I think one of the aspects of Youth of the Beast, the late genre- filmmaker master Seijun Suzuki's breakthrough, to take into account is that the story moves at a breathless pace. It's not that it is a story that is hard to follow - there are a good many characters to get to know, and after a black and white prologue (though at first I wasn't sure if it was a 'show-end-at-beginning' thing before going into full color for the majority of the film), we're put right into the physical space of this seemingly violent thug played by Jô Shishido (also named Jo here, good call) - it's that Suzuki, I think, is not so much interested in the story as in how a film MOVES. After all, it is a movie, right? Let's get that motion picture moving and vibrant and with energy. This is like a shotgun blast of 60's crime cinema that makes us feel a lot of things through a lot of intense visual choreography of the frame and what is in it (i.e. the old Scorsese axiom, cinema being a matter of what's in the frame and what's out, is paramount to Suzuki)/Youth of the Beast is not necessarily the most remarkable film as far as the story goes, and I'm sure there have been other Yakuza films and other gangster thrillers that have similarities; in a sense this isn't unlike Yojimbo/Fistful of Dollars/Red Harvest, though this time the main character has more of a motive than in that story. What's remarkable is the direction and how the tone is brutal and yet it's staged in some creative ways. There's times when you know a character is about to lunge at someone else, or that we get a piece of visual information like a knife being held under a table or somewhere else, before that character lunges and strikes. Other times it's more about how he'll pan the camera, like when the car full of the one crime family gets ambushed by another car (the music cue here is especially, terribly exhilarating, and the rest of the score has a wonderful jazz rhythm to it), and when we see those faces of the guys with their masks on and how he pushes in.Hell, even just how Suzuki uses color cinematography is impressive, all of those reds (the woman being whipped on the carpet), and how he'll have a backdrop like at the movie theater where the Yakuza do some of their business and a film screen projecting some movie or other is in the background of the frame. It feels like one of those moments where post-modernism is creeping in to Japanese cinema, and of course Suzuki would continue making such advances with Tokyo Drifter and particularly Branded to Kill. The movie is hard and rough, violent and the characters' motivations - well, I should say Jo, who is basically undercover playing one side and then another until it's an all-out war - are intense enough that the cast rises above what could be basic (even boiler-plate) B-movie pulp. I don't know how much input Suzuki had on the script, but he knows how to keep his actors moving and being interesting, whether it's Jo, who is the stand-out of the film, or his 'friend' who has a thing for the ladies. This is pulp Japanese cinematic excellence, all feeding off of a vision that is unique.

I watched my first Suzuki film, Gate of Flesh, many months ago and was fascinated, almost against my will, by its vivid mixture of cheesiness and style. I wasn't sure what it was that so intrigued me until I saw Youth of the Beast and realized that I was watching the director that Tarantino, Miike, Chan-wook Park all would like to be. He is the real deal, sui generis, derivative of no-one, who single handedly broke out of the doldrums of Nikkatsu Studio's b-unit yakuza film grind of the late 50s early 60s to turn the genre into a bona fide art form.The story is Yojimbo like, enemy gangs played off against each other by Jô Shishido, alpha-male extraordinaire, a maverick thug, possibly concealing extra bullets in his pudgy cheeks, who shows up with no apparent history but some serious baggage. But the story doesn't matter, it just a frame on which Suzuki hangs his surreal, over the top sensibility, using slyly inventive camera work, splashes of brilliant color, and astonishing set design to create a dark parody of the genre that displays the jazzy hyper kinetic chaos of post war Tokyo. The honorable gangster of the 50s is dead, summarily shot in the head by Suzuki's fiendish wit, and only fools and sadists remain.The set pieces sustain a freshness even 44 years later, and illuminate what more recent (and derivative) genre directors might be trying to achieve. A sadomasochistic interlude plays out in an impromptu backyard dust storm painted in brilliant yellows. The invasion of a yakuza foot soldier's apartment yields a ceiling festooned with inexplicable face-bumping model airplanes. A one way mirror in the office of a yakuza nightclub examines the oblivious decadence of its patrons as violence plays out in the foreground. The rival gang is unaccountably headquartered in a movie theater, where the characters lay plots in the projection room as giant heads peer in and disembodied voices provide an eerie and distracting backdrop. Suzuki compels us to watch snippets of various Japanese and American noirs while we are watching his movie, how clever. A series of quick cuts hop around amongst a collection of candy colored telephones returning in full circle to settle in a slickly kitsch ultra stylish hostess club, where the camera, set in an invisible wall, follows the action by gliding effortlessly up and down a string of booths.It begins to be difficult to avoid the idea that Suzuki might just be poking fun at our voyeuristic lust for cinematic