Next up in this series of looks into the discs in Nikkatsu's Seijun Suzuki boxsets is Fighting Delinquents, which appears in the third set, "Seijun on Drifters," and is one of the unrestored 4k transfers in the sets (to date there are 7 such transfers: Branded to Kill and Love Letter on the first volume, Nude Girl with a Gun and Carmen from Kawachi on the second volume, and Tokyo Drifter, Inn of Floating Weeds, and Fighting Delinquents on the third volume). Fighting Delinquents was a breakout hit for Suzuki in an unprecedented way (Nude Girl with a Gun had been a hit for him prior to this, but it didn't elevate Suzuki's status at Nikkatsu much––it did seem to give him the opportunity to direct up-and-coming star Akira Kobayashi in a duo of A-picture melodramas, The Boy Who Came Back and Blue Breasts). Suzuki's career gained a new level of prestige in the company. It didn't put him on a level with the top brass' favorites, like Umetsugu Inoue or Shohei Immamura, but following the success of Fighting Delinquents, Tokyo Knights, and Blood-Red Water in the Channel, Suzuki gets a lot more opportunities to work with big stars and to work with bigger budgets––and also, to work with one of Suzuki's most expressive techniques, his work with color.
So who's this Koji Wada?
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Spoiler
KOJI WADA
Fighting Delinquents makes a star out of it's leading man, Koji Wada, another member of Nikkatsu's Diamond line of stars recruited to potentially replace Yujiro Ishihara in case the actor became too incapacitated or too toxic for the studio (he liked to drink and apparently get in fights in nightclubs, etc.) Of the three main replacements (Akira Kobayashi, Keiichiro Akagi, Koji Wada––Jo Shishido and Hideaki Nitani were often included in promotional material about the group, although Jo became a leading man later than most of the others and Hideaki Nitani had been a leading man earlier and was getting frequently slotted into villain roles by the point the Diamond Line had formed), Wada was the youngest––he started his career at about 15 years old––and he had the lightest star persona. He also looked the most like Ishihara of any of the other replacements. Fighting Delinquents is his fifth film––he was a supporting player in the Akira Kobayashi joint Poem of the Blue Star, and he first starred in a movie by Suzuki's mentor, Hiroshi Noguchi, whose title translates to something like "Horseman of the Ginza." That film paired him with leading lady Mayumi Shimizu for the first––but hardly the last––time. For one reason or another, Fighting Delinquents is the film that successfully sells Wada as a star personality to the viewing public––after which, Nikkatsu makes Suzuki Wada's exclusive director for about 2 years (a couple of non-Suzuki directed movies with Wada do come out in this time regardless).
Suzuki has mentioned Wada in two interviews in English, summing up their 10 films together succinctly but not clearly. In his Asian Cult Cinema interview, Suzuki is given Wada's name in a associative game, where he's meant to say the first thing that comes to his head about the person mentioned. When they get to Wada, Suzuki says "A spoiled brat who came from a very rich family." In an interview in "Bug" Magazine, Suzuki is asked what his favorite film amongst his Nikkatsu pictures is, and he answers that it's The Wind-of-Youth Group Goes Over the Mountain Pass, and then he mentions that it stars a young actor named Koji Wada. There's no snark in the answer. And one has to acknowledge the way Suzuki continued to work with Wada after his star had faded. Wada does Gate of Flesh and Carmen from Kawachi during that later period, and he shows up as an ideas man at an ad agency in Story of Sorrow and Sadness––a brief, one-scene role which really seems like something one of the two men did as a favor for the other. It seems obvious though that Suzuki's standing at the company improves with the release of Fighting Delinquents and the less-compelling, carbon-copy follow-up, Tokyo Knights. The successes of the two depreciate after that––by the time of Wind-of-Youth Group the films are no longer hits––but then they bounce back with Blood-Red Water in the Channel. Suzuki's last film starring Wada is Those Who Bet on Me, and it seems to be Suzuki who gets the boot, with Nikkatsu president Hori Kyusaku criticizing Suzuki for "extensive use of symbolism in a traditional action picture."
The partnership with Wada follows a number of attempts to pair Suzuki with an up-and-coming star. There are the early pictures with Akira Kobayashi, the launching of Keiichiro Akagi in Naked Age, and the first of his star vehicles for Tamio Kawaji, Everything Goes Wrong (both this and a second film, Hi-Teen Yakuza, star Kawaji and are amongst Suzuki's most disastrous financial failures––Everything Goes Wrong plays in theaters for only about 3 days before it's withdrawn). With Wada, star and director seem to really click. There is a lightness, a discreet silliness, and an unbridled youthful energy to Wada, and in this film especially, Suzuki makes the absolute best of these qualities. The grittier realism Suzuki was reaching for in films like Smashing the 0-Line and Everything Goes Wrong is blasted away in this story of a poor orphan boy (or at least, presumed orphan boy) who turns out to be the heir to an ancient samurai family and their crumbling estate. Wada squares off first against his grandmother, the clan's stolid matriarch, and then a corrupt developer who is trying to seize the clan's ancestral seat. In the process, he teaches his grandmother to appreciate rock n-roll, he beats the tar out of the developer's goons, and he re-unites with his long-lost mother.
THE STORY
The premise of these early Wada star vehicles is very winning; though he always plays a teenager, the young man is adept at anything he is tasked with doing, able to succeed in any pursuit, and uncannily right for any given situation. Early on the filmmakers attempt to suggest that Wada's temper might be a character flaw, but very quickly that temper (fueled by righteous rage against the developer) is dropped from the film so that Wada can learn to A) ride horses, B) date way above his social standing, C) renovate his family's shambling estate, D) run his group of fellow orphans like a white-knight gang, D) negotiate land deals, E) fight seemingly endless enemies with a riding crop, F) handle firearms like a pro. He outfoxes the developer and he wins the heart of his mother, who is busy dating the evil developer, but who leaves the developer when it turns out her son loves her, and doesn't blame her for abandoning him.
As William Carroll points out, there's a surprising amount of similarities between this film and the immediately previous Suzuki picture, Everything Goes Wrong. While that film was a downbeat melodrama with an urban, realistic sense about it (and very French New-Wave styl camerawork), and Fighting Delinquents is an upbeat, comic action film, both pictures focus on a young man divested of an accessible father figure, "betrayed" by a mother figure who beds the enemy mostly to have the emotional support of a partner. The young men in both films hang out with a crowd of similar young people, who support their wildest instincts, but both young men are torn between a more rambunctious or violent life and a kind of desire for pro-social connections. Both young men are driven to almost a bloodlust by a righteous sense of indignation at any perceived iniquity. But while Jiro in Everything Goes Wrong wants a childhood he feels has been stripped of him by the loss of his father in the war, and ultimately charges down a nihilistic path, Sadao in Fighting Delinquents is consistently rewarded for be the best, better than all the rest. His attitude is one of a kind of neoliberal give-and-take; he will take on the goals of the samurai clan and preserve their land, but he'll be damned if these stuffy jidai-geki types don't learn the twist by the time he's done. While Jiro sees the war as a cataclysm, Sadao and his friends reach anachronistically for an old war song to express solidarity with one another and with an earlier way of life, after resisting the developer's attempt to mess with the family. The result is a film a lot less thematically cogent than Everything Goes Wrong, but with a lot of amenities to make the pill easier to swallow. It should be noted that, as conservative as the message of the movie seems to be, Nikkatsu felt Suzuki went too far with the color and fantasy of the movie, and seemed to restrict Suzuki's use of color on his next project, Tokyo Knights (immediately a much duller-looking film).
