Branded To Kill (1967)

Elliptical, surreal, and absurdist, Branded To Kill is an assassin film stripped down to the essentials and twisted to near-unrecognizability as a genre film. Although the plot is actually very simple (when an assassin botches a job by accidentally killing a bystander rather than his target, he is marked for death by his employers), the film takes more than one viewing to really take in, and more viewings only underline the weirdness of the film that ended director Seijun Suzuki's career at Nikkatsu.

Goro Hanada, played by Nikkatsu action stalwart Jo Shishido, is known as "Number 3," his ranking among assassins. Just back from vacation with a new bride in tow, he is in need of money and takes on a job picking up a man (Koji Nanbara) and keeping him protected while delivering him to his destination. Having finished the job, his car breaks down and his is picked up by a mysterious, death-obsessed woman, Misako (Annu Mari), who returns with a proposition for the fatally botched hit. Now a marked man, he is nearly killed by his wife, who is having an affair with his superior Yabuhara (Isao Tamagawa), and then Misako, with whom Hanada has fallen in love, attempts to kill him, hoping to die herself in the process. He escapes, as he does from subsequent setups against his opposite numbers in the organization, until he finally faces the Phantom No. 1, the master assassin whom no one has seen.

Born in 1923, Seijun Suzuki first learned the ropes of cinema production at Shochiku in the late forties after taking an exam to become an assistant director, but by the early fifties, the long lines of ADs waithing to direct their first films at Shochiku left Suzuki with few prospects for career advancement with that company. Nikkatsu, to this day Japan's oldest existing film company, had lost its film production unit in the early forties in a government-mandated consolidation of the film industry, but in the early fifties the domestic market was favorable enough for Nikkatsu to seriously consider starting up film production again. The career tracks were faster and the pay was better, so Suzuki went over to Nikkatsu and by 1956, he was directing films.

Suzuki hit on his signature style in 1963 with Youth of the Beast: a mix of slick, colorful visuals and strange juxtapositions, frequently undercutting tragedy with black humor. But he always considered himself a director of program pictures; he was assigned his scripts and his stars, and his stated aims were always to make entertainment, not art. In pictures such as Gate Of Flesh (1964, which I discussed in these pages), Story of a Prostitute (1965), Tokyo Drifter and Fighting Elegy (both 1966), he beguiled the boredom of making by-the-numbers genre pictures by experimenting with color, framing and continuity. Suzuki had an intuitive grasp of the artificiality of narrative film without all the critical and aesthetic baggage that usually goes with such insights. He realized that as long as a film cut together, all sorts of liberties could be taken with continuity and logic and the results could still be interesting. Branded To Kill shows how many of the conventional rules of creating a coherent and realistic story-world could be ignored while still creating an entertaining film, and Suzuki accomplishes this without being programmatic or theoretical.

The violence in action films, compared with real life, is frequently fanciful: hundreds of rounds of ammunition are expended without hitting anyone, fist-fights don't result in broken noses, cheekbones, jaws or teeth (or knuckles, for that matter), swordfights in Japanese films result in aerosol sprays of blood; in the finale of Brian De Palma's Scarface, Al Pacino practically stops his own weight in hot lead, shooting all the while from an incredibly heavy-looking machine gun, before he finally succumbs. But Branded To Kill dares to be preposterous: Hanada kills one target by shooting him between railroad cars from a billboard advertising cigarette lighters, timing it so that he gets the fatal shot when the giant lighter's lid hinges up; he kills another target by shooting him in the head through the drain-pipe of a sink (a little piece of business Jim Jarmusch paid homage to in his film Ghost Dog), and escapes from another hit by floating away on a balloon. He stops one pistol shot with a belt buckle, and later a certainly fatal shot to the head with one of Misako's plastic hairbands.

