Tokyo Drifter (1966)

Seijun Suzuki had a lucrative career going making inexpensive crime thrillers for Nikkatsu but his movies gradually became weirder and more stylistically extravagant. Things came to a head with Branded To Kill in 1967 but you can already see signs of his desire to break away from the standard crime movie formula in Tokyo Drifter in 1966.

Tetsu (Tetsuya Watari) is a heavy for a yakuza gang but when his boss Kurata decides to go straight and disband the gang Tetsu decides to go straight as well.

It’s not going to be so easy. Otsuka, a rival yakuza from Karuta’s past, wants to take over Kurata’s legitimate businesses. If it’s going to be difficult for Kurata to go straight then it will be just as hard for Tetsu. His loyalty to Kurata is absolute.

Otsuka comes up with an elaborate plan to force Kurata’s hand. During the execution of the plan there are two murders, and either Kurata or Tetsu might be manoeuvred into taking the rap for one or both murders.

Tetsu decides it would be better for everyone if he wasn’t around any more. So he leaves and becomes a drifter. Like the Tokyo Drifter in the song that his girlfriend Chiharu (Chieko Matsubara) sings.

Of course his yakuza past keeps catching up with him, and Otsuka is still out to get him. A killer named Tatsu the Viper is stalking him.

In the course of these adventures and misadventures he encounters Kenji (Hideaki Nitani). Kenji saves Tetsu’s life. Kenji is also a drifter. A yakuza who becomes a drifter is a bit like a masterless samurai. He no longer has a sense of belonging. There is however a difference between the two men. Kenji had been Otsuka’s man but has abandoned his loyalty to his old yakuza boss. This deeply upsets Tetsu. Tetsu would never give up his loyalty to Karuta. A yakuza just doesn’t do such things. So two men who should become friends become at best uneasy allies.

Otsuka goes on plotting and eventually there must of course be a showdown.

We have to confront the question of genre. A lot of the Japanese crime movies made from the late 40s to the mid 60s get labelled as film noir and many do indeed have strong affinities to film noir. That’s especially true of Nikkatsu’s late 50s/early 60s offerings and several of Seijun Suzuki’s movies are often described as film noir. It’s obvious that Suzuki was heavily influenced by American crime movies of the 40s. The basic plot outline of Tokyo Drifter could come from a 40s American crime thriller. It does however have quite a few distinctively Japanese features. This is very much a movie about loyalty and betrayal, but it’s loyalty in a sense that owes more to the code of the samurai than to anything that you’d find in an American gangster movie. Tetsu is not Karuta’s loyal employee. They have a kind of father-son relationship but also the kind of relationship that would have existed between a samurai and his lord.

Stylistically this is a movie with its own unique flavour. It’s shot in colour, and vibrant colour. There’s a lot of film noir atmosphere but there’s a very strong 1960s vibe. In fact there’s a blending of 40s and 60s style. The nightclub in which Chiharu sings looks very 1960s but she doesn’t sing pop songs. She sings the kinds of songs that a chanteuse in a 1940s Hollywood movie would sing.

I thought initially that Tetsuya Watari was a bit too young to play Tetsu. I’d have been inclined to go for an actor who looked a bit more world-weary. He was forced on Suzuki by the studio and was apparently quite a problem, being too nervous and inexperienced to remember his lines. In a normal movie his performance might have been a disaster but in this movie his non-acting acting works. In a Suzuki movie clothes make the man. Literally. Suzuki thought the key to characterisation was to choose the right costume for the character. If the costume was right nothing else really mattered.

There are also touches of the surrealism that was a Suzuki trademark. This is not the real world. This is not Tokyo in 1966. This is a world created by Seijun Suzuki. The rules are different. It’s a totally artificial world that doesn’t even try to resemble the real world.

There’s a wonderful scene set in a western saloon (it’s a bar in Tokyo in the style of a wild West saloon), with an all-in brawl just like in a western. It’s played for comedic effect, it’s totally crazy and it comes out of nowhere but it works.

When you watch the two interviews with the director included on the Criterion DVD you start to get a handle on what it is that makes Tokyo Drifter so appealing. Suzuki wasn’t trying to be arty. He had no artistic pretensions at all. He was simply trying to be non-boring and fun. He hated the idea of shooting any scene in a conventional way. It was much more fun to do it in a totally unconventional and original idea. The movie looks like it was made as an art film, in a very Pop Art way, but this was entirely accidental. It was simply a product of Suzuki’s determination to keep trying something different. This is a kind of naïve art. Unlike too many self-consciously arty films it is never boring. You never know what Suzuki will throw at you next.