The supporting cast edges its way into the film shyly. Mayumi Shimizu is there as the upper-crust girl-of-good-breeding who takes a shine to rough-hewn but cheerful Sadao. Mayumi serves, here as in most other Koji Wada films, as the fresh-faced love interest (I like her best in The Wind-of-Youth Group, where her story of deferred passion is more credible and heartfelt, and where the film in the end revolves around her re-invigorating her father's stage show). There is competition for the role; when Sadao is with the street kids in the beginning, it's strongly suggested that there is a love interest for him amongst them––the only girl member, played by Yoshiko Nezu.
Nezu was a Suzuki discovery who debuted in the previous film, Everything Goes Wrong, and seemed to take over the narrative by the midpoint of that film––hijacking it from the less-sympathetic star, Tamio Kawaji. Nezu's short hair and flippant disposition, along with an unusual-looking face, made her stand out in that movie. But after that, is only in three more movies: Fighting Delinquents, Tokyo Knights, and some other random Mayumi Shimizu vehicle by another director. None of the later roles are as significant to their films as the role in Everything Goes Wrong. Here in Fighting Delinquents, her character is built up as a potential love interest for Sadao, and then pretty much dropped as the story goes on. She does nothing individually meaningful after her first scene, and Mayumi Shimizu just hijacks her space in the picture. However, the trailer features s couple of shots which indicate that Nezu and the other street kids might have had a larger role in the drama initially. Here she is spying on somebody for some reason––who and what, we'll never know: it isn't in the final edit.
So which girl does Sadao get in the end? Well, it's understood he's with Shimizu, but neither girl gets a position of honor here, because for some reason the movie invests its most romantic elements in the relationship of mother and son.
This actress is Emiko Azuma. She has an incredibly-long 75-year career in films, appearing in nearly 50 movies. She appears in 5 Suzuki films: Smashing the 0-Line, Fighting Delinquents, Tokyo Knights, The Bastard, and...and she is the bladder-cherry vendor/guardian of hell in Mirage Theater, 18 years after those other roles. Her parts in Suzuki pictures are extremely memorable, except in Tokyo Knights, which isn't a terribly memorable movie. She radiates a kind of sexy, adult poise that is pretty unique in these movies. In Smashing the 0-Line she is stunningly erotic, even though she hardly speaks. Here, she plays a much meatier role as the missing, mystery mother figure. The most intense drama of this film is about Wada's Sadao finding his mother and wooing her away from the evil developer who killed Wada's adoptive father and is trying to dispossess his family of their land. The film insists that the goal here is one of restoring a maternal order denied to this woman––who seems like she's been using her time as an outcast to become a sort of a savvy woman-about-town. But the scenes between mother and son are all increasingly sensual, taking the place of any romantic scenarios Wada' would have with the actresses closer to his own age. It's been commented in a lot of sources that Suzuki loves and encourages very physical performances in his pictures––one of the things which sets him apart from the majority of his peers at Nikkatsu––and the drama between mother and son is made dynamic, violently passionate, close to erotic by this visualization.
Emiko Azuma never seems to have been a starlet, only a supporting player. Half her roles don't seem to have a name in the cast-lists. But she looks luminously beautiful on-screen (I've seen this film and Smashing the 0-Line in 35mm and she was notably striking in both movies––I don't know if it was my imagination that the rest of the crowd to see the pictures also seemed to lean closer and pay more attention when she appeared onscreen?), but seeing this film on home video, she is clearly way-too-40 to be the star of a conventional romance (in fact, she's just 36 in this film). But she navigated a path that included roles in a lot of notable films, from Tadashi Imai's Night Drum, Cruel Story of Bushido and The Possessed to the Suzuki films (minor in their day, major now), to Suzuki acquaintance Toshio Matsumoto's Funeral Parade of Roses (Matsumoto testified in Suzuki's defense in his lawsuit against Nikkatsu), to Suzuki pal Masahiro Shinoda's Scandalous Adventures of Buraikan, to Suzuki compatriot Ko Nakahira's Rika: The Mixed-Blood Girl, to her un-starry but unsettling and essential role in Mirage Theater. If she was a Nikkatsu contract-player, it only seems to be for about 5 years, starting in 1960. I call her out here because I love her in these movies, the film loves her, and this looks like it was her largest film role (she does play Eddie's mother in Funeral Parade of Roses, but I think she has more scenes and screen-time in Fighting Delinquents). She's also, for my money, the hottest smokeshow of an actress in a Suzuki film until Naoko Ohtani stars in Zigeunerweisen––though there is a lot of competition. I get chills seeing her; I was born too late.
COLOR
This is Suzuki's first color film, and for that occasion, essential Suzuki cinematographer Kazue Nagatsuka returns to the fold (he had been working for Suzuki's mentor, Hiroshi Noguchi, for most of the previous year––his most recent previous Suzuki picture being the ultra-noir Passport to Darkness). Nagatsuka started as a cinematographer in the silent era, and worked with Hiroshi Noguchi on Song of the Underworld (basis for Suzuki's later Kanto Wanderer). That same year he shot Suzuki's second film, Singing Rope: Innocent Love at Sea, and Suzuki's third picture, the very visually-compelling Satan's Town. Over the previous year, working mostly with Noguchi, Nagatsuka had been developing some of Nikkatsu's earliest color pictures. He brings the approach he honed working with Noguchi to Suzuki's first color film, but there is a difference; Suzuki, unlike his mentor, really wants to get something unexpected out of the color cinematography.
Noguchi's films are mostly inaccessible––the only one released officially with English subtitles is the low-key Jo Shishido comic action movie, Murder Unincorporated. He also directed the Yumiko Nogawa She-cat Gambler series later on. Noguchi is known for pioneering the "hado-boirudo" or "hard-boiled" film at Nikkatsu, a contemporary of late-era Hollywood film noir. He shot initially in black-and-white, and in all his color films, Noguchi seems to want to harken back to a black-and-white world. He has Natasuka shoot a fairly controlled, desaturated image full of mostly grey tones. He has little bits of greyed-down color in costuming, but a lot of the background settings in his movies are tones of grey, or heavily greyed-down colors. Suzuki clearly wants more. In later years, Nagatsuka's assistant, Shigeyoshi Mine, will shoot some of Suzuki's boldest color films, like Kanto Wanderer, Tokyo Drifter, and Gate of Flesh. Those pictures will feature big panels of solid color, intruding into pared-down sets to create shocking visuals (the bold red revealed when the walls fall around Katsuta at the climax of Kanto Wanderer, for instance). By comparison, Nagatsuka's approach to color is much more influenced by his work on Noguchi's color noir pictures. The result is that the color films Nagatsuka shoots for Suzuki have a desaturated look––with the exception of particular items within the shots, which Nagatsuka enables to really pop with a color accent. There is, for instance, a lot of gold in the Nagatsuka movies that you don't see in the Mine films. Fighting Delinquents has a slightly unusual look for Suzuki, because the background space surrounding the characters is frequently as grey as it is in Noguchi's movies. Later on, Suzuki and Nagatsuka will develop a much different look for Suzuki's pictures. Nagatsuka will start to use more black space than grey backgrounds, and the result becomes that isolated colors burn before our eyes. This technique reaches its apotheosis when Nagatsuka returns to cinematography at the end of his life, after thirteen years of retirement, to shoot Suzuki's Zigeunerweisen and Mirage Theater. These are some of the most beautiful movies I've seen, and proof of the way the Nagatsuka/Suzuki approach to color is unique and effective. This movie, in spite of all the Noguchi-brand grey space, has a lot of foreground objects that burst with color. What's more, Suzuki experiments with non-diegetic color right out of the gate. There's a lot of casual beauty on display; in the theater, this film seems bursting with color––apparently the Nikkatsu execs hated this decision, and the result seems to be a pulling-back of color for the next film, Tokyo Knights. In the following film, Living by Karate aka A Hell of a Guy, Suzuki and Nagatsuka work the vivid color back in. Of the Nikkatsu movies, probably the other notable one Nagatsuka does in color is The Flower and the Angry Waves, which has a really uniquely fantastical, burnished look to it.
