The razor's edge: a review of Youth of the Beast.
Finally got around to watching another movie directed by Seijun Suzuki: the 1963 Youth of the Beast (original Japanese title: Yaju no Seishun); this was apparently the first movie in which Suzuki stopped being a time-server, a hired hand, and developed his own style. And sweet fancy Moses, what a style!
Youth of the Beast was based on a novel by Haruhiko Oyabu, one of the leading figures, if not founding fathers, of Japan's hard-boiled/noir genre; if the English subtitles for the 2001 interview with the lead Jo Shishido can be trusted, the novel was apparently titled Knock Off the Bad Guys: Leave it to Me (this is the name of the shooting script that Shishido holds up to the camera at the beginning of his interview on the Criterion DVD; amusingly enough, Suzuki in his 2001 interview admitted that the title "Youth of the Beast" is nonsensical: he said that the studio, Nikkatsu, probably chose it because they marketed their pictures to young people). While Nikkatsu merely wanted another run-of-the-mill yakuza picture, Suzuki and his lead actor Shishido (this was the first time they worked together) made it anything but, primarily to relieve their own boredom and artistic frustration.
The movie opens with the police discovering the bodies of a couple who apparently killed themselves in a shinjū, or lovers' suicide; the male decedent happens to have been a police detective, Koichi Takeshita. Shortly thereafter, a taciturn, brutal, swollen-jawed hood named Joji ("Jo" for short) Mizuno (Jo Shishido) makes the scene in the Nomoto yakuza clan's turf, decking an assortment of young punks (and wiping the blood off of his pointy-toed shoe on one punk's shirt after kicking the snot out of him), macking another punk's pachinko machine, and running up a ginormous tab at one of Nomoto's mizu shobai ("water business": a yakuza clan's restaurants, bars and nightclubs used sometimes as fronts for illegal operations -- prostitution, gambling -- and sometimes as legitimate enterprises through which they can launder their money acquired through criminal activity) outfits and refusing to pay. This lands him an audience with the Nomoto heavies on deck at the nightclub, and his physical toughness, quick reflexes and coolness under pressure earn him a sit-down with the head of the clan, Tatsuo (Shoji Kobayashi), a horn-rimmed knife artist with a white Persian cat that he frequently cradles in the best Blofeldian fashion. (The kitty even licks his mouth for a long, uncomfortable moment later in the movie.) Impressed with how Jo out-thinks their chief gunman, Minami (Hideaki Esumi), Tatsuo hires him. But, wouldn't you know it, Jo's too ambitious a guy to settle for having just one job: he soon hooks up with Nomoto's rivals; and isn't he awfully interested in the dead cop Takeshita..?
The chief pleasures of Youth of the Beast are in its breakneck pacing, its urgent jazz score (by Hajime Okumura), its amazing visuals and set design (there's a scene where Tatsuo whips a woman's back to ribbons in a wind storm of golden dust that suggests the Ghost Wind of the psychoactive -- and psi-active -- kireseth pollen in Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover series; that's a still of it below), its innovative and frequently don't-blink-or-you'll-miss-it staging of the action sequences, and the stylized though convincingly gritty and perverse underworld milieu and the oddly poignant moments that even the shadiest of the characters can have; that said, the big reveal at the end managed to take me by surprise, while the denouement is simultaneously so devious and so vicious that it would make Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer green with envy.
Kimberly Lindbergs pretty much nailed it in her Cinebeats blog last August when she wrote:
"Youth of the Beast was made only a year after the first James Bond film and yet in many ways it’s light years ahead of any adult action films shot during that decade and made on probably half the budget. Besides mind-blowing action sequences, jaw-dropping photography and an amazingly effective score, the film is also infused with Suzuki’s own brand of eroticism and violence, and it showcases his incredibly modern storytelling abilities that have inspired countless imitators."
Spillane should've been so lucky to have had Mike Hammer adapted for the screen by Seijun Suzuki.
Oh, the only other Suzuki movie I've seen thus far and which I wasn't impressed with? Tokyo Drifter (original title: Tôkyô nagaremono; 1966), which I saw on VHS several years ago. I remember very much wanting to like it, but being, in the end, underwhelmed by it. At this remove, after having just been blown out of my socks by Youth of the Beast, I can't rightly say why I didn't like Tokyo Drifter: whether I wasn't in the mood for it, whether the strain of trying to watch it while shooing away the kids (and the missus...) left me unable to appreciate it, or what; but I definitely want to give it another whirl, after I've tucked a few of Suzuki's other movies (Gate of Flesh, Story of a Prostitute, Fighting Elegy, Branded to Kill -- this last one is what got him fired by the bewildered suits at Nikkatsu) under my belt.