Youth of the Beast

Like the volatile crime stories of Sam Fuller (Pickup on South Street) and Sergio Leone (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly), Japanese director Seijun Suzuki's flamboyant movies often occur in a hallucinogenic world and unfurl at an operatic pitch. Suzuki's free-form, eye-popping movies were almost unknown to American audiences until the mid-1990s touring retrospective Branded to Thrill: The Delirious Cinema of Seijun Suzuki played several big cities, and led to a trickle of his many films coming to video and DVD in the years since. Youth of the Beast, the 1963 action-thriller now out in a Criterion Collection DVD, is one of the 40 movies Suzuki cranked out as a staff director at Nikkatsu Studio between 1956 and 1967 - B-movies with screaming titles like Detective Bureau 2-3: Go to Hell, Bastards! and widescreen A-movie production values. Most were gangster movies, but several (like 1966's Elegy to Violence, another new Criterion DVD) boldly condemn the Japanese World War II experience. Gangsters and prostitutes are mainstays of Suzuki's movies, and through their tales he often casts a sympathetic eye towards society's outsiders. Jo Mizuno (Joe Shoshido), the hero of Youth of the Beast, is the expected Suzuki anti-hero, but he's not so easy to categorize. He blasts onto the screen in a flurry of stylized violence, pushing around an overeager teenager, a fellow player in a pachinko parlor and then a waiter in a nightclub where he shows off a wad of money but refuses to pay his bill. He's dragged into the club's office, where perhaps the movie's most quintessentially Suzuki moment occurs: in the foreground, Jo loudly tussles with henchmen from the gang who run the club while, through the soundproof one-way mirror that serves as the wall between the office and club, a fan dancer silently twirls around for the customers. It's not just a scenic melding of those B-movie staples sex and violence, it's the sort of collision and beauty and brutality that make Suzuki's movies so electrifying. It turns out Jo's belligerence has just been a performance he's put on to impress the gang and get a job (a fact that brings even more richness to the shots in which Jo and the fan dancer share the frame). His performance works, too. But we soon learn there's a whole other layer to that performance. After his first "job' for the Nomoto gang, Jo mysteriously attends a memorial service for a police detective who died under suspicious circumstances in the movie's black-and-white prologue, telling the widow (Misako Watanabe) that 'a long time ago, your husband was very kind to me.' Soon, we learn Jo is a disgraced cop and that the dead man was his partner; Jo was framed by the mob and served time, and believes gangsters were behind his ex-partner's death. Jo not only snoops around into the Nomoto gang's hush-hush call girl ring, which he thinks had something to do with the murder, he also indulges in Dashiell Hammett's old Red Harvest plot device of the lone-wolf hero selling his services to two rival gangs (the same inspiration for Leone's A Fistful of Dollars and Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo). Jo's sleuthing, his playing double agent and his sexual and violent escapades keep him busy, but the plot is not all that remarkable (though the final-reel revelations tie everything together really well). As usual, it's the flamboyant touches Suzuki injects into the action that give Youth of the Beast pop. The movie came at a point in Suzuki's career where the director was getting frustrated with Nikkatsu's assembly-line approach. The company released two movies a week, and shooting schedules and budgets were tight. Suzuki, who averaged about four movies per year, started to let his imagination run wild with Youth of the Beast. He not only gives the Nomoto gang a visually interesting office, he places the rival Sanko gang's headquarters behind a moviehouse¿s screen, with movies running during every scene there. Another scene finds the perverse Nomoto boss, who strokes a cat a la Blofeld, whipping a junkie prostitute behind his modern house during a yellow-tinged sandstorm. And Suzuki twice uses the sort of shot he would again use in later movies, in which a color object (or a distinct set of them) is set off against a monochromatic background. Add a lively jazz score, and Youth of the Beast becomes much more lurid (visually and psychologically) than the mere "programmer" Nikkatsu wanted. The five-minute recent interview with Suzuki on the Youth of the Beast DVD touches upon most of the movie's more flamboyant moments, and the fact that the title has nothing at all to do with the story. It's rather choppily edited together, as is the slightly longer interview with Shoshido, whose trademark puffy cheeks gave him a tenacious demeanor that's just right for his character. Not surprisingly, the DVD gives the movie a noticeably sharper picture than its 1999 U.S. VHS release. Still to come after Youth of the Beast for Suzuki was his masterpiece, 1966's Tokyo Drifter, and another collaboration with Shoshido, Branded to Kill, the semi-coherent hit man tale that got the director fired from Nikkatsu for making "incomprehensible" movies. Each is previously available on DVD from Criterion, while 1958's Underworld Beauty, on disc from Home Vision, showed Suzuki could make a dandy conventional noir thriller, too. Still conspicuously absent from DVD are two of the five 1999 U.S. Suzuki videos, both non-gangster tales based on novels by Tajiro Tamura: Story of a Prostitute and 1964's amazing Gate of Flesh, starring Shoshido. For more information about Youth of the Beast, visit Criterion Collection. To order Youth of the Beast, go to TCM Shopping. by Paul Sherman