I suppose in this movie, color represents the riot of youth. The older characters are done up in greys. The young ones wear bright, saturated colors which are clearly associated with stage performance. A puppet theater which appears in the middle of the movie draws on the same kind of colors that the youth gang wears. Interestingly, Sadao's mother doesn't always dress in grey. As she becomes more sympathetic to Sadao, her wardrobe adds color, but mostly pastels. Maybe Suzuki is trying to say something about the mother's changing role through the color scheme?
SETTINGS
The film is set in a notable tourist destination, the island of Awaji, and, much like a Hitchcock picture, the location shooting takes in a number of the local tourist attractions––like the puppet theater, as well as the Naruto Strait Whirlpools, whose turbulence works as a striking metaphor for youthful turbulence in the movie. The film begins with the titles over the whirlpools––and at the end, there is a fascinating and clearly deliberate confluence, where the procession of a village festival churns and undulates over the closing credits like a whirlpool of its own. In spite of the shaggy-dog feeling of the story, a lot of care has gone into a lot of aspects of the film.
THE DISC
Devoted Suzuki fans may recall an English-subtitled DVD of this movie from Yume Pictures in the UK, released about 17 years ago. This muddy, desaturated disc was terribly interlaced, with constant banding on the image at all––ALL––times. It was hell to watch this movie in that format. The unrestored 4k transfer of the movie looks amazing, bringing the color to vivid life and creating a lot of sharpness and delineation. There are pops and scratches all over the film––though not nearly so many as in Love Letter, say...but it frankly looks just amazing, with a lot of visual depth and a generally "bigger" look than previous presentations. I don't know how o put that, quite. The 35mm print I saw seemed brighter and more saturated still, but the color is quite vivid on this disc. I have no complaints, only pretty much across-the-board praise. I would have loved to see all these movies done in these unrestored 4k scans––they look just like a retrospective screening, with both the imperfections and also the big experience of seeing a good movie in a beautiful, visually-solid presentation.
MY TAKE
Back when my only reference was the Yume Pictures DVD, I didn't think much of this movie. It looked very visually bland and flat, and any time there was motion on-screen it was incredibly distracting to see all the banding that would happen. Years afterwards, I went into a 35mm screening of the film with dread, and came out with eyes opened wide. In the theater, this is a riotously fun movie, a crowd-pleaser full of restless, vigorous kids being irrepressible and eventually charming the sh*t out of a stodgy group of old-timers. There is a conspicuous absence of figures from the mother's generation, reflecting, perhaps, the aftermath of WWII that still lingered. It is usually Suzuki's premise that Japan's encounter with corporatism in the wake of the war resulted in a country on the wrong track. Suzuki's own preference seems to be for a return to a more communal form of living––though this seldom gets fully articulated in the movies themselves. But I think this is an interesting early representation of how Suzuki feels about the relationship between the war and the new economic prosperity he so mistrusts. Ideas are very jumbled here, unlike in Everything Goes Wrong––Fighting Delinquents was written by someone I can't remember, who later became a diet member, and it smacks of a kind of centrism which only appeals to Suzuki insofar as he is skeptical of almost everything in pretty much equal measure. The idea that youth gangs won't rebel if they get to have their way part of the time is a really strange position for the film to take––but in an era of prosperity, perhaps Suzuki can't quite find an effective way to mediate the message screenwritten in. As usual for "Nikkatsu Akushon" cinema, the villain is an unscrupulous developer, but this is more Nikkatsu reaching for a soft target than it is Nikkatsu making a stand against the land development companies.
Either way, the emphasis is not on the politics of the situation, but in the energetic determination of Koji Wada's Sadao character. Everywhere he goes, he is practically flying. This element really carries the film––there is nothing like it in the later Wada pictures. If I had to pick another Wada film of the same quality, it would be The Wind-of-Youth Group Goes Over the Mountain Pass––though in general, the quality of these pictures remains pretty high. They are mostly very fun, until Million-Dollar Smash-and-Grab gives us some boring boxing between childhood friends, now enemies. The fun of Koji Wada arguing coquettishly with his sour grandmother, of watching her be seduced by his charms––the odd way in which Sadao and his mother are aching to get just all over one another––the exuberant abandon of Wada as he fights the goons with a switch at the end of the movie...the way the Naruto Whirlpools swallow up the escaping villain...these moments and scenarios are all bracing and exciting in a simple, direct, fun way. Clearly there is pressure on Suzuki to toe the line, but later Suzuki movies will go on to show us he has a real respect for and interest in violently rebellious kids, as people alienated enough to be both perceptive of what's wrong with society, but also to be vibrant actors changing things in one way or another. If Naked Age and Everything Goes Wrong are movies which despair of the energy spent by their young protagonists ever finding worthwhile outlet, Fighting Delinquents and the other Koji Wada movies are a much more positive spin on the idea, giving us a youth who gently but persistently pushes older people and their compromises into productive change. True, this movie doesn't quite get there ideologically, but it's almost there.
I'd very much like to know what further material there was for the street kids. They deserve a bigger role here.
Next I'll take a look at a very early crime film/musical from Suzuki, Inn of Floating Weeds––which also has a beautiful 4k transfer!
Fighting Delinquents makes a star out of it's leading man, Koji Wada, another member of Nikkatsu's Diamond line of stars recruited to potentially replace Yujiro Ishihara in case the actor became too incapacitated or too toxic for the studio (he liked to drink and apparently get in fights in nightclubs, etc.) Of the three main replacements (Akira Kobayashi, Keiichiro Akagi, Koji Wada––Jo Shishido and Hideaki Nitani were often included in promotional material about the group, although Jo became a leading man later than most of the others and Hideaki Nitani had been a leading man earlier and was getting frequently slotted into villain roles by the point the Diamond Line had formed), Wada was the youngest––he started his career at about 15 years old––and he had the lightest star persona. He also looked the most like Ishihara of any of the other replacements. Fighting Delinquents is his fifth film––he was a supporting player in the Akira Kobayashi joint Poem of the Blue Star, and he first starred in a movie by Suzuki's mentor, Hiroshi Noguchi, whose title translates to something like "Horseman of the Ginza." That film paired him with leading lady Mayumi Shimizu for the first––but hardly the last––time. For one reason or another, Fighting Delinquents is the film that successfully sells Wada as a star personality to the viewing public––after which, Nikkatsu makes Suzuki Wada's exclusive director for about 2 years (a couple of non-Suzuki directed movies with Wada do come out in this time regardless).
