showdown, which plays like a precursor to a Hong Kong heroic bloodshed movie––specifically The Killer. Suzuki does combat this incongruity some of the time. I kept noticing, in the screencaps, moments where the film would cut from one brother, in a particular scene, to the other brother, posing almost exactly the same way in another scene, elsewhere.

















In the scenes where he brings the two of them together, Suzuki seems to be working hard with increasingly stylized visuals to show them inhabiting a world only the two of them can share. The car scene, where the waves roil on all sides of the vehicle, is one of Suzuki's most overt stylizations in that regard.



Remarkably, whenever the film cuts from one brother doing something to the other brother doing the same, Suzuki has staged the brothers facing in opposite directions, or occupying opposite halves of the screen. This is obviously meant to tie the brothers together––they are, in essence, no matter what they are doing in the scene, looking at one another––but the effect is so subtle I frankly didn't notice it in the theater. The only time they aren't facing one another is in the rainy car scene, with the torrential waves in the back-projection. Kobayashi tries to persuade Takahashi that he's doing the right thing, his brother wants to believe him, and so, for a moment, they are going in the same direction...but just for a moment.

Ultimately, though, in spite of this really clever visual conceit, the script itself just doesn't create a space these highly contrasting characters can inhabit together. The roughhousing younger brother belongs in one of the earlier Koji Wada films, yucking it up. The elder brother is doing this gravure, mopey, gangster melodrama. The tones don't mesh, and the film doesn't really acknowledge that incongruity. Nor is there any way that Takahashi's antics add to or complicate Kobayashi's drama, or get in the way of his being stuck in a far more boring, typical tragic gangster drama. Suzuki teases some shock out of the ending––there is far, far more blood in this finale than in any other Nikkatsu film I've seen in the era.

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However, I can't say that most of this feels especially earned. Kobayashi's character has felt largely like a background player to the more muscular exuberance of the Takahashi scenes. We learn only at the end that he's been doing stuff we haven't even seen in the movie––but that doesn't make him feel more active as a character. As glamorous as the increasingly more solid Kobayashi seems here, he simply doesn't seem to merit this extravagant, bloody end. Maybe if he had fought anyone other than his brother on camera before this in the picture? But he just smokes and drinks and acts cool and reserved. Visually, though, the film is toned more to the Kobayashi scenes, with their morbid languor. The mellow color palette makes the film feel more somber, muting some of the more vibrant comic scenes. And the vitality of the office comedy in Takahashi's earlier scenes melts away as the gangster plot comes to the fore.



The film doesn't really lack for entertainment; but it's jumbled, vacillating tonality just makes it especially hard to be as engaged as usual. The second element that drags the film down is more related to the kind of material we're dealing with in the film. Yakuza, deeply ensconced in Japanese tradition, to the point it seems corny. The yakuza boss does flower arranging and tea ceremonies. These are things that have never seemed to interest Suzuki. The critique of the yakuza here is more earnest than usual; the film's humor isn't generally related to satirizing the yakuza, as Kanto Wanderer does. Because the office comedy doesn't stick around, the humor seems detachable, airlifted in to liven up the beginning of the picture. Because of this, the critique of the yakuza isn't very hidden in the picture, and it perhaps struck the wrong tone for audiences who were beginning to reject the Nikkatsu Akushon style of filmmaking and embrace Toei's patriotic-but-for-yakuza garbage (hot take: I vastly prefer Nikkatsu's approach to Toei's––I know, big surprise).


Holy cow, this is Chieko Matsubara! I did not recognize her when I saw this in the theater, and she still is hard to recognize in these shots even after knowing it's her.

In general, the casting isn't that interesting, either. The actors chosen for these roles hardly seem to project anything about what type of character they are. The choice to make Chieko Matsubara the movie's vamp seems a poor one for all involved.


There is this unusual frank sensuality for an Akira Kobayashi/Chieko Matsubara movie...they seem nearly naked to me in this scene, compared to their usual scenes together, and I felt like I should leave the room and give them some alone time. But in the next scene her character is literally on a slab in a mortuary. The pacing of the movie is so strange.



