ryannichols7 wrote: Wed Jun 05, 2024 1:12 pm
wild but awesome that the 15th most popular Suzuki movie (according to Letterboxd) is going to be the first one with a full length commentary on home video, at least I'm pretty sure
To be fair, Letterboxd's popularity rankings, for Suzuki at least, reflect the historic availability of the films a lot more than any measure of quality. Cherry Blossoms in Spring, Suzuki's entry into early V-Cinema, is a striking, experimental and artistic success on the level of Kageroza, and is a great companion piece to the Taisho Trilogy––but most people haven't seen it, and it ranks very low in popularity. I think just about every Suzuki movie is better than Take Aim at the Police Van, but it's been in an Eclipse set forever, and it played on TCM recently on Noir Alley––so it ranks higher than more accomplished Suzuki noir pictures, like Smashing the O-Line and Passport to Darkness. Kanto Wanderer deserves way better than to be ranked 26th, but it's been far, far less available than most of the films above it on the list (including Capone Cries Hard, which has had a 1080p source on backchannels for a while now, whereas Kanto Wanderer has had only the poor-quality, way–OOP Homevision DVD as a source until just recently).
Tattooed Life is one of the less-challenging films of Suzuki's era of artistic maturity, with a surreal ending, but before that only discreet touches of Suzuki's by-then normal deconstruction and experimentation. It arrives after what seems to have been one of Suzuki's more consequential disciplinary actions––Nikkatsu execs forbidding him to work with star Akira Kobayashi again, after the relative failure of Our Blood Will Not Forgive. That film had been preceded by two hits with Kobayashi, Kanto Wanderer and The Flower and the Angry Waves, and it looks as if Nikkatsu invested more in Suzuki and the film Our Blood Will Not Forgive––and they seemed to feel stung it wasn't a success. Immediately after the failure of that film, Nikkatsu takes Story of a Prostitute, which was intended to be a color film, and revokes the color film at the last minute. But Tattooed Life is the next yakuza movie experiment Nikkatsu has Suzuki approach, and it seems as if they rode him hard to tow the line. As it is, Suzuki is told he has "gone too far" with the stylization of the ending. Before that, though, it's got a line in standard melodrama, along with some of the collectivist energy of The Flower and the Angry Waves. Earlier Suzuki yakuza films are part of Nikkatsu's attempt to "feel out" the newly popular genre––Kanto Wanderer and The Flower and the Angry Waves and Our Blood Will Not Forgive all have a take on the yakuza different from the norm––which Nikkatsu seemed to want at the time. But by the time of Tattooed Life, Nikkatsu had the yakuza genre hit they wanted as a template, Symbol of a Man, and I think Suzuki was pushed a lot on Tattooed Life to move more towards the elements that made Symbol of a Man film successful. So it's a film that takes place in a similar time period to Symbol of a Man, with that film's star, and a sort of heaping of melodrama which was kept at bay or significantly modulated in Suzuki's previous three yakuza pictures. It does have the notable element from Flower and the Angry Waves of a yakuza in hiding from his former associates. Either way, to me Tattooed Life bears the evidence of being a more highly-scrutinized production for Suzuki––which might make it a little easier to do commentary as it plays out its genre tropes.
Our Blood Will Not Forgive––the source of all the scrutiny––is a movie which suffers from problems which are likely the conspicuous fault of upper management. For the only time, Suzuki is given two major stars––Akira Kobayashi, the reliable #2 star of the studio (next to Yujiro Ishihara), and rising star Hideki Takahashi, the later star of Tattooed Life. The two are playing brothers, but their star personas are as unalike as can be. Takahashi is brash and fiery, swaggering and cavorting throughout the movie; Kobayashi is coolness personified (and, I suspect, an influence on the somewhat similar-looking Chow Yun-Fat years down the road––in this movie, Kobayashi wears a white suit which gets covered in blood as he fights the yakuza to the death, eerily similar to Chow's final scene in The Killer decades later). The script has a larger number of above-the-line contributors than is usual for a Suzuki movie (none of which are Suzuki's growing brain trust of young cinema revolutionaries––of the writers, only Takeo Matsuura seems to have extensive screenwriting experience––he wrote for Nikkatsu for what seems to be decades, including screenplays for Suzuki's previous movies A Hell of a Guy and Man with the Shotgun). It's adapting a book, but it feels like there's pressure to adapt material that plays to the two stars' very different energies. The result is the feeling of watching two different movies, alternating scenes: a boisterous comedy starring Hideki Takahashi, and a very pretty but moribund movie in which Kobayashi and Chieko Matsubara mope quietly in the same apartment, seemingly forever. The two brothers of the film are supposed to come together to face fate at the end of the movie––or at least, it feels like that's what is supposed to happen. But the seriousness of Kobayashi's movie ends up neutralizing Takahashi's movie in the end. It's a weird film, an unusual failure on Suzuki's part to make the pieces of the story at least cohere (the nonsensical plot of Take Aim at the Police Van at least does that), and it speaks to the varied needs of two stars whose auras do not mesh together comfortably. But the film is full of striking sequences, and many sequences with each star play extraordinarily well––just not well together; in a way, if the two movies could have been pried apart from one another, either one might have had a better chance at success. This really seems to be a tipping point for Suzuki's fortunes at Nikkatsu––but it's also synchronous with Nikkatsu's own financial downslide. Suzuki's films get fewer and fewer chances to prosper going forward. He is rebuffed when he asks for a deal like Immamura's. The executive who supported Suzuki is fired. And the president decides to scapegoat him. The thing is, Our Blood Will Not Forgive is not that bad, really; it's just not as good as Suzuki's high average. Tattooed Life, I believe, doesn't do too well financially. Most of Nikkatsu's attempts to grab Toei's coattails and get into the yakuza genre don't do great. But you can probably trace the more straightforward nature of this film––as opposed to Kanto Wanderer or Youth of the Beast, for instance––much more thematically-complicated, less orthodox pictures where Suzuki is expressing his own views and experimenting with style––to the fallout of Our Blood Will Not Forgive. The theatrical ending which bursts forth unexpectedly at the end of Tattooed Life is, I think, prefigured by equally shocking, stylized endings to the other three yakuza movies––the red screens revealed in the gambling parlor in Kanto Wanderer, the concerto of masks and disguises in the finale of Flower and the Angry Waves, and the brilliantly bloody, violent dawn shootout at the end of Our Blood Will Not Forgive all have a similar surrealistic charge to them.
Anyway, I'm looking forward to the commentary. I thought William Carroll's book on Suzuki was really good––though Peter Yacavone's slightly more recent book is perhaps more what I've always wanted in a book on Suzuki––and I think it'll be great to hear. But mostly I'm looking forward to the beautiful images in gorgeous hi-def presentation. Hopefully this does well, and gives us a chance to get Kanto Wanderer or Carmen from Kawachi, or Capone Cries Hard at some point.