Suzuki has mentioned Wada in two interviews in English, summing up their 10 films together succinctly but not clearly. In his Asian Cult Cinema interview, Suzuki is given Wada's name in a associative game, where he's meant to say the first thing that comes to his head about the person mentioned. When they get to Wada, Suzuki says "A spoiled brat who came from a very rich family." In an interview in "Bug" Magazine, Suzuki is asked what his favorite film amongst his Nikkatsu pictures is, and he answers that it's The Wind-of-Youth Group Goes Over the Mountain Pass, and then he mentions that it stars a young actor named Koji Wada. There's no snark in the answer. And one has to acknowledge the way Suzuki continued to work with Wada after his star had faded. Wada does Gate of Flesh and Carmen from Kawachi during that later period, and he shows up as an ideas man at an ad agency in Story of Sorrow and Sadness––a brief, one-scene role which really seems like something one of the two men did as a favor for the other. It seems obvious though that Suzuki's standing at the company improves with the release of Fighting Delinquents and the less-compelling, carbon-copy follow-up, Tokyo Knights. The successes of the two depreciate after that––by the time of Wind-of-Youth Group the films are no longer hits––but then they bounce back with Blood-Red Water in the Channel. Suzuki's last film starring Wada is Those Who Bet on Me, and it seems to be Suzuki who gets the boot, with Nikkatsu president Hori Kyusaku criticizing Suzuki for "extensive use of symbolism in a traditional action picture."
The partnership with Wada follows a number of attempts to pair Suzuki with an up-and-coming star. There are the early pictures with Akira Kobayashi, the launching of Keiichiro Akagi in Naked Age, and the first of his star vehicles for Tamio Kawaji, Everything Goes Wrong (both this and a second film, Hi-Teen Yakuza, star Kawaji and are amongst Suzuki's most disastrous financial failures––Everything Goes Wrong plays in theaters for only about 3 days before it's withdrawn). With Wada, star and director seem to really click. There is a lightness, a discreet silliness, and an unbridled youthful energy to Wada, and in this film especially, Suzuki makes the absolute best of these qualities. The grittier realism Suzuki was reaching for in films like Smashing the 0-Line and Everything Goes Wrong is blasted away in this story of a poor orphan boy (or at least, presumed orphan boy) who turns out to be the heir to an ancient samurai family and their crumbling estate. Wada squares off first against his grandmother, the clan's stolid matriarch, and then a corrupt developer who is trying to seize the clan's ancestral seat. In the process, he teaches his grandmother to appreciate rock n-roll, he beats the tar out of the developer's goons, and he re-unites with his long-lost mother.
THE STORY
The premise of these early Wada star vehicles is very winning; though he always plays a teenager, the young man is adept at anything he is tasked with doing, able to succeed in any pursuit, and uncannily right for any given situation. Early on the filmmakers attempt to suggest that Wada's temper might be a character flaw, but very quickly that temper (fueled by righteous rage against the developer) is dropped from the film so that Wada can learn to A) ride horses, B) date way above his social standing, C) renovate his family's shambling estate, D) run his group of fellow orphans like a white-knight gang, D) negotiate land deals, E) fight seemingly endless enemies with a riding crop, F) handle firearms like a pro. He outfoxes the developer and he wins the heart of his mother, who is busy dating the evil developer, but who leaves the developer when it turns out her son loves her, and doesn't blame her for abandoning him.
As William Carroll points out, there's a surprising amount of similarities between this film and the immediately previous Suzuki picture, Everything Goes Wrong. While that film was a downbeat melodrama with an urban, realistic sense about it (and very French New-Wave styl camerawork), and Fighting Delinquents is an upbeat, comic action film, both pictures focus on a young man divested of an accessible father figure, "betrayed" by a mother figure who beds the enemy mostly to have the emotional support of a partner. The young men in both films hang out with a crowd of similar young people, who support their wildest instincts, but both young men are torn between a more rambunctious or violent life and a kind of desire for pro-social connections. Both young men are driven to almost a bloodlust by a righteous sense of indignation at any perceived iniquity. But while Jiro in Everything Goes Wrong wants a childhood he feels has been stripped of him by the loss of his father in the war, and ultimately charges down a nihilistic path, Sadao in Fighting Delinquents is consistently rewarded for be the best, better than all the rest. His attitude is one of a kind of neoliberal give-and-take; he will take on the goals of the samurai clan and preserve their land, but he'll be damned if these stuffy jidai-geki types don't learn the twist by the time he's done. While Jiro sees the war as a cataclysm, Sadao and his friends reach anachronistically for an old war song to express solidarity with one another and with an earlier way of life, after resisting the developer's attempt to mess with the family. The result is a film a lot less thematically cogent than Everything Goes Wrong, but with a lot of amenities to make the pill easier to swallow. It should be noted that, as conservative as the message of the movie seems to be, Nikkatsu felt Suzuki went too far with the color and fantasy of the movie, and seemed to restrict Suzuki's use of color on his next project, Tokyo Knights (immediately a much duller-looking film).
The supporting cast edges its way into the film shyly. Mayumi Shimizu is there as the upper-crust girl-of-good-breeding who takes a shine to rough-hewn but cheerful Sadao. Mayumi serves, here as in most other Koji Wada films, as the fresh-faced love interest (I like her best in The Wind-of-Youth Group, where her story of deferred passion is more credible and heartfelt, and where the film in the end revolves around her re-invigorating her father's stage show). There is competition for the role; when Sadao is with the street kids in the beginning, it's strongly suggested that there is a love interest for him amongst them––the only girl member, played by Yoshiko Nezu.
Nezu was a Suzuki discovery who debuted in the previous film, Everything Goes Wrong, and seemed to take over the narrative by the midpoint of that film––hijacking it from the less-sympathetic star, Tamio Kawaji. Nezu's short hair and flippant disposition, along with an unusual-looking face, made her stand out in that movie. But after that, is only in three more movies: Fighting Delinquents, Tokyo Knights, and some other random Mayumi Shimizu vehicle by another director. None of the later roles are as significant to their films as the role in Everything Goes Wrong. Here in Fighting Delinquents, her character is built up as a potential love interest for Sadao, and then pretty much dropped as the story goes on. She does nothing individually meaningful after her first scene, and Mayumi Shimizu just hijacks her space in the picture. However, the trailer features s couple of shots which indicate that Nezu and the other street kids might have had a larger role in the drama initially. Here she is spying on somebody for some reason––who and what, we'll never know: it isn't in the final edit.
So which girl does Sadao get in the end? Well, it's understood he's with Shimizu, but neither girl gets a position of honor here, because for some reason the movie invests its most romantic elements in the relationship of mother and son.
This actress is Emiko Azuma. She has an incredibly-long 75-year career in films, appearing in nearly 50 movies. She appears in 5 Suzuki films: Smashing the 0-Line, Fighting Delinquents, Tokyo Knights, The Bastard, and...and she is the bladder-cherry vendor/guardian of hell in Mirage Theater, 18 years after those other roles. Her parts in Suzuki pictures are extremely memorable, except in Tokyo Knights, which isn't a terribly memorable movie. She radiates a kind of sexy, adult poise that is pretty unique in these movies. In Smashing the 0-Line she is stunningly erotic, even though she hardly speaks. Here, she plays a much meatier role as the missing, mystery mother figure. The most intense drama of this film is about Wada's Sadao finding his mother and wooing her away from the evil developer who killed Wada's adoptive father and is trying to dispossess his family of their land. The film insists that the goal here is one of restoring a maternal order denied to this woman––who seems like she's been using her time as an outcast to become a sort of a savvy woman-about-town. But the scenes between mother and son are all increasingly sensual, taking the place of any romantic scenarios Wada' would have with the actresses closer to his own age. It's been commented in a lot of sources that Suzuki loves and encourages very physical performances in his pictures––one of the things which sets him apart from the majority of his peers at Nikkatsu––and the drama between mother and son is made dynamic, violently passionate, close to erotic by this visualization.
