Climbing Mt. Suzuki
Section Two

Already his tenth film, but the earliest still seen, Underworld Beauty (Ankokugai no Bijo, 1958) immediately reveals the director’s instinctive identification with the bottom rungs of the social ladder—ex-cons, criminals, and smalltime artisans. This modest action thriller also gives an early glimpse of how Suzuki’s stylistic ambition informs a relatively routine crime plot as he stirs up excitement with imaginative locations, economical visual effects, and extreme behavior of his characters.

Released from prison, the hero (with slick black hair like George Raft at Warner Brothers) retrieves a cache of diamonds hidden in a sewer, then conceals them again, this time in the clay breast of a mannequin. When one of his young helpers leaps to his death from a rooftop, the boy’s singularly unrefined sister decides to join the ex-con to fight the gang responsible. Picking up an American sailor before the funeral, she is not above getting raucously drunk and then pouring whiskey into her brother’s coffin.

A stuffed crocodile on the wall presides over a Turkish bath where much of the action takes place. Among the high-1950s Tiki furnishings, the primary peril for the busty heroine is possibly being steamed to death in her lingerie. However, the men who are drawn to her by desire are condemned to frustration: when she presses her wet body against a window, a gangster can only lasciviously stroke the steamed-up glass barrier that keeps them apart.

Moving from rooftop to sewer, from a mannequin factory to a basement coal bin, the action features a masochist who gets beaten into a state alternating between whimpering and hysteria, and then culminates in a delirious final shootout-cum-electrocution. A nightclub—a huge tri-level set that could pass as the lobby in Grand Hotel—hosts wild jitterbug parties where yakuza villains hang out with cross-dressers. It’s here that the hero shoots out one light after another, each shattered bulb rendering the image darker and darker.

It’s never dull visually, or aurally either, thanks to a very amusing score that incorporates Hawaiian steel guitar, sci-fi-like theremin themes, dramatic mambo music, what sounds like a Hanns Eisler foxtrot, employing 1950s xylophone, bluesy saxophones, and possibly a kazoo. Still, the film does ultimately succumb to routine motivation and sketchy characterization, while Suzuki lets continuity skips and unmatched shots stand. Strict narrative logic is also ignored when an evil artist locks the heroine in a room, yet she soon reappears with no explanation of how she escaped.

Sixteen films later, Youth of the Beast (Yaju no Seishun) drew attention in 1963 for introducing the laconic and intense Jo Shishido as the existentially tortured hit man, modeled on Jean-Pierre Melville’s similar hypercool figures in Bob le Flambeur (1955) and Le Doulos (1962). Though Shishido made only three films with Suzuki, his impact was such that they are forever connected in the popular mind. As a disgraced cop seeking to avenge the sordid death of his mentor, he interacts with a dizzying array of mobsters, rival criminals, and counter-gangsters in pachinko parlors and call-girl clubs.

Suzuki’s signature concentration on bodily insult leads to razorblade fights, a creative use of flaming hair spray, an interlude of impromptu surgery, then wedges a knife up one of Shishido’s fingernails, and finally contrives to hang him upside down, helplessly swinging from the chandelier of a smoldering burnt-out house. Elsewhere, a drug addict, dragging herself across the floor to beg for a fix, claws open the upholstery of a chair, while the most striking sequence depicts a sadist frenziedly whipping a woman while outside an expressionist storm rages with clouds of orange dust.

Suzuki himself appears as one of the mobsters, another is openly identified as gay (yet not caricatured, except for his pink limousine), yet another tenderly cradles his fluffy cat like a James Bond villain, and a fan dancer swirls pink feathers about, while figures pass back and forth laterally across the expanse of the widescreen, moving in different directions and on multiple planes of action.

“After the war, Tokyo became a city of beasts”, says the beginning of Gate of Flesh (Nikutai no Mon, 1964). This nightmare vision of the American Occupation period is continuously surprising, set half outside in the tumult of the open market, where crime and assault await around every corner, and half inside a cavernous interior, a microcosm of entrapment where sexual tensions cannot be contained.

