BRANDED TO KILL/ KOROSHI NO RAKUIN

Japan, 1967, 91 minutes, Colour.
Jo Shishido.
Directed by Seijun Suzuki.

In the early 1960s, Japanese director Seijun Suzuki made a number of films which, at the time, were colourful potboilers, films of crime in Japan, the yakuza, killers and hitmen, with a surprising amount of sex scenes and nudity. One of his earliest films was Gate of Flesh. This present film and Tokyo Drifter are considered to be some of his best films.

He made films according to order but fell out with his production company and in the late 60s moved to television. In succeeding years, his films have gained a greater reputation and are continually re-shown. An American parallel might be American International, the maker of small-budget movies, with touches of exploitation, in the 1960s and into the 1970s.

Suzuki is considered a visual stylist, though making his films quickly but able to bring a strong eye for colour, black-and-white, angles, detail which makes his films still stand out. Branded to Kill is in black-and-white while some of the earlier films open in black-and-white and move to colour.

A regular actor was Jo eshishido, usually portraying a hitman.

And all the films have very complex plots which require quite some attention, trying to identify who is who, who is on the side of good, who is a criminal, who is doing the betraying.

In this film Shishido is number three hitman but has ambitions to be number one. He does get entangled with number one in ways that he was not anticipating. There are various scenes of his hits, his entanglement with a number of women, his double dealing with bosses. There is a also an extra nuance that he has an addiction for sniffing rice!

As with his other films, they are interesting to watch in the light of Japanese cinema in the 1960s with such masters as Kurosawa, Mizoguchi, Ichikawa, and their masterpieces. This is very much pop and popular culture.