Emiko Azuma never seems to have been a starlet, only a supporting player. Half her roles don't seem to have a name in the cast-lists. But she looks luminously beautiful on-screen (I've seen this film and Smashing the 0-Line in 35mm and she was notably striking in both movies––I don't know if it was my imagination that the rest of the crowd to see the pictures also seemed to lean closer and pay more attention when she appeared onscreen?), but seeing this film on home video, she is clearly way-too-40 to be the star of a conventional romance (in fact, she's just 36 in this film). But she navigated a path that included roles in a lot of notable films, from Tadashi Imai's Night Drum, Cruel Story of Bushido and The Possessed to the Suzuki films (minor in their day, major now), to Suzuki acquaintance Toshio Matsumoto's Funeral Parade of Roses (Matsumoto testified in Suzuki's defense in his lawsuit against Nikkatsu), to Suzuki pal Masahiro Shinoda's Scandalous Adventures of Buraikan, to Suzuki compatriot Ko Nakahira's Rika: The Mixed-Blood Girl, to her un-starry but unsettling and essential role in Mirage Theater. If she was a Nikkatsu contract-player, it only seems to be for about 5 years, starting in 1960. I call her out here because I love her in these movies, the film loves her, and this looks like it was her largest film role (she does play Eddie's mother in Funeral Parade of Roses, but I think she has more scenes and screen-time in Fighting Delinquents). She's also, for my money, the hottest smokeshow of an actress in a Suzuki film until Naoko Ohtani stars in Zigeunerweisen––though there is a lot of competition. I get chills seeing her; I was born too late.
COLOR
This is Suzuki's first color film, and for that occasion, essential Suzuki cinematographer Kazue Nagatsuka returns to the fold (he had been working for Suzuki's mentor, Hiroshi Noguchi, for most of the previous year––his most recent previous Suzuki picture being the ultra-noir Passport to Darkness). Nagatsuka started as a cinematographer in the silent era, and worked with Hiroshi Noguchi on Song of the Underworld (basis for Suzuki's later Kanto Wanderer). That same year he shot Suzuki's second film, Singing Rope: Innocent Love at Sea, and Suzuki's third picture, the very visually-compelling Satan's Town. Over the previous year, working mostly with Noguchi, Nagatsuka had been developing some of Nikkatsu's earliest color pictures. He brings the approach he honed working with Noguchi to Suzuki's first color film, but there is a difference; Suzuki, unlike his mentor, really wants to get something unexpected out of the color cinematography.
Noguchi's films are mostly inaccessible––the only one released officially with English subtitles is the low-key Jo Shishido comic action movie, Murder Unincorporated. He also directed the Yumiko Nogawa She-cat Gambler series later on. Noguchi is known for pioneering the "hado-boirudo" or "hard-boiled" film at Nikkatsu, a contemporary of late-era Hollywood film noir. He shot initially in black-and-white, and in all his color films, Noguchi seems to want to harken back to a black-and-white world. He has Natasuka shoot a fairly controlled, desaturated image full of mostly grey tones. He has little bits of greyed-down color in costuming, but a lot of the background settings in his movies are tones of grey, or heavily greyed-down colors. Suzuki clearly wants more. In later years, Nagatsuka's assistant, Shigeyoshi Mine, will shoot some of Suzuki's boldest color films, like Kanto Wanderer, Tokyo Drifter, and Gate of Flesh. Those pictures will feature big panels of solid color, intruding into pared-down sets to create shocking visuals (the bold red revealed when the walls fall around Katsuta at the climax of Kanto Wanderer, for instance). By comparison, Nagatsuka's approach to color is much more influenced by his work on Noguchi's color noir pictures. The result is that the color films Nagatsuka shoots for Suzuki have a desaturated look––with the exception of particular items within the shots, which Nagatsuka enables to really pop with a color accent. There is, for instance, a lot of gold in the Nagatsuka movies that you don't see in the Mine films. Fighting Delinquents has a slightly unusual look for Suzuki, because the background space surrounding the characters is frequently as grey as it is in Noguchi's movies. Later on, Suzuki and Nagatsuka will develop a much different look for Suzuki's pictures. Nagatsuka will start to use more black space than grey backgrounds, and the result becomes that isolated colors burn before our eyes. This technique reaches its apotheosis when Nagatsuka returns to cinematography at the end of his life, after thirteen years of retirement, to shoot Suzuki's Zigeunerweisen and Mirage Theater. These are some of the most beautiful movies I've seen, and proof of the way the Nagatsuka/Suzuki approach to color is unique and effective. This movie, in spite of all the Noguchi-brand grey space, has a lot of foreground objects that burst with color. What's more, Suzuki experiments with non-diegetic color right out of the gate. There's a lot of casual beauty on display; in the theater, this film seems bursting with color––apparently the Nikkatsu execs hated this decision, and the result seems to be a pulling-back of color for the next film, Tokyo Knights. In the following film, Living by Karate aka A Hell of a Guy, Suzuki and Nagatsuka work the vivid color back in. Of the Nikkatsu movies, probably the other notable one Nagatsuka does in color is The Flower and the Angry Waves, which has a really uniquely fantastical, burnished look to it.
I suppose in this movie, color represents the riot of youth. The older characters are done up in greys. The young ones wear bright, saturated colors which are clearly associated with stage performance. A puppet theater which appears in the middle of the movie draws on the same kind of colors that the youth gang wears. Interestingly, Sadao's mother doesn't always dress in grey. As she becomes more sympathetic to Sadao, her wardrobe adds color, but mostly pastels. Maybe Suzuki is trying to say something about the mother's changing role through the color scheme?
SETTINGS
The film is set in a notable tourist destination, the island of Awaji, and, much like a Hitchcock picture, the location shooting takes in a number of the local tourist attractions––like the puppet theater, as well as the Naruto Strait Whirlpools, whose turbulence works as a striking metaphor for youthful turbulence in the movie. The film begins with the titles over the whirlpools––and at the end, there is a fascinating and clearly deliberate confluence, where the procession of a village festival churns and undulates over the closing credits like a whirlpool of its own. In spite of the shaggy-dog feeling of the story, a lot of care has gone into a lot of aspects of the film.
THE DISC
Devoted Suzuki fans may recall an English-subtitled DVD of this movie from Yume Pictures in the UK, released about 17 years ago. This muddy, desaturated disc was terribly interlaced, with constant banding on the image at all––ALL––times. It was hell to watch this movie in that format. The unrestored 4k transfer of the movie looks amazing, bringing the color to vivid life and creating a lot of sharpness and delineation. There are pops and scratches all over the film––though not nearly so many as in Love Letter, say...but it frankly looks just amazing, with a lot of visual depth and a generally "bigger" look than previous presentations. I don't know how o put that, quite. The 35mm print I saw seemed brighter and more saturated still, but the color is quite vivid on this disc. I have no complaints, only pretty much across-the-board praise. I would have loved to see all these movies done in these unrestored 4k scans––they look just like a retrospective screening, with both the imperfections and also the big experience of seeing a good movie in a beautiful, visually-solid presentation.