The four women at the center of Gate of Flesh channel the postwar exuberance of survivors into aggressive prostitution. How else can they survive the peace, with its new economic order? Without families to serve as backup, they are left to their own devices, sisters of Mizoguchi’s bickering brothel-workers in Street of Shame. It’s a dog-eat-dog world of people locked into their own ambitions and desires, a world of the powerless reaching for an edge. Like Mizoguchi following the trials and struggles of females, Suzuki gives compassionate attention to his women, but withholds sentimental identification, implying rather than analyzing the cycle of exploitation

Sex is business but desire also surfaces, and it’s a sweaty thing here. Prewar illusions of romantic love have given way to frank lusts, enclosed and played out in an urban cavern of catwalks and staircases, all leading downward. In this subterranean site, already handily equipped for an impromptu flogging, the film’s quartet of freelance hookers obsess on a muscled street thug (Jo Shishido again playing De Niro to Suzuki’s Scorsese). Here the arena is capitalist commerce (no wonder there are no adoring star close-ups). In the black market everything and everyone is for sale.

Above ground, the camera tracks through crowds in the bustling open markets, the venues of the desperate postwar economy. Suzuki’s people are completely outside the comfort zone of the bourgeoisie: a carnival of brawling, lust-driven, amoral proletarians, all crowding and jostling together like social molecules. It’s a dangerous world where anything can happen, from arrest and robbery to kidnapping and stabbing. In films like Stray Dog (Nora Inu, 1949), Kurosawa depicted transgressive behavior in the urban underworld, but even he never showed thugs energetically cheating, mugging, and even stabbing clueless American GIs, although Imamura’s Pigs and Battleships (Buta to Gunkan, 1961) would cross-fertilize Yankee sailors, local prostitutes, and low-life gangsters.

Suzuki’s insolent humor allows a scene where a young Japanese man in the background starts to eat “American stew” and then quizzically fishes a condom out of his soup bowl. The director lets this pass so quickly, as a momentary foregrounding of action, that it seems like information scanned in our peripheral vision. Paradoxically, this only forces us to reflect on it, if only to reconcile the moment’s place in the portrait of society he is painting. 

With its ensemble of rowdy hookers, all presented without a shred of victimhood, Gate of Flesh flirts with the “pinku-eiga” subgenre, but working up such hypnotic intensity that flogging and crucifixion begin to seem inevitable rather than absurdly extreme responses to the situation. Here there are no abstractions like evil, no dreams, only ruthless reality determined by instinctual drives, including bare survival.

Suzuki’s blackest vision, the most dramatic and most emotionally direct, comes in Story of a Prostitute (Shunpu-den, 1965). Appropriately, the film seems to occur during an endless dusk, lit with no direct sunlight, and even the expansive widescreen compositions seem restricting. Tackling the scandal of the “comfort women” forced to service the sexual needs of the Imperial Japanese army in 1930s Manchuria, Suzuki reliably chooses the most controversial possible stance with a heroine who actually welcomes the job. Instead of painting her as an abused victim, he illustrates her response to betrayal by a lover (she bites his tongue in revenge). She reasons that  “I want to meet many different men”, and finding herself amidst an entire thousand-man battalion in a brutal existence on a northern Chinese desert outpost, she certainly achieves her wish.

Unlike the nymphomaniac of male fantasy that might be expected in an exploitation film, Suzuki’s heroine is a creature of single-minded focus. When one officer explains the brothel’s function by saying, “This is a soldier’s washing place. They wash their minds and bodies”, she represents all the women when she asks, “Where is our washing place?” Nevertheless, she cannot resist fixating on another singularly inappropriate man, a walking time-bomb of repressions and misdirected slavery to official conceptions of duty. He is unworthy of her devotion, and she endures romantic torment, but who can judge the validity of another’s obsession?