Worst of all is the plot with the mother, which lingers around the film, leaking in at all sides. This lugubrious element of the tale reminds one of the limp melodrama of an Umetsugu Inoue movie (like The Stormy Man, which is where the mother subplot seems to be lifted from). Suzuki is usually a more subtle melodramatist; Kanto Wanderer and Carmen from Kawachi both illustrate the subtle way he brings very unsentimental melodrama into his movies, normally.



Here, with the brothers competing for their mother's love, it makes the drama feel not just toothless, but deeply square. Save for the raucous comedy and the violence at the end, this could just have been an Umetsugu Inoue movie, actually. The vivid elements that make a Suzuki movie are largely missing from the production (another reason to believe this was intended to be a more prestigious project than Suzuki normally worked on; more interference from the studio, potentially). There are some wonky stylistic choices only Suzuki would make, but Suzuki's particular outlook is almost invisible in this picture. "Revenge for a dead father's legacy" is not a theme Suzuki would normally get behind. The kind of anarchism with which Suzuki normally approaches his subjects is mostly missing here. And the movie's criticism feels more skin-deep than in the other pictures of this era.

In many ways, the film seems to herald the end of Suzuki's Nikkatsu career, or set that end in motion. Ironically, the film follows immediately after Suzuki's biggest hit at Nikkatsu, Gate of Flesh. After this movie, the studio begins very conspicuously disciplining Suzuki, frequently taking away the promise of color cinematography (Story of a Prostitute, made after this, was meant to be in color; on the set the first day, Suzuki and Kazue Nagatsuka discovered they'd been given black-and-white film), more frequently criticizing passages of his filmmaking. Suzuki responds by being more passive/aggressively antagonistic towards his bosses, exercising more control over the scriptwriting and subject matter of his pictures (a subject the Nikkatsu top brass seemed eager to control, or at least, keep a lit on). I really want this to be a good movie. It certainly isn't as bad as I thought when I first saw it. But it doesn't come together in the exciting way of literally all the other Suzuki movies of this time period.



It is visually quite vivid, though. And I am pretty sure John Woo saw this movie, and took a whole aesthetic from it. The romantic look into the gangster world; the epic shootout, with Kobayashi in a nearly white suit (very reminiscent of The Killer); the elegant suits and cigarette breaks––all of it appears in the Woo movies later on. I believe Woo did mention seeing Detective Bureau 2-3 in the an interview, and I believe Our Blood Will Not Forgive got a release in Hong Kong (going some ways to explaining the Hong Kong dvd). At any rate, that's the film. Where do I think the movie turned out more expensive than Suzuki's standard picture? The two star salaries, mostly. That, and there is a considerable amount of location footage with lots of extras, crowds, and unusual scenery. Plus, a lot of rain.











What about the quality of the disc?











The disc is both prettier and clearer than previous presentations of the movie, and also not really good enough. The picture could look sharper, cleaner, and could especially have more clarity––as the trailer demonstrates. You have seen a number of screenshots in here from the shootout finale. That day-for-night sequence is actually more readable on this version than in the previous home video release. But when I saw the film on 35mm, I could see all the action unfurling. Honestly, in the theater the day-for-night seemed a little more biased on the side of clarity––to the point that I thought it could actually be darker. Give it a few years and a different format, I guess, and I get my capricious wish. I don't think this one is really worth any company picking up for an English-language release; bad movies are not the norm for Suzuki, and this one's Suzuki-esque qualities don't make it quite memorable enough. And while I like Kobayashi a lot as an actor, he doesn't save this movie. There are just as many movies where Kobayashi doesn't brighten up the proceedings (Black Tight Killers, Retaliation, all those Wataridori movies, etc.) and there are great movies where he is well-cast (Kanto Wanderer and The Flower and the Angry Waves). What I think the film is missing is a way to tie the goofy office satire to the gangster melodrama, plot-wise. Something that would bring those two worlds together more; and more of a symbiotic relationship between the brothers.This movie is longer than the standard Suzuki film not because that is merited so much as that the brothers' different stories aren't more efficiently tied together.



Next I want to tackle Gate of Flesh, for which there are two blu ray editions now, so between the new disc's feature and trailer, and the French disc from Elephant, to see how this film has been treated, and I want to get to the discs on the third set, as well.