MY TAKE
Back when my only reference was the Yume Pictures DVD, I didn't think much of this movie. It looked very visually bland and flat, and any time there was motion on-screen it was incredibly distracting to see all the banding that would happen. Years afterwards, I went into a 35mm screening of the film with dread, and came out with eyes opened wide. In the theater, this is a riotously fun movie, a crowd-pleaser full of restless, vigorous kids being irrepressible and eventually charming the sh*t out of a stodgy group of old-timers. There is a conspicuous absence of figures from the mother's generation, reflecting, perhaps, the aftermath of WWII that still lingered. It is usually Suzuki's premise that Japan's encounter with corporatism in the wake of the war resulted in a country on the wrong track. Suzuki's own preference seems to be for a return to a more communal form of living––though this seldom gets fully articulated in the movies themselves. But I think this is an interesting early representation of how Suzuki feels about the relationship between the war and the new economic prosperity he so mistrusts. Ideas are very jumbled here, unlike in Everything Goes Wrong––Fighting Delinquents was written by someone I can't remember, who later became a diet member, and it smacks of a kind of centrism which only appeals to Suzuki insofar as he is skeptical of almost everything in pretty much equal measure. The idea that youth gangs won't rebel if they get to have their way part of the time is a really strange position for the film to take––but in an era of prosperity, perhaps Suzuki can't quite find an effective way to mediate the message screenwritten in. As usual for "Nikkatsu Akushon" cinema, the villain is an unscrupulous developer, but this is more Nikkatsu reaching for a soft target than it is Nikkatsu making a stand against the land development companies.
Either way, the emphasis is not on the politics of the situation, but in the energetic determination of Koji Wada's Sadao character. Everywhere he goes, he is practically flying. This element really carries the film––there is nothing like it in the later Wada pictures. If I had to pick another Wada film of the same quality, it would be The Wind-of-Youth Group Goes Over the Mountain Pass––though in general, the quality of these pictures remains pretty high. They are mostly very fun, until Million-Dollar Smash-and-Grab gives us some boring boxing between childhood friends, now enemies. The fun of Koji Wada arguing coquettishly with his sour grandmother, of watching her be seduced by his charms––the odd way in which Sadao and his mother are aching to get just all over one another––the exuberant abandon of Wada as he fights the goons with a switch at the end of the movie...the way the Naruto Whirlpools swallow up the escaping villain...these moments and scenarios are all bracing and exciting in a simple, direct, fun way. Clearly there is pressure on Suzuki to toe the line, but later Suzuki movies will go on to show us he has a real respect for and interest in violently rebellious kids, as people alienated enough to be both perceptive of what's wrong with society, but also to be vibrant actors changing things in one way or another. If Naked Age and Everything Goes Wrong are movies which despair of the energy spent by their young protagonists ever finding worthwhile outlet, Fighting Delinquents and the other Koji Wada movies are a much more positive spin on the idea, giving us a youth who gently but persistently pushes older people and their compromises into productive change. True, this movie doesn't quite get there ideologically, but it's almost there.
I'd very much like to know what further material there was for the street kids. They deserve a bigger role here.
Next I'll take a look at a very early crime film/musical from Suzuki, Inn of Floating Weeds––which also has a beautiful 4k transfer!
Spoiler
KOJI WADA
Fighting Delinquents makes a star out of it's leading man, Koji Wada, another member of Nikkatsu's Diamond line of stars recruited to potentially replace Yujiro Ishihara in case the actor became too incapacitated or too toxic for the studio (he liked to drink and apparently get in fights in nightclubs, etc.) Of the three main replacements (Akira Kobayashi, Keiichiro Akagi, Koji Wada––Jo Shishido and Hideaki Nitani were often included in promotional material about the group, although Jo became a leading man later than most of the others and Hideaki Nitani had been a leading man earlier and was getting frequently slotted into villain roles by the point the Diamond Line had formed), Wada was the youngest––he started his career at about 15 years old––and he had the lightest star persona. He also looked the most like Ishihara of any of the other replacements. Fighting Delinquents is his fifth film––he was a supporting player in the Akira Kobayashi joint Poem of the Blue Star, and he first starred in a movie by Suzuki's mentor, Hiroshi Noguchi, whose title translates to something like "Horseman of the Ginza." That film paired him with leading lady Mayumi Shimizu for the first––but hardly the last––time. For one reason or another, Fighting Delinquents is the film that successfully sells Wada as a star personality to the viewing public––after which, Nikkatsu makes Suzuki Wada's exclusive director for about 2 years (a couple of non-Suzuki directed movies with Wada do come out in this time regardless).
Suzuki has mentioned Wada in two interviews in English, summing up their 10 films together succinctly but not clearly. In his Asian Cult Cinema interview, Suzuki is given Wada's name in a associative game, where he's meant to say the first thing that comes to his head about the person mentioned. When they get to Wada, Suzuki says "A spoiled brat who came from a very rich family." In an interview in "Bug" Magazine, Suzuki is asked what his favorite film amongst his Nikkatsu pictures is, and he answers that it's The Wind-of-Youth Group Goes Over the Mountain Pass, and then he mentions that it stars a young actor named Koji Wada. There's no snark in the answer. And one has to acknowledge the way Suzuki continued to work with Wada after his star had faded. Wada does Gate of Flesh and Carmen from Kawachi during that later period, and he shows up as an ideas man at an ad agency in Story of Sorrow and Sadness––a brief, one-scene role which really seems like something one of the two men did as a favor for the other. It seems obvious though that Suzuki's standing at the company improves with the release of Fighting Delinquents and the less-compelling, carbon-copy follow-up, Tokyo Knights. The successes of the two depreciate after that––by the time of Wind-of-Youth Group the films are no longer hits––but then they bounce back with Blood-Red Water in the Channel. Suzuki's last film starring Wada is Those Who Bet on Me, and it seems to be Suzuki who gets the boot, with Nikkatsu president Hori Kyusaku criticizing Suzuki for "extensive use of symbolism in a traditional action picture."
The partnership with Wada follows a number of attempts to pair Suzuki with an up-and-coming star. There are the early pictures with Akira Kobayashi, the launching of Keiichiro Akagi in Naked Age, and the first of his star vehicles for Tamio Kawaji, Everything Goes Wrong (both this and a second film, Hi-Teen Yakuza, star Kawaji and are amongst Suzuki's most disastrous financial failures––Everything Goes Wrong plays in theaters for only about 3 days before it's withdrawn). With Wada, star and director seem to really click. There is a lightness, a discreet silliness, and an unbridled youthful energy to Wada, and in this film especially, Suzuki makes the absolute best of these qualities.
The grittier realism Suzuki was reaching for in films like Smashing the 0-Line and Everything Goes Wrong is blasted away in this story of a poor orphan boy (or at least, presumed orphan boy) who turns out to be the heir to an ancient samurai family and their crumbling estate.
Wada squares off first against his grandmother, the clan's stolid matriarch, and then a corrupt developer who is trying to seize the clan's ancestral seat. In the process, he teaches his grandmother to appreciate rock n-roll, he beats the tar out of the developer's goons, and he re-unites with his long-lost mother.
THE STORY
The premise of these early Wada star vehicles is very winning; though he always plays a teenager, the young man is adept at anything he is tasked with doing, able to succeed in any pursuit, and uncannily right for any given situation. Early on the filmmakers attempt to suggest that Wada's temper might be a character flaw, but very quickly that temper (fueled by righteous rage against the developer) is dropped from the film so that Wada can learn to A) ride horses, B) date way above his social standing, C) renovate his family's shambling estate, D) run his group of fellow orphans like a white-knight gang, D) negotiate land deals, E) fight seemingly endless enemies with a riding crop, F) handle firearms like a pro. He outfoxes the developer and he wins the heart of his mother, who is busy dating the evil developer, but who leaves the developer when it turns out her son loves her, and doesn't blame her for abandoning him.