sex and violence. As the film progresses I keep getting an image of a puckish little fellow giggling gleefully from behind the camera - his humor is so infectious and so playful that I can't help laughing at myself right along with him. His mise en scène is all about disengaged observation, and when he isn't cramming his audience inside walls or behind glass partitions so we can a better view of a nice bit of torture, he makes us stand with the rest of the rubberneckers, at a safe distance, where we can enjoy the fun of a vicious street brawl without getting blood on our shoes. The camera pulls back whenever physically possible, not to demonstrate the wood block beauty of classic Japanese cinema, but to show us ourselves, sitting in the dark watching, or leaning in to discover just who is speaking from all the way across a room. He creates the same sense of distance for his characters, scattering them them liberally throughout the room, so that conversations occur with cuts that must leap the distance from one side to the other, while backs are often turned, and profiles more common than full face shots. Like us, they are permitted no empathy, no connection, all puppets in Suzuki's absurd universe.But we're still nowhere near the bottom of Suzuki's bottomless bag of tricks. His situational comedy is as broad as his camera is sly, taking care to subvert every code and convention of the genre along the way. There is a lot of fun to be had here as well, including a particularly amusing heist scene involving ineptly applied stocking disguises, smoke bombs and undignified scrambling, or Jo's decidedly un-stoic petulance regarding some Yakuza style finger whittling.As for pacing, there is no fat to be trimmed, and no fades, no dissolves and sparse transitional scenes. Suzuki's cuts are disconcertingly abrupt, he flings out plot points with utter contempt, often allowing mere seconds for us to absorb information. Quite challenging while trying to read subtitles, I made liberal use of the rewind button.A driving, jazzy score punctuates the film throughout that not only matches the amped up mobility of the visuals but the innovative jump cuts. The Criterion transfer is worth mentioning, it's a joy to behold. It rare to find such a crisp, brilliant restoration, and there aren't many b-level Japanese films from this era that look this good. Bonus material reveals Suzuki to be just what I'd expect, a sweet and unpretentious little old guy with a naughty gleam in his eyes. He's not very forthcoming about his film but seems very entertained by all the questions. Jô Shishido also has a brief interview where he ruefully discusses his cheek implants.

A recently imprisoned ex-cop pursues the person(..or persons)responsible for the murder(..ruled a double suicide with his body found poisoned along with a hooker)of his former partner, infiltrating powerful mobs in the city, pitting them against each other through cunning manipulation, with his life always in danger. But, what will his reaction be when he discovers just who it was that caused his partner's death? Not as overtly complex as the film tends to get due to the lengths for which Jo has to go to stage the eventual showdown between the two Yakuza groups. Oftentimes, Jo has to worm his way out of nearly impossible situations where his true identity(..and motives)could be discovered any moment. Intense and determined, somehow, someway, Jo will find the person he seeks, even if it eventually kills him. Often, Jo is either beating somebody to a pulp or receiving punishment himself, all par for the course when dealing with nefarious Yakuza types. Director Seijun Suzuki stages the action and plot with his usual eye-popping visual style and keeps the pace moving, always shooting characters from different angles..the film is never flat or static, and Suzuki is always able, it seems, to capture images and characters in unique and colorful ways. Most(..practically all) characters are criminals and lowlifes of some sort, and Jo, by default, is the easier person to root for because his reasons are motivated out of loyalty to a fallen comrade whose reputation was sullied by practitioners of evil. Jo Shishido is an interesting leading man(..reminding me of Takeshi Kitano after his unfortunate crash)because his face seems numbed into almost one expression, cold, driven, hate, willing to use anyone within the underworld to get his revenge. But, boy, that twist is a knock-out regarding the person responsible for his pal's death, and Jo's decision to allow punishment is equally shocking(..but somewhat satisfying).Stunning set-pieces include how Jo defends himself while tied upside down to a chandelier as gangsters shoot at him, an impressive exterior shot of Yakuza boss Nomoto's whipping of a drug-addicted prostitute in his backyard as a yellow dust storm is transpiring, and how Jo is able to mastermind an effective escape from a hotel room where he was supposed to gun down a rival gangster(..which ends in a frenzy of violence) as police soon arrive on the scene. My favorite set-piece, an exercise in pure style, has Jo meeting Nomoto's gang for the first time, their business room slightly lower from the restaurant/club upstairs(..a window available for the criminals to see the action upstairs), and how Suzuki covers a lot of area/space as the real plot is set in motion was quite impressively shot and staged. My favorite character has to be the gay brother of boss Nomoto who responds unkind to anyone that mentions his mother was a whore(..he's quite a calm, very mild-mannered fellow until then).

