• 野獣の青春 (Youth of the Beast)

6/17/21 (Thurs)

This 1963 yakuza film was evidently the first to define Suzuki Seijun’s surreal style. It’s a fairly straightforward story for him, albeit intricately plotted. Jo (Shishido Jo – he seems to play Jo-named characters a lot), a lone-wolf gangster and former policeman, seeks to avenge the death of a former colleague by playing two gangs off against each other. The colleague had been found dead with a call girl in an apparent double suicide, including a suicide note allegedly written by the woman. Jo, however, suspects that the death was not self-inflicted. His violent search for the truth drives the film.

The pattern of the drama was well worn, and we could pretty much guess the villain before the end, though that might be a pattern that this movie itself established. A friend noted that movies these days would have added yet another twist, though that’s become rather old hat as well. Maybe I’ve seen too many of these.

That said, the story is told with flair, including an endless array of fight scenes with Jo in the club offices (backed by a strip show seen via a one-way mirror), a pachinko parlor, the streets, the gangster’s office, even tied up and hanging upside down from the ceiling. The stoic Jo is a virtual superman with gun, fists or anything he has on hand, an entirely unrealistic portrayal – which, of course, is all part of the fun. It’s a virtual cartoon; when gangsters throw a large bundle of dynamite from their car into a passing vehicle, I actually thought of Yosemite Sam or Wile E. Coyote. Best to go with the flow.

The film offers many eccentric characters, like the sadistic boss with his purring cat, but of special note was the gay head of the call girl business. His gayness played no part in the story itself and was shrugged off by others, alluded to only as a character trait. Nor was he overly fey: sensitive to his mother’s background as a prostitute to soldiers, he keeps a razor blade handy for anyone who dares to mention it. It was an interesting touch for an early 1960s film, suggesting a different attitude in Japan toward homosexuality. Westerners seem more hung-up over this even now: one gangster’s derogatory mention of the character as an okama, the only critical reference to his sexuality, was demurely subtitled “gay” rather than a more accurate “faggot” or at least “queer”.

The film, though not quite as disjointed as Suzuki’s later flicks, does have his patented strange edits and a gaudy color scheme (like the bright red carpet matching the red whip marks on the girl’s back). The red flower in the otherwise black-and-white scene at the opening is repeated in the final shot as red fallen petals scattered over a black-and-white floor. There were several scenes involving windows, including the one-way mirror view of the strip club from the office, movies seen flickering in reverse on the wall in the gangster’s cinema-based office, and Jo’s scrunched-up face as he’s slammed against the glass. The complicated plot and large number of players make the story hard to follow at times, but it all comes together at the end. I’m not sure about the title, though I assume the “beast” refers to the gangster world as a whole. A fun film.