There are so many excellent visual set-pieces. The climactic shoot-out is the wildest most outrageous shoot-out you’ve ever seen.

Suzuki didn’t agonise too much over continuity. The important thing was to avoid being boring. He was much more interested in the production design than in the plot. And the production design in this case is stunning and outlandish.

Predictably Nikkatsu hated the movie. After two more films they fired him. Branded To Kill, usually regarded as his masterpiece, was the last straw for Nikkatsu.

Tokyo Drifter is a wild ride but I can promise you that while you might be mystified you will not be bored. Very highly recommended.

Cruel Gun Story (1964)

Cruel Gun Story (Kenjû zankoku monogatari) is a 1964 Nikkatsu crime thriller that proves to be a fine illustration of the best and the worst characteristics of Japanese film noir.

Togawa (Jô Shishido) gets early release from prison, arranged for him by a mobster who wants his services for a big heist he is planning. A very big heist. The plan is to steal the takings from the Japanese Derby from an armoured car. The armoured car will be ambushed soon after leaving the racetrack. Togawa finds himself working with a motley assortment of hoodlums on this job. The tensions between the gang members are running high even before the job is pulled and so it’s no surprise that it all goes horribly wrong.

The plan was clever enough and the gang steals not just the money but the whole armoured car, including the driver and the guards.

The double-crosses start almost immediately and they steadily escalate. Everyone is double-crossing everyone else only to be double-crossed themselves.

There are so many betrayals that trying to describe the plot would be futile. The body count is enormous with endless gun battles interspersed with kidnappings and explosions.

Togawa is the classic doomed noir protagonist. We’re supposed to regard him as the hero and in order to enlist the audience’s sympathies we get a nauseatingly maudlin and self-pitying backstory. Togawa isn’t really a bad man. He was driven to violence when his sister was crippled in a traffic accident. Now Togawa wants money, lots of it, to pay for an operation so his sister will be able to walk again. The sentimentality is laid on by the truckload.

The sentimentality is bad enough but it’s combined with an extraordinary degree of adolescent moral nihilism. Everybody is corrupt. And of course it’s all the fault of the Americans. Tedious knee-jerk anti-Americanism is one of the more repulsive features of 1960s and 1970s Japanese cinema. It’s almost always combined with an equally irritating tendency to indulge in self-loathing. Any sane person would have regarded the postwar Japanese economic miracle as a very good thing indeed, but of course intellectuals and creative artists regarded it as a very bad thing. Who wants security, stability, freedom and prosperity?

The self-pitying hero-as-victim is something you tend to expect in film noir but this movie gives us not just one but a whole swag of self-pitying victims.

This movie obviously has some very irritating vices but fortunately it also has some impressive virtues. The content might be dubious but the style is breathtaking. Director Takumi Furukawa pulls off one stunning visual set-piece after another. There are a lot of action scenes and they’re superbly staged. The feel is very film noir. The movie was shot in black-and-white and in Nikkatsu’s version of Cinemascope and Saburo Isayama’s cinematography is moody and magnificent.

And of course this movie has iconic Japanese noir star Jô Shishido. He manages to negotiate his way through the sentimental sludge and no matter how contemptible Togawa might be his performance is still watchable. When it comes to cinematic cool they don’t come much cooler than Jô Shishido.

The movie’s biggest single flaw is that the characters are almost all detestable. It’s hard to think of a single character with a single redeeming quality.

The tensions between the characters fail to generate much interest because we already know that everyone is going to be double-crossed and it all becomes rather predictable. Both the betrayals and the violence lack impact because they’re so absurdly overdone.

This is one of the five movies in Criterion’s Eclipse Series Nikkatsu Noir DVD boxed set. The transfer is superlative. The paucity of extras is a disappointment. All we get are some cliché liner notes that spin us a lot of silly film school claptrap.

Assuming that you can tolerate its flaws, which are both numerous and severe, you might find Cruel Gun Story to be worth watching as an exercise in pure cinematic style.

A Colt Is My Passport (1967)

A Colt Is My Passport (Koruto wa ore no pasupoto) is one of five films included in the Criterion Eclipse Nikkatsu Noir DVD boxed set. While the other four films are excellent this one is the standout.