Seijun Suzuki is one of the more polarizing and ambiguous figures in Japanese cinema. Genius? Madman? Something in between? Perhaps it doesn't matter, the differences between these positions are in any case, quite sleight. An amazingly prolific director - he directed over forty films in the 1960s alone - his very productivity helped lend credibility to those who dismissed him as B-movie man, preeminent among these to be sure, but a B-movie man nonetheless. In recent years, however, his work has been increasingly appreciated, particularly in the West.In large measure, this uptick in esteem is can be traced to the film industry finally catching up to Suzuki. His classic mid-60s films (Youth of the Beast, Gate of Flesh, Tokyo Drifter and Branded to Kill) featured a powerful combination of brutal, explicit and often sadistic violence, morbid humor, a keen sense of the ridiculous and a visual and narrative style that is fractured and often hallucinatory, all held together (or, rather, defiantly not held together) by a totalizing nihilism that denies any higher or greater meaning to actions beyond the demonstrable consequences of action itself. This made for cinema that, at the time, was incomprehensible to many viewers, and Suzuki was famously fired by Nikkatsu in 1967 for making films that "make no sense and make no money." Decades later, however, the potency of his best films is keenly appreciated by many cinephiles raised on Pulp Fiction and Natural Born Killers (both almost completely derivative of Suzuki's work).Suzuki himself identified Youth of the Beast as marking the beginning of his most creatively fertile period, and all the distinctive elements of his film-making are in evidence, and meshing perfectly. The basic story - a mysterious tough muscles into the center of a war between rival gangs, then begins pursuing ends of his own as he plays each off the other - is strongly reminiscent of Kurosawa's Yojimbo, but where Yojimbo is a period piece set in a down and out town of the Edo period, Youth of the Beast is a (post)modern gangster film set in contemporary (1960s) Tokyo. Mifune's iconic role as the amoral ronin Sanjuro Kuwabatake is here filled by Jo Shishido as disgraced ex-detective Joji 'Jo' Mizuno.The film opens with police investigating the apparent double suicide of a detective and his mistress (we later learn that it was actually a double murder). The initial sequence plays at being a traditional police procedural, with middle aged men in rumpled suits and worn hats speaking clinically of the dead. The camera pans to a table and an incongruous splash of color, a single cut red flower in a vase. It is an image of fleeting life that is repeated as the film's closing frame.Suddenly, the film jumps to full color with a blast of hard bop from the soundtrack, cutting to a crowded street in Tokyo and the maniacal laughter of a woman. The camera soon finds 'Jo' Shisado, who explodes into violent action, attacking three men, pummeling one of them to the ground and kicking him repeatedly before fastidiously wiping the blood from his shoe onto the fallen man's shirt. He then turns with an air of total indifference and strolls into a hostess bar.His outburst provides an entree into the Tokyo underworld; the men he thrashed were low-level yakuza soldiers, and the ease with which he dispatched them attracts the attention of the local underboss. Soon, he meets the big boss, Hideo Nomoto, and becomes a hit-man for Nomoto's gang. It rapidly becomes apparent that Jo is playing a deeper game. He forces his way into the office of Nomoto's chief rival, earning a place on his payroll as well, this time by providing intelligence on Nomoto's activities. He plays the rivals off one another, eventually achieving the cataclysmic annihilation of both gangs.The great strength of Youth of the Beast is its combination of superb visual flair and unremitting nihilism. Suzuki's shots are almost invariably dynamic in their composition, a riot of color and movement against a gritty background of corruption and decay. They create at once a hallucinatory detachment and a gut level immersion in the violence. Even the relatively static shots are intensely poetic and loaded with symbolism. Several scenes take place in the office of Nomoto's hostess bar. The entire back wall of the office is a one-way mirror, looking out into the nightclub. The floor of the office is set below the floor of the club. It is a perfect visual depiction of an "underworld" existing side by side with everyday life, but invisible to most people.One aspect of the film will likely be extremely disturbing to many contemporary Western viewers. Suzuki's films were often possessed of a violent and virulent misogyny, and this is no exception. The female characters are invariably unsympathetic; prostitutes, addicts and murdering adulteresses. One scene features a pimp humiliating an addicted woman while she begs for a fix. In another, Nomoto beats a call girl with his belt and then rapes her. The movie reaches its climax when Jo leaves the woman who orchestrated the murder of his partner to the tender mercies of a straight razor wielding psychopath. It is a fitting end to one of the most relentlessly violent films of its era.