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Takeo Kimura (Japanese, 1918-2019) - Two-panel Screen, Birds and Autumn Trees, c. 1930s

Branded to Kill (1967)

Originally broadcast on the 19th June, 1999 at 00:55am.

If you believe some critics, the movie we're about to see - Branded to Kill - is one of the best Japanese films ever made. At the time of its release, 1967 (year of Bonnie and Clyde), it was savaged by the mainstream Japanese press and pretty much ignored by the rest of the world. The head of Nikkatsu, the genre film studio who made it, hated it so much that he said he was ashamed that his logo was on it. He sacked the director, Seijun Suzuki, who sued, but didn't make another movie for a decade. Post-war Japanese films were often serious, humanistic, haunted by war and failure. In the late-1950s and early-'60s, however, a new generation of directors such as Oshima and Imamura came to the fore and they were tired of the old po-faced movie-making. One of the ways this New Wave escaped from the downtroddenness was to celebrate popular culture and the influence of American music and literature on Japan. One of the bright new directors of the period was Seijun Suzuki. Born in 1923 and drafted during the war, he made something like 37 hard-boiled action pictures, yakuza movies or soft-core porn films in a ten year period beginning in 1957. His studio was happy when the films were fast and sexy, of course, but - under the influence of Oshima, an artist called Takeo Kimura and French movies by Godard - his films became more stylish, shocking and modern. Branded to Kill seemed to the old-guard like a celebration of violence, of meaningless sex, of nihilism and Hard Left ideas. Suzuki's supporters, many of whom were students, demonstrated in Tokyo when it and every other film he made was withdrawn from distribution. Watching Branded to Kill today, I think you can still feel the film-maker's sense of relief at not having to deal with huge social issues. Like Howard Hawks in films like The Big Sleep, which influenced Suzuki, the director creates a very atmospheric, artificial world of black and white, pools of light on people's eyes, back projections, silence shattered by gunfire. Then on top of this old style there's something new. Look at the incredible sequence which starts about 25 minutes in, with the assassination behind the billboard lighter. There's the noiseless traffic - the sound is as stylised as the pictures - the fake eyes, the men stacked behind each other, the attempted shooting botched by the butterfly, the camera attached to the shower, the over-printing of birds and rain pattern. This is the stuff that created all the fuss. It seemed like a kick in the balls to the demure art of Japanese film-making. But look again at these sequences. The characters do not share the sense of fun, the sex scenes are anguished, human beings are expendable, the main character of Goro is haunted by less tangible things than Humphrey Bogart ever was. It's like Suzuki took the gangster style of '40s American movies, intensified it to an almost pornographic degree, as Sergio Leone had done with westerns such as The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (made the year before Branded to Kill), and then used it to break up post-war Japanese pessimism into comic book chunks. The effect is dazzling and got under people's skins. I don't like this film nearly as much as I do the great works by Suzuki's fellow rebels, Imamura and Oshima, but I love the look of it and the way its feeling is deeper than you think.

- Mark Cousins' original introduction, transcribed from the video below. (thanks to Kurt Aerden and Kaprisky for the video)

Brief thoughts

Note: Mark Cousins refers to a "an artist called Takia Kimura" in the above intro, but he means art director/co-writer and frequent Suzuki collaborator, Takeo Kimura (thanks to Kaprisky), who (along with six assistant directors) was part of the writing group that formed around Suzuki in the mid-'60s, the pen name of which was Hachiro Guryu ("Group of Eight"). I'm a little skeptical about the commonly accepted story that this film was banned because it was just too "out there" for the old guard. Here is an interesting essay from the Criterion edition of the film, which can be read on their site:

Legal wheels grind slowly in Japan, and Suzuki didn’t win his action until 1971. Several interesting insights into Nikkatsu’s boardroom emerged during the hearings. One was that Branded to Kill had been made at very short notice to fill a gap in Nikkatsu’s release schedule caused by the cancellation of another film. Suzuki had got together with his friends in the Guryu Hachiro group to work up a hasty screenplay and help the company out of a hole. It also became public that Hori and the Nikkatsu board had been covering up huge losses for years, and that the decision to fire Suzuki was intended to make him a scapegoat for financial failure—and to serve as a caution to other directors under Nikkatsu contract. Less than one year after the court ruling in Suzuki’s favor, Nikkatsu (by then under a new president) publicly reinvented itself as a producer of soft-core sex films. Of course, Nikkatsu wasn’t the only film company suffering losses; the entire Japanese film industry was in trouble in the late 1960s, as television won the mass audience. All of the major companies—even Shochiku—experimented with hyped-up sex and violence in their scramble to give audiences something they couldn’t get on television, but Nikkatsu was the only one that was effectively bankrupt.

As ever, it seems, film studios were usually motivated by avarice and incompetence rather than political or artistic impulses. There are several pieces by Tony Rayns on the film and others on the CineFiles database The visual invention of the film is extremely impressive, but reading about the process by which Suzuki's films were constructed at this point - with significant input from Kimura and the cinematographers - I wondered how much the films could be said to be the work of Suzuki and how much was a collaborative effort. It's a little too academic for my taste and I'm not surprised that most of the film's champions were students, but it's undeniably a great film. The best bit for me was the scene where Goro assassinates the jewellery dealer and then escapes on an advertising balloon floating past the window outside. The soundtrack by Naozumi Yamamoto is also superb and has a real character of its own. Each time I heard it I was reminded of Cousins' comment about Leone and I thought how reminiscent it was of the tone of Morricone's scores for Leone.