Jô Shishido is hitman Kamimura. He is employed by a yakuza boss to kill a rival gang boss. The job goes smoothly but things start to go badly wrong afterwards. Arrangements had been made to fly Kamimura and his partner Shun (Jerry Fujio) out of the country but they’re cancelled at the last minute. What Kamimura and Shun don’t know is that they’re about to be rather spectacularly double-crossed.

Kamimura and Shun hide out in a motel, but the net is closing around them. Every time it seems like they’re about to escape something goes wrong and the double-cross against them becomes more sinister. It all culminates in an extraordinary visual tour-de-force of an ending.

The first thing you will notice about this movie is that the music is pure spaghetti western. As the story unfolds the spaghetti western influence becomes more and more obvious - in fact this movie could have been remade as a spaghetti western with virtually no changes to either the plot or the characters.

There is of course a film noir influence as well although the movie that approaches this one most closely in feel is Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le samouraï which was released in the same year, 1967. Jô Shishido mines the same ice-cold killer territory that Alain Delon explored in Melville’s film and he manages to be almost as cool as Delon (which is no mean achievement).

This is very much a buddy movie with the friendship between hitman Kamimura and his sidekick Shun being the emotional core of the story. Suggestions that have been made of a homoerotic element in this relationship must be dismissed as nonsense. Anyone with any experience of Japanese cinema knows that honour and loyalty are what always drives the hero (or heroine in the case of some of the best pinky violence movies of the 70s). Any Japanese movie made in 1967 is going to be influenced by both Japanese samurai movies and American westerns, and again honour and loyalty are the keys.

Jô Shishido is very much the star but Jerry Fujio gives him some excellent support, with Chitose Kobayashi also giving a fine performance as Mina, the love interest for the hero. Mina is a complex character, always expecting betrayal and always seeking to escape although she has no idea where to escape to.

Director Takashi Nomura and his cinematographer Shigeyoshi Mine (who had photographed Seijun Suzuki’s extraordinary and brilliant Tokyo Drifter a year earlier) don’t go for an obvious film noir look, despite shooting the film in black-and-white. They don’t go overboard with the shadows. Most scenes are brightly lit and there’s an openness combined with a brooding quality to the outdoor scenes that reinforces the western feel. Where Takashi Nomura really scores is in the flamboyant and dynamic directing of the action scenes. The ending takes place in a bleak wasteland that could be a landfill, or the end of the world, or the desert setting for the climax of a spaghetti western. I’m not going to spoil it in any way, but it’s insane and magnificent.

Nikkatsu had turned to producing mukokuseki akushun (“borderless action”) movies in the late 50s in an attempt to give the studio youth appeal. By 1967 the cycle was almost played out. After the stylistic excesses of movies like Seijun Suzuki’s Branded To Kill and Tokyo Drifter, and indeed A Colt Is My Passport, there was probably nowhere left for the genre to go.

The DVD is superb with the picture quality being satisfyingly crisp. The lack of extras is disappointing.

A Colt Is My Passport is one of the most stylish and exciting crime movies you’re ever going to see. An absolute must-see.

Take Aim at the Police Van (1960)

Most accounts I’ve read of Seijun Suzuki's career suggest that after making a series of very successful crime thrillers for Nikkatsu he fell out of favour when he developed his own idiosyncratic, outrageous and somewhat surreal personal style in movies like Tokyo Drifter (1966) and Branded to Kill (1967). 

Which may be so, but that personal style (in a less developed form) is already clearly present as early as 1960 in Take Aim at the Police Van.

Take Aim at the Police Van is immediately recognisable as a Seijun Suzuki film. It’s not as visually extravagant as his later movies but it is visually very imaginative and provocative. And very very stylish.

As in most Seijun Suzuki films the plot is less important than the style, but then it’s probably true of most film noir (and Suzuki is certainly widely regarded as an exponent of the Japanese brand of film noir) that plotting is less important than style and mood.

The movie’s bravura opening sequence sees a prison van being ambushed by a sharpshooter, with two prisoners being shot dead. It’s something of a puzzle for the police since it appeared to be an execution rather than an attempted prison break.

It’s a puzzle that prison guard Daijiro Tamon (Michitaro Mizushima) is determined to solve. He was in charge of the prison van and was suspended for six months as a result of the attack. Not that he was suspected of any involvement, but the safety of the prisoners was his responsibility, hence the suspension. What it means is that he now has time for his own investigation.

This investigation leads him to a series of women all of whom have some connection with the prisoners in the prison van at the time of the attack. The women include Yuko Hamashima (Misako Watanabe), who runs the Hamaju Agency. They provide female entertainers. The entertainment includes private strip shows in spa resorts. Yuko also happens to be an expert archer, a act that assumes some interest when one of the girls Tamon wants to talk to is killed by an arrow! This is definitely a Seijun Suzuki movie.