Thus Suzuki deftly undercuts the pretensions of the action genre to serious dramatics, showing its relation to comedy and even farce, which is one thing that might have irritated Nikkatsu studio head Kyusaku Hori. But Suzuki doesn't stop there; one of Hanada's peculiar pleasures is the smell of cooked rice, a pleasure bordering on fetishism. Other motifs are rain, birds, and dead butterflies and moths, all associated with Misako, a death-obsessed woman who only yields to Hanada's advances when she is convinced that Hanada will kill her. A quasi-mythological creature (Hanada reaches for her in one scene and comes away with a handful of mashed-up moths), Misako is one of the creepiest and weirdest femmes fatales in cinema, using the presence of Annu Mari (whose exotic looks reportedly derive from mixed Japanese-Indian parentage) to great effect. There is also the mystery of the top-ranked killer, "Phantom Number One" who in the final act engages with Hanada in a cat-and-mouse game to end all cat-and-mouse games. After an initial siege which keeps Hanada holed up in his high-rise apartment, the two spend a day or so together in the apartment under an uneasy truce where they sleep, eat, and go to the bathroom together (a sequence which again turns the typical matching-of-wits of two killers into hilarious farce as Number One sleeps with his eyes open and urinates in his pants in order to keep his vigil on his target) until the finale in a boxing stadium. Although Number One is shown doing, well, number one, he is also a character who is apparently everywhere and sees everything.

Today, Branded To Kill is considered Seijun Suzuki's masterpiece and is often compared to the films of David Lynch, a filmmaker frequently accused of incomprehensibility on his own part, and who uses genre clichés to suit himself in an intuitive and subversive fashion. But in 1967, Suzuki was not an "artiste," but a contract director at a studio known for youth-oriented action films that was also struggling to stay afloat in a film market losing audiences in droves to television. Suzuki remarked in 1997 that by the time he did Gate of Flesh, he was being warned by the company just about every time he directed a new picture, and Branded To Kill was the last straw. He was fired by Nikkatsu, and Kyusaku Hori was quoted as saying that Suzuki's pictures did not make money, and did not make sense (though Nikkatsu did release the picture more or less as delivered to the studio). There was some outcry from students, intellectuals and film fans to Suzuki's dismissal, but to no avail. Suzuki responded by taking the studio to court for breach of contract, and eventually prevailed, though it took years and left him blacklisted by the industry for ten years.

When Suzuki returned to filmmaking, it was as an independent. He made Tale of Sorrow and Sadness in 1977, and the three films known as the "Taisho Trilogy" (1979-91): Zigeunerweisen, Heat Haze Theater and Yumeji. Suzuki's post-Nikkatsu films have been praised by critics, but are also, from what little I have been able to see or read of them, very different from his earlier periods, going much further in the direction of strainge imagery and narrative incoherence. In 2001 he revisited -- sort of -- his earlier film and made Pistol Opera, which returns -- again, sort of -- to the universe of Branded To Kill, in which the current Number 3 killer, played by Makiko Esumi (known to aficionados of more serious Japanese cinema from Hirokazu Kore'eda's Maborosi) must run the gauntlet of even more eccentric ranked assassins and meets a figure of death in the form of a cute and lovable little girl, as well as the old Number 3 -- now a retired and foolish old fart with an inflated sense of his own importance (but alas, not played by Jo Shishido). Bringing together his earlier visions of action cinema with his later work in nonsensical surreal art film, Pistol Opera makes his earlier film look almost normal. Viewers less interested than I am in the oeuvre of Seijun Suzuki, or who might have less of a penchant for the cascading torrents of surreal eye-candy, but who just like to watch beautiful, elegant and deadly East Asian femmes fatales on occasion (and I think that includes most of us) might still enjoy this picture for Esumi's performance.

I viewed Branded To Kill on the 1999 Criterion Collection DVD, which includes an interview with the director from that time, as well as a gallery of film posters from the collection of musician John Zorn, who also writes a short introduction to the film in the package's booklet. Those who are interested may also see Pistol Opera on DVD from Media Blasters' Tokyo Shock label.