As William Carroll points out, there's a surprising amount of similarities between this film and the immediately previous Suzuki picture, Everything Goes Wrong. While that film was a downbeat melodrama with an urban, realistic sense about it (and very French New-Wave styl camerawork), and Fighting Delinquents is an upbeat, comic action film, both pictures focus on a young man divested of an accessible father figure, "betrayed" by a mother figure who beds the enemy mostly to have the emotional support of a partner. The young men in both films hang out with a crowd of similar young people, who support their wildest instincts, but both young men are torn between a more rambunctious or violent life and a kind of desire for pro-social connections. Both young men are driven to almost a bloodlust by a righteous sense of indignation at any perceived iniquity. But while Jiro in Everything Goes Wrong wants a childhood he feels has been stripped of him by the loss of his father in the war, and ultimately charges down a nihilistic path, Sadao in Fighting Delinquents is consistently rewarded for being the best, better than all the rest. His attitude is one of a kind of neoliberal give-and-take; he will take on the goals of the samurai clan and preserve their land, but he'll be damned if these stuffy jidai-geki types don't learn the twist by the time he's done.
While Jiro sees the war as a cataclysm that took his father and negated his future, Sadao and his friends reach anachronistically for an old war song to express solidarity with one another and with an earlier way of life, after resisting the developer's attempt to mess with the family. The result is a film a lot less thematically cogent than Everything Goes Wrong, but with a lot of amenities to make the pill easier to swallow. It should be noted that, as conservative as the message of the movie seems to still be, Nikkatsu felt Suzuki went too far with the color and fantasy of the movie, and seemed to restrict Suzuki's use of color on his next project, Tokyo Knights (immediately a much duller-looking film).
The supporting cast edges its way into the film shyly. Mayumi Shimizu is there as the upper-crust girl-of-good-breeding who takes a shine to rough-hewn but cheerful Sadao. Mayumi serves, here as in most other Koji Wada films, as the fresh-faced love interest (I like her best in The Wind-of-Youth Group, where her story of deferred passion is more credible and heartfelt, and where the film in the end revolves around her re-invigorating her father's stage show). There is competition for the role; when Sadao is with the street kids in the beginning, it's strongly suggested that there is a love interest for him amongst them––the only girl member, played by Yoshiko Nezu.
Nezu was a Suzuki discovery who debuted in the previous film, Everything Goes Wrong, and seemed to take over the narrative by the midpoint of that film––hijacking it from the less-sympathetic star, Tamio Kawaji. Nezu's short hair and flippant disposition, along with an unusual-looking face, made her stand out in that movie.
But after that, she appears only in three more movies: Fighting Delinquents, Tokyo Knights, and some other random Mayumi Shimizu vehicle by another director. None of the later roles are as significant to their films as the role in Everything Goes Wrong. Here in Fighting Delinquents, her character is built up as a potential love interest for Sadao, and then pretty much dropped as the story goes on. She does nothing individually meaningful after her first scene, and Mayumi Shimizu just hijacks her space in the picture. However, the trailer features s couple of shots which indicate that Nezu and the other street kids might have had a larger role in the drama initially. Here she is spying on somebody for some reason––who and what, we'll never know: it isn't in the final edit.
So which girl does Sadao get in the end? Well, it's understood he's with Shimizu, but neither girl gets a position of honor here, because for some reason the movie invests its most romantic elements in the relationship of mother and son.
This actress is Emiko Azuma. She has an incredibly-long 75-year career in films, appearing in nearly 50 movies. She appears in 5 Suzuki films: Smashing the 0-Line, Fighting Delinquents, Tokyo Knights, The Bastard, and...and she is the bladder-cherry vendor/guardian of hell in Mirage Theater, 18 years after those other roles. Her parts in Suzuki pictures are extremely memorable, except in Tokyo Knights, which isn't a terribly memorable movie.
Whoa, horsey, competition rears its' head.
Azuma radiates a kind of sexy, adult poise that is pretty unique in these movies. In Smashing the 0-Line she is stunningly erotic, even though she hardly speaks.
In Fighting Delinquents, she plays a much meatier role as the missing, mystery mother figure. The most intense drama of this film is about Wada's Sadao finding his mother and wooing her away from the evil developer who killed Wada's adoptive father and is trying to dispossess his family of their land. The film insists that the goal here is one of restoring a maternal order denied to this woman––who seems like she's been using her time as an outcast to become a sort of a savvy woman-about-town.
But the scenes between mother and son are all increasingly sensual, taking the place of any romantic scenarios Wada' would have with the actresses closer to his own age. It's been commented in a lot of sources that Suzuki loves and encourages very physical performances in his pictures––one of the things which sets him apart from the majority of his peers at Nikkatsu––and the drama between mother and son is made dynamic, violently passionate, close to erotic by this visualization.
Emiko Azuma never seems to have been a starlet, only a supporting player. Half her roles don't seem to have a name in the cast-lists. But she looks luminously beautiful on-screen (I've seen this film and Smashing the 0-Line in 35mm and she was notably striking in both movies––I don't know if it was my imagination that the rest of the crowd to see the pictures also seemed to lean closer and pay more attention when she appeared onscreen?), but seeing this film on home video, she is clearly way-too-40 to be the star of a conventional romance (in fact, she's just 36 in this film).
But she navigated a path that included roles in a lot of notable films, from Tadashi Imai's Night Drum, Cruel Story of Bushido and The Possessed to the Suzuki films (minor in their day, major now), to Suzuki acquaintance Toshio Matsumoto's Funeral Parade of Roses (Matsumoto testified in Suzuki's defense in his lawsuit against Nikkatsu), to Suzuki pal Masahiro Shinoda's Scandalous Adventures of Buraikan, to Suzuki compatriot Ko Nakahira's Rika: The Mixed-Blood Girl, to her un-starry but unsettling and essential role in Mirage Theater. If she was a Nikkatsu contract-player, it only seems to be for about 5 years, starting in 1960. I call her out here because I love her in these movies, the film loves her, and this looks like it was her largest film role (she does play Eddie's mother in Funeral Parade of Roses, but I think she has more scenes and screen-time in Fighting Delinquents).
She's also, for my money, the hottest smokeshow of an actress in a Suzuki film until Naoko Ohtani stars in Zigeunerweisen––though there is a lot of competition. I get chills seeing her; I was born too late.
COLOR
This is Suzuki's first color film, and for that occasion, essential Suzuki cinematographer Kazue Nagatsuka returns to the fold (he had been working for Suzuki's mentor, Hiroshi Noguchi, for most of the previous year––his most recent previous Suzuki picture being the ultra-noir Passport to Darkness). Nagatsuka started as a cinematographer in the silent era, and worked with Hiroshi Noguchi on Song of the Underworld (basis for Suzuki's later Kanto Wanderer). That same year he shot Suzuki's second film, Singing Rope: Innocent Love at Sea, and Suzuki's third picture, the very visually-compelling Satan's Town. Over the previous year, working mostly with Noguchi, Nagatsuka had been developing some of Nikkatsu's earliest color pictures. He brings the approach he honed working with Noguchi to Suzuki's first color film, but there is a difference; Suzuki, unlike his mentor, really wants to get something unexpected out of the color cinematography.
Noguchi's films are mostly inaccessible––the only one released officially with English subtitles is the low-key Jo Shishido comic action movie, Murder Unincorporated. He also directed the Yumiko Nogawa She-cat Gambler series later on. Noguchi is known for pioneering the "hado-boirudo" or "hard-boiled" film at Nikkatsu, a contemporary of late-era Hollywood film noir. He shot initially in black-and-white, and in all his color films, Noguchi seems to want to harken back to a black-and-white world. He has Natasuka shoot a fairly controlled, desaturated image full of mostly grey tones. He has little bits of greyed-down color in costuming, but a lot of the background settings in his movies are tones of grey, or heavily greyed-down colors. Suzuki clearly wants more.