Yuko will play the femme fatale role although she’s really a more ambiguous character than the usual femme fatale. Tamon is hardly a typical noir hero however. He’s a straightforward hero, albeit an unconventional one, being middle-aged and a less than obvious choice as an action hero. The attraction between Tamon and Yuki soon becomes obvious although it’s perhaps one of the less believable elements in this movie, Tamon being a sympathetic but far from romantic hero. Mizushima and Watanabe both give fine performances though.

The plot hinges on the identity of a man known only as Akiba who heads a prostitution racket. Akiba remains in the shadows while his goons do his dirty work for him, the goons including the slightly edgy marksman and other assorted yakuza thugs.

There are plenty of action set-pieces, handled with flair and a touch of black humour. There are a couple of dream sequences that offer a glimpse of the more outrageous and delirious approach that would characterise the director’s mid-60s offerings. The movie was shot in a 2.45:1 aspect ratio that Suzuki utilises with considerable skill. Suzuki makes equally skillful use of locations, especially for the lengthy climactic sequence in the railway yards.

This is a stylish if not overly noirish crime thriller with a dash of sleaze, marked by Suzuki’s characteristic visual flair. Thoroughly enjoyable and highly recommended.

This is part of the Nikkatsu Noir DVD boxed set released by Criterion in their Eclipse “budget” series. It’s a terrific widescreen print but lacking in extras apart from the brief but reasonably interesting liner notes. Movies like this really would benefit from a commentary track given that many viewers probably know little or nothing about Japanese cinema in general and Japanese film noir in particular.

Rusty Knife (1958)

Rusty Knife is a Japanese film noir/crime thriller and is one of five movies presented in the Nikkatsu Noir boxed set by Criterion in their “budget” Eclipse series.

Chronologically this is the second movie in the set. All five movies represent a Japanese approach to film noir that combines plenty of classic noir elements with a uniquely Japanese flavour. This, and the fact that all were made by Nikkatsu Studios in the late 50s and early 60s, is what gives this collection of movies by a variety of directors its coherence.

Rusty Knife dates from 1958 and was directed by a man who went to become one of the studio’s most successful directors, Toshio Masuda.

A small Japanese industrial city is at the mercy of the gangster Katsumada. The police know all about his activities but no-one can be persuaded to testify against him. Then the police get a break. Five years earlier a city councillor, Nishida, committed suicide. Or so it appeared. In fact he was murdered. There were three witnesses, all criminals. They were all paid off.

Now one of the criminals, Shimabara (Jô Shishido, later to become Japanese noir’s most iconic star), has decided the huge money was not sufficient. He tries to blackmail Katsumada. He pays the price for his folly, but he was not a complete fool. He had given a letter to his girlfriend, to be delivered to the police in the event of his untimely demise. Not only does the letter reveal that Nishida’s death was murder, it also names the two other witnesses.

These two witnesses, Terada and Tachibana (Yûjirô Ishihara), now work in Tachibara’s bar. These two former yakuza have now gone straight. Five years earlier another event occurred. Tachibara’s girlfriend was raped and subsequently killed herself. Tachibara killed the rapist and served five years in prison. He is a hot-tempered but fundamentally decent man. He wants no more violence in his life, he wants no more to do with crime. Nut neither the police nor Katsumada are likely to leave him in peace.

He is a typical noir hero, an essentially good man who cannot escape his past or his one tragic violent act. Also swept into this drama is Nichida’s daughter Keiko (Mie Kitahara), now a documentary film-maker crusading against violent crime. She and Tachibana are friends but now they will be drawn together in an unexpected way, and the various plot strands will coalesce.

Tachibana is a reluctant hero but there is one piece of evidence that will cause him to question the fatal events that occurred five years earlier and persuade him to take a stand.

There’s plenty of noirish atmosphere and like most Japanese movies it’s quite stylish but without the visual extravagance of a Seijun Suzuki movie. The truck fight sequence is impressive. Yûjirô Ishihara and Mie Kitahara are both excellent.

Budget-priced has of course a different meaning to Criterion than to us regular folks, this Nikkatsu Noir boxed set being merely overpriced rather than colossally overpriced. Picture quality is very good though. And the movies are so good that the set is an absolute must-buy.

Rusty Knife is very definitely worth a look. Highly recommended.