Suzuki’s own voice seems to speak in another character, a practical renegade, a soldier who tries to fulfill the military duties assigned to him, yet who finally deserts in disgust and joins the Chinese enemy. Himself a draftee into the Japanese army in 1943, at the very height of World War 2, Suzuki was shipwrecked and adrift for days in the seas around the Philippines, with ample time to reflect on how repressed male appetites link with the military mind, whether controlled by fascist machismo or dominated by hopeless idealism.

With the windswept desolation of the setting eloquently captured in the somberly handsome black-and-white ‘Scope compositions, Suzuki seems inspired to visual invention. He manipulates fantasy slow-motion, alters lighting to express emotional shifts, devises phosphorus explosions and flaming paper lanterns, and adds shock cuts and unexpected changes in scale of performance (ranging from compacted silence to primal scream), making this one of his boldest and most compelling films.

Tattooed Life (Irezumi Ichidai, 1965), a widescreen and resplendently colored adventure set at the turn of the century, plays out in golden-leafed landscapes (like The Naked Spur). Taking a yakuza plot of two brothers on the run in the countryside, Suzuki treats it like John Ford might, with the outdoor brawling of The Quiet Man and a community of broadly painted characters, though Suzuki’s collection of cheats, grifters, crackpots, and blowhards seems a much more transgressive bunch than Ford’s. After the yakuza kills a rival gang boss, his own gang turns against him, but his brother, a sensitive artist, saves him from assassination. Both flee to a frontier-style mining town to escape the triad of dangers— the old gang, the rival gang, and the police. In this less inhibited community, an aggressive village girl courts the yakuza brother, telling him “Take off your clothes. We’re taking bets on who could see you first without your clothes.” The artist, meanwhile, ends in tragedy, besotted with the mine-owner’s cautious but neglected wife (“I want to capture your beauty. Please let me see your body. Just once is enough.”).

Along with some red herrings (never-explained shots of a mysterious pair of red shoes) and a street brawl intercut with inexplicable fireworks, Suzuki produces his most innovative series of images yet: in lightning-fast succession, a gunshot comes through a window, a mountainside collapses, a wave dashes on the seashore, and a prostitute looks in the mirror. Blood spreads in water, and when the artist is hit mortally across the face, a red light sweeps across the widescreen, then cuts to a storm raging in red. For the final yakuza combat, as the lights go down, a lateral track along a row of screens yields to bold geometric compositions, with figures silhouetted first in yellow, then blue, as the camera looks up through a glass floor for the fighting to begin (some of this is quoted in the House of Blue Leaves sequence in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill, Volume I).

Adding musical numbers to the customary tropes of the hit man narrative, Tokyo Drifter (Tokyo Nagaremono, 1966) keeps circling back to its abstract nightclub set, when it’s not mocking its mobsters’ efforts to reform in money-lending and real estate (“We’re not a bunch of gangsters now”). (10) After a shootout in a paper house with swords and guns, Suzuki stages a classic all-out fistfight, a melée inexplicably set in a wild west saloon, involving black American sailors and a redheaded dancehall girl fluttering pink feather fans. Transparently striving to evoke the classic Hollywood studio brawls directed by Tay Garnett (Seven Sinners, 1940) and John Ford (Donovan’s Reef, 1963), Suzuki revels in demolishing breakaway tables and chairs, in splintering balconies, and does not neglect the iconic moment when the heroes pause, share a laugh and a knowing look, then return to knocking heads.

With stylish resourcefulness, Suzuki affects horizontal wipes and deploys primary colors, from a prologue in monochrome (except for a red gun), to sets designed with gold walls and blood red backgrounds, the latter reflecting his recurrent image of blood diffusing in water. Nikkatsu Studios—invariably demonized for firing Suzuki after his surrealist flights of fancy in Branded to Kill—here seems, if anything, extraordinarily tolerant in accepting this hefty dose of rural horseplay in a crime thriller it doubtless intended to exploit urban excitement, all the more considering the director was a Tokyo-born native.