In later years, Nagatsuka's assistant, Shigeyoshi Mine, will shoot some of Suzuki's boldest color films, like Kanto Wanderer, Tokyo Drifter, and Gate of Flesh. Those pictures will feature big panels of solid color, intruding into pared-down sets to create shocking visuals (the bold red revealed when the walls fall around Katsuta at the climax of Kanto Wanderer, for instance).
By comparison, Nagatsuka's approach to color is much more influenced by his work on Noguchi's color noir pictures. The result is that the color films Nagatsuka shoots for Suzuki have a desaturated look––with the exception of particular items within the shots, which Nagatsuka enables to really pop with a color accent. There is, for instance, a lot of gold in the Nagatsuka movies that you don't see in the Mine films. Fighting Delinquents has a slightly unusual look for Suzuki, because the background space surrounding the characters is frequently as grey as it is in Noguchi's movies. Later on, Suzuki and Nagatsuka will develop a much different look for Suzuki's pictures. Nagatsuka will start to use more black space than grey backgrounds, and the result becomes that isolated colors burn before our eyes. This technique reaches its apotheosis when Nagatsuka returns to cinematography at the end of his life, after thirteen years of retirement, to shoot Suzuki's Zigeunerweisen and Mirage Theater. These are some of the most beautiful movies I've seen, and proof of the way the Nagatsuka/Suzuki approach to color is unique and effective. This movie, in spite of all the Noguchi-brand grey space, has a lot of foreground objects that burst with color.
What's more, Suzuki experiments with non-diegetic color right out of the gate. There's a lot of casual beauty on display; in the theater, this film seems bursting with color––apparently the Nikkatsu execs hated this decision, and the result seems to be a pulling-back of color for the next film, Tokyo Knights. In the following film, Living by Karate aka A Hell of a Guy, Suzuki and Nagatsuka work the vivid color back in. Of the Nikkatsu movies, probably the other notable one Nagatsuka does in color is The Flower and the Angry Waves, which has a really uniquely fantastical, burnished look to it.
I suppose in this movie, color represents the riot of youth. The older characters are done up in greys. The young ones wear bright, saturated colors which are clearly associated with stage performance. A puppet theater which appears in the middle of the movie draws on the same kind of colors that the youth gang wears.
Interestingly, Sadao's mother doesn't always dress in grey. As she becomes more sympathetic to Sadao, her wardrobe adds color, but mostly pastels. Maybe Suzuki is trying to say something about the mother's changing role through the color scheme?
SETTINGS
The film is set in a notable tourist destination, the island of Awaji, and, much like a Hitchcock picture, the location shooting takes in a number of the local tourist attractions––like the puppet theater, as well as the Naruto Strait Whirlpools, whose turbulence works as a striking metaphor for youthful turbulence in the movie. The film begins with the titles over the whirlpools––and at the end, there is a fascinating and clearly deliberate confluence, where the procession of a village festival churns and undulates over the closing credits like a whirlpool of its own. In spite of the shaggy-dog feeling of the story, a lot of care has gone into a lot of aspects of the film.
THE DISC
Devoted Suzuki fans may recall an English-subtitled DVD of this movie from Yume Pictures in the UK, released about 17 years ago. This muddy, desaturated disc was terribly interlaced, with constant banding on the image at all––ALL––times. It was hell to watch this movie in that format. The unrestored 4k transfer of the movie looks amazing, bringing the color to vivid life and creating a lot of sharpness and delineation. There are pops and scratches all over the film––though not nearly so many as in Love Letter, say...but it frankly looks just amazing, with a lot of visual depth and a generally "bigger" look than previous presentations. I don't know how o put that, quite. The 35mm print I saw seemed brighter and more saturated still, but the color is quite vivid on this disc.
I have no complaints, only pretty much across-the-board praise. I would have loved to see all these movies done in these unrestored 4k scans––they look just like a retrospective screening, with both the imperfections and also the big experience of seeing a good movie in a beautiful, visually-solid presentation.
MY TAKE
Back when my only reference was the Yume Pictures DVD, I didn't think much of this movie. It looked very visually bland and flat, and any time there was motion on-screen it was incredibly distracting to see all the banding that would happen. Years afterwards, I went into a 35mm screening of the film with dread, and came out with eyes opened wide. In the theater, this is a riotously fun movie, a crowd-pleaser full of restless, vigorous kids being irrepressible and eventually charming the sh*t out of a stodgy group of old-timers. There is a conspicuous absence of other figures from the mother's generation, reflecting, perhaps, the aftermath of WWII that still lingered, and the largely missing generation of which Suzuki remained as part of. It is usually Suzuki's premise that Japan's encounter with corporatism in the wake of the war resulted in a country on the wrong track. Suzuki's own preference seems to be for a return to a more communal form of living––though this seldom gets fully articulated in the movies themselves. But I think this is an interesting early representation of how Suzuki feels about the relationship between the war and the new economic prosperity he so mistrusts. Ideas are very jumbled here, unlike in Everything Goes Wrong––Fighting Delinquents was written by someone whose name I can't remember, but whom I believe later became a diet member, and it smacks of a kind of centrism which only appeals to Suzuki insofar as he is skeptical of almost everything in pretty much equal measure. The idea that youth gangs won't rebel if they get to have their way part of the time is a really strange position for the film to take––but in an era of prosperity, perhaps Suzuki can't quite find an effective way to mediate the message screenwritten in. As usual for "Nikkatsu Akushon" cinema, the villain is an unscrupulous developer, but this is more Nikkatsu reaching for a soft target than it is Nikkatsu making a stand against the land development companies.
Soft target, ahoy!
Either way, the emphasis is not on the politics of the situation, but in the energetic determination of Koji Wada's Sadao character. Everywhere he goes, he is practically flying. This element really carries the film––there is nothing like it in the later Wada pictures.
If I had to pick another Wada film of the same quality, it would be The Wind-of-Youth Group Goes Over the Mountain Pass––though in general, the quality of these pictures remains pretty high. They are mostly very fun, until Million-Dollar Smash-and-Grab gives us some boring boxing between childhood friends, now enemies. The fun of Koji Wada arguing coquettishly with his sour grandmother, of watching her be seduced by his charms––the odd way in which Sadao and his mother are aching to get just all over one another––the exuberant abandon of Wada as he fights the goons with a switch at the end of the movie...the way the Naruto Whirlpools swallow up the escaping villain...these moments and scenarios are all bracing and exciting in a simple, direct, fun way. Clearly there is pressure on Suzuki to toe the line, but later Suzuki movies will go on to show us he has a real respect for and interest in violently rebellious kids, as people alienated enough to be both perceptive of what's wrong with society, but also to be vibrant actors changing things in one way or another. If Naked Age and Everything Goes Wrong are movies which despair of the energy spent by their young protagonists ever finding worthwhile outlet, Fighting Delinquents and the other Koji Wada movies are a much more positive spin on the idea, giving us a youth who gently but persistently pushes older people and their compromises into productive change. True, this movie doesn't quite get there ideologically, but it's almost there.
I'd very much like to know what further material there was for the street kids that got cut. They deserve a bigger role here.
Next I'll take a look at a very early crime film/musical from Suzuki, Inn of Floating Weeds––which also has a beautiful 4k transfer!