I Am Waiting (1957)

I Am Waiting (Ore wa matteru ze) is the earliest of the five movies in the Nikkatsu Noir boxed set, and it ticks enough of the noir boxes to satisfy most noir enthusiasts.

Jôji Shimaki is a boxer who was banned from the ring after killing a man in a barroom brawl. Now he runs a bar that is a sort of refuge for outsiders and losers. His brother emigrated to Brazil a year earlier and Jôji has been waiting to hear from him so he can go and join him. Brazil is for Jôji a sort of magical talisman, a promised land where he can make a new start.



He meets Saeko. He’s a boxer who can’t box any more, she’s an opera singer whose voice has gone, reducing her to performing in sleazy dives. They’re both broken and they’re not unnaturally drawn together.

Saeko thinks she might have killed a man too, a man who was making unwelcome advances to her. Unfortunately she had become involved with some dubious characters and she has a night-club boss who is also a gangster after her for breaking her singing contract.



Jôji tries to keep Saeko out of of further trouble while at the same time pursuing an obsessive quest to find out why he hasn’t heard from his brother.

Stylistically this film is pure noir, and it has the right mood as well. Most of the characters who inhabit the world of Jôji’s bar are classic noir characters. They’re not bad people, but they’re lost and they can’t find their way back.



The movie benefits considerably from its two magnetic leads, Yûjirô Ishihara as Jôji and Mie Kitahara as Saeko. Mie Kitahara definitely has an iconic noir look. They would go on to co-star in many more films.

The mood owes as much to pre-war French film noir as to Hollywood noir, although without the extreme nihilism of the French variety. Nikkatsu was a studio trying to reinvent itself in the late 50s, trying (with considerable success) to tap into the growing youth market.



The DVD from Nikkatsu’s Eclipse series is reasonably impressive although it lacks extras. The movie is presented in its original 1.33: aspect ratio.

Stray Dog (1949)

Akira Kurosawa’s 1949 Stray Dog (Nora inu) is a crime film that is often seen as an example of Japanese film noir. It certainly has many affinities to film noir and Kurosawa was almost certainly influenced by American film noir but there are some crucial differences as we’ll see.

Murakami (Toshirô Mifune) is a rookie homicide detective. His inexperience causes him to fall victim to a pickpocket on a bus, and his gun is stolen. He assumes he will be dismissed from the force for such an egregious failure but his chief has no time for that kind of self-pity and tells Murakami to get on with his job.



Murakami becomes obsessed by the necessity of getting his gun back. The stolen gun will have fatal consequences and will also drive the plot. The gun is used in an armed robbery and Murakami is convinced that it’s only a matter if time before it’s used in a murder, and his sense of guilt takes him to the edge of self-destruction.

He is teamed with an older detective, Sato. This then becomes the classic cop movie combination of the wise old detective teaching the green youngster the ropes. The gun itself becomes merely a symbol, an example of the workings of fate but Kurosawa is mostly interested in how we respond to fate.



Murakami’s quest for his lost firearm will take him on a journey into the seedy depths of the world of petty crime, a world of casual violence and nihilism. His fate becomes entwined with that of the man who now has his gun, a man who seems set on destroying himself and others with a vicious disregard consequences.

Like American noirs Stray Dog deals with the difficult adjustment to the new post-war world. But Kurosawa has little sympathy for those who use the war as an alibi for failure and despair.



There are major differences compared to American noir (or French noir for that matter). The idea of wallowing in victimhood is explicitly rejected. Yusa and Murakami have both suffered from the blows of fate but the most important line of dialogue in the movie occurs when Murakami’s boss tells him that bad luck can be an opportunity or it can destroy you. What is crucial here is that it doesn’t have to destroy you. It only destroys you if you choose to allow that to happen.

The noir world of chaos and self-pity can be defeated. If Murakami chooses the path of duty, if he accepts that as a cop he has a job to do and gets on with it he will survive. Survival is a choice, a message you can’t imagine finding in an American or a French noir. Kurosawa’s movie is dark but there’s a fundamental optimism that is antithetical to the universe of film noir. Family and duty can bring salvation, another message you don’t normally associate with film noir.



While Murakami feels some sympathy for the criminal the movie in general presents criminals as rabid dogs who must be destroyed. The violent world of the criminal is not glamorous, it is a squalid and pathetic world of losers.

The very fact that Kurosawa takes elements of film noir and puts them to his own uses makes this a particularly interesting film. This is one of Kurosawa’s less known movies but it’s arguably one of his best. Recommended.