Kaneto Shindo, dedicated leftist writer and director of Onibaba (1964), devised the inventive script for the exhilarating and humorous Fighting Elegy (Kenka Erejii, 1966), which looks back to Japan at the brink of martial law in 1935. Beneath the cheerful surface of knockabout farce, grim conclusions lurk in the portrait of young men as uneducated louts brimming with testosterone, and thus ripe for exploitation by fascist elements. Focusing on a youthful military cadet being groomed for the coming imperial conflict, the film specifically links the macho posturing of make-believe war games to the hormonal surges of the hero, who actually cries, “I don’t masturbate. I fight!”

While his military academy puts him through various forms of mortifying the flesh, such as walking on tacks and pointed sticks, Suzuki makes the youth’s attempts to hide his ever-present erection the film’s running joke. When he fixates on a girl who plays music for a church, the boy sits beside her for a piano lesson, but then must endure remarks like, “Your fingers are stiff as legs!” In the film’s most audacious joke, the frustrated teen is left alone with the piano, but we watch the dawning surprise in his face as he happily realizes that he can use his near permanent erection to bounce out a tune on the keys.

Women fare no better in traversing adolescence, for the virginal ingenue spurns his declaration of love and offer of marriage, opting instead to enter a nunnery, but finding time for a naively romantic and melodramatic farewell, where her fingers break through a paper screen to grasp his. In another typical Suzuki physical gag, the hero is expected to sit in a classroom where mischievous classmates (“red-assed monkeys!”) have removed the seat, so he simply pretends one is there and squats as if sitting.

Applying an exceptionally zoom-heavy style, Suzuki experiments with scale and direction, eccentrically cutting in sudden close-ups, having characters drop into the frame from above,  then selectively fills the frame with nature-centered effects as leaves rain down on the lovers at the exact right moment while a windstorm blows up clouds of dust. Eventually, after the hero wields a mace in a fight, after ears are bitten off and cheeks gouged, he is expelled and exiled to the provinces but ends up lashed to a wheel. The boyish zest with which Suzuki illustrates the stupidity of teen male chest-thumping markedly contrasts with the chilly cerebral detachment in the portrait of the military found in Kiju Yoshida’s Coup d’Etat (1973) also set in the late 1930s. (11)

When a butterfly alights on his rifle’s target-sight, the hit man hero of Branded To Kill (Koroshi no Rakuin, 1967) misses his shot, precipitating a chain of disasters that doom him to pursuit by various killers. It is chance entering the equation of his life, determining a new, unwelcome direction, much the way Branded To Kill  started a series of rippling consequences that halted the momentum of Suzuki’s career, beginning with the studio firing him for producing an “incomprehensible” film. It was certainly a thumb in the eye of action fans’ desire for simple coherence, though Donald Richie has speculated that conservative social forces also pressured the studio to distance itself from its own exploitation excesses.

As delirium takes over the plot, which could be described as pulp as if directed by an alien—or in the words of Scott Tobias, a “nonsensical story of dueling assassins, relayed in a fractured and willfully abstract cinematic grammar reminiscent of Jean-Luc Godard, [that] could freeze the brain…” (12)—the high-strung protagonist comes to fully embody the double-bind of existence: living and dying are equally impossible. While he deludedly aspires to the heights of the murder heirarchy, nightmarish poetic visuals mix with fetishistic details, such as the hero’s sensual enjoyment of the smell of boiled rice. With ellipses and jump cut fractures, the comedy of desire that drives toward death proceeds with sexual episodes more feverish than erotic, involving a nude Jo Shishido and a mysterious woman on a bed of butterflies in an empty apartment.

When the studio locked away prints of his films and refused to cooperate for a public retrospective, Suzuki dared to sue, ensuring that the scandal would stay alive but also effectively blackballing himself from the studio system (he ultimately won a settlement, although it took almost ten years).

Go Back to Section One or  Continue to Section Three.

Climbing Mt. Suzuki
Section One
Section Two
Section Three

The "nightmare vision" of Gate of Flesh.

A still from Fighting Elegy.