Gate of Flesh (1964)

The 1960s and '70s were a fertile period for genre cinema in Japan: they impress me in much the same way as Hong Kong film of the eighties and nineties do with their combination of freewheeling creativity, style, and exploitation values, and probably no other filmmaker of the period did it as distinctively as Seijun Suzuki. He began making films at the Nikkatsu studios in the fifties but hit his full stride in the early to mid-sixties. They seem weird and arty today, with lots of bright color, weird visual flourishes and a cocktail-lounge cool, but art was the last thing on Suzuki's mind when he made them. To this day Suzuki maintains that he was not motivated by visual aesthetics or symbolism, or even a particular passion for film: it was just his job. He was a B-movie director, he will say, who worked on projects assigned by the studio, projects destined for the second-feature slot on the triple-feature programs which were standard in Japanese moviehouses at the time. Nevertheless, no one made pictures quite like Suzuki, and his influence is seen all over in Japanese exploitation film.

Gate of Flesh (Nikutai no mon, 1964) was my introduction to Suzuki's work, a melodrama set in postwar Tokyo during the early months of the Allied occupation, a time when devastation and poverty are everywhere and where survival is the main preoccupation. Maya (Yumiko Nogawa), a girl who has come from the countryside looking for work, joins a group of prostitutes: in exchange for their protection, she must abide by their code of conduct, rule number one being never to sleep with a man for free. Girls who break this rule are severely and brutally punished before being turned out to fend for themselves. Into this tight-knit group comes Shin (Jo Shishido), ex-soldier and petty criminal, wounded and on the run from the Allied MPs after stabbing a GI, and his guts and charisma prove attractive to all the girls, provoking infatuation and then dissension: when Maya finally sleeps with Shin, the others turn on them both, drumming Maya out of the group and betraying Shin to the local yakuza.

Gate of Flesh was based on a novel by Tajiro Tamura which was originally filmed in 1949 and has been filmed again twice since Suzuki's version. This was intended as a vehicle for Jo Shishido, a star who was a major box-office draw and one of the more out-there of Nikkatsu's tough-guy leads, and who worked with Suzuki on a number of films and always seemed to have a handle on what Suzuki was doing. Charismatic and tough in a very Japanese way (it's been my observation that just about every culture seems to have its own distinctive flavor of tough guy, at least as far as film is concerned), Shishido had a distinctive face (thanks in large part to cosmetic surgery early in his film career), a sonorous baritone and a crazy fire in his eyes that made him ideal for heavies and especially anti-heroes. As good as he is in this film, it is Nogawa who shines in this torrid and often bitter film as her character is whipped through all sorts of extreme emotions and appears to grow up before the viewer's eyes from a hungry, frightened and childlike newcomer to a coy and flirty teenager to the heartbreak and suffering of adulthood. Misako Tominaga is also noteworthy as an older member of the group who does not share the girls' dress, aggressive "American" manners, or their simplistic view of men and sex as a meal ticket.

The strongly drawn characters make for torrid drama, but Gate of Flesh is also memorable for its expressionistic visuals, its bitter and angry view of Japan's defeat in the war, and its pioneering venture into "pink" or softcore sexual content. Much of the Suzuki look has to do with longtime collaborator Takeo Kimura, who did production design for many of Suzuki's films, and much of it also has to do with the low budgets Suzuki had for his projects and the ways Suzuki and Kimura devised to get the most out of those budgets. Postwar rebuilding had eliminated most if not all traces of the devastation of the war, leaving no suitable locations, so a set was built from a warehouseful of scrap lumber being stored on Nikkatsu's lot, using labor that was recorded as routine cleaning and maintenance. Much has been made of the "symbolic" meaning of the color coordinated outfits, a color for each character, that Maya and her fellow hookers wear, but the main purpose of single colors was simply to distinguish them from the other hookers in the neighborhood, and it led to my favorite sequence when each of the girls shares her private thoughts about Shin in settings that match their outfits and have almost no continuity with the rest of their surroundings. Also, superimposition is used to show characters' points of view and reactions, as when a closeup of Nogawa's face, both anguished and ecstatic, is superimposed over Tominaga's punishment for her liaison with a mild-mannered schoolteacher.

Gate of Flesh's view of the aftermath of the war from the perspective of the Japanese is also interesting because it differs so much from the way we especially in the US have been taught about the Occupation. In 1964, anyone old enough to attend this film would probably have had some vivid memories of the period: its hardship and poverty, and the humiliation of living under the boot of foreigners. Suzuki himself had been called up towards the end of the war, and his own wartime memories were of retreating from the Phillippines and being shipwrecked after American fighters bombed his ship, and he has recalled candidly that his own view of the Americans at the time he made Gate of Flesh was less than positive for just this reason, and the sadness, bitterness, and anger of defeat hangs over the film like a cloud. Tominaga's character is a widow who lost her husband in the war, and Maya's brother was lost in Borneo, and Shin is a constant reminder to them both. For his part, Shin is cynical about politics, as are all the characters; they have the point of view of people whose lives have been up-ended by war, and who have little time for arguing over politics. The most moving passage of the movie on the topic of the war is when Shin and the girls get drunk together and Shin, his head shrouded by a rising sun flag covered with the names of his comrades, sings a soldier's song which fades into quiet weeping, and this flag figures in the end of the film, floating in the gutter, as the camera moves up and takes a long shot of the city and the Stars and Stripes flying in the distance.

Finally, Gate of Flesh is notable as a harbinger of what would eventually become a staple of Japanese genre film: sex. While small indie producers and distributors were already making softcore adult films, Gate of Flesh was reportedly the first major-studio film to go in the adult softcore direction with its nudity and disturbingly sadistic punishment scenes, scenes that even today will not sit well with many viewers, especially in the West. Japanese genre cinema would go further in the ensuing decades, and here we see the beginnings of what would become a major trend: nudity and themes of obsession, perversion and misogyny, which is hard to justify on moral or social grounds but also puts the "sex-obsessed" Western media in some perspective.