The gangsters in those other Suzuki movies jostle for power at every turn and regularly trade gunfire, but even they don't have the dog-eat-dog brutality of the prostitutes who share a bombed-out brick basement and hold each other to a simple code of honor in Gate of Flesh: if you have sex with a man without being paid, the others will beat you to a humiliating pulp. The key word there is "humiliating." When we see the first transgressor get her punishment, the others tie her to a post, beat her, cut her hair off and leave her naked and covered in a fisherman's net in an open rowboat. Of the three doses of punishment we'll see meted out, this might be the least painful.
The victim of that beating is shown the door at about the same time starving 18-year-old heroine Maya (Yumiko Nogawa of Suzuki's later The Story of a Prostitute and Carmen from Kawachi) befriends the three remaining prostitutes, who tell her they're the only people who will look out for her. Maya doesn't need much convincing to join them, and much of the early action in Gate of Flesh is a stark rendering of the hordes of desperate people on Tokyo's waterfront scraping together enough money and food to survive. Prostitutes beg American GIs to partake, while petty thievery is a way of life (in one crisp montage, we see snatched goods being swiftly passed among accomplices or immediately swapped at food stalls, all with a precision that's no doubt come from repetition).
There's a certain sadomasochism to the way the women debase themselves in order to survive (lying prostrate in front of an oncoming Army jeep at one point). The prostitutes revel in this blend of pleasure and pain, usually finishing their savage beatings with happy sing-alongs, and Suzuki gleefully stirs this sex-and-violence stew. The women defiantly embrace their dark sides, and not just by becoming prostitutes. Showing a liberating self-awareness of their lowly rung in society, at one point the hookers lash out by embracing a "spit on everything" philosophy quite literally, and spend one scene walking through the nearby street market spitting pieces of chewed apple on others. The most extreme sadomasochism in the women's code of honor is that it forbids love. Love is hardly an excuse for having romantic, off-the-books sex for these women. But that doesn't mean that, beneath the crusty interiors, these women don't still long for love and see it as a possible exit strategy for their current plight.
We see that plainly once macho Shintaro (chipmunk-cheeked Joe Shishido of Youth of the Beast and Branded to Kill) arrives. This bitter war veteran stabs a GI with whom he heisted a PX, and is wanted by the American MPs who patrol the area. Wounded when the MPs almost arrest him, he invites himself into the prostitutes' lair until he recovers, and he soon becomes the fantasy object of all four women. Who will get Shintaro in bed, and who will get caught and punished for it, becomes the engine of the plot for the rest of the 90-minute movie, culminating in a Pepe Le Moko/ Quai des Brumes sort of tragic ending for its criminal lovers.
Gate of Flesh is achingly gritty, yet highly stylized. Fittingly, Suzuki's movie came out in the same year as Sam Fuller's The Naked Kiss, with which its shares its mix of lurid titillation and social commentary (I haven't even mentioned one of the most lurid moments in any movie, in which Maya seduces an American pastor hoping to help her). Suzuki and frequent production designer Takeo Kimura really went wild this time, color-coding the prostitutes so that their clothes reflect their personalities - for instance, the feistiest, Sen (sexy fireball Satoko Kasai), always wears red, while child-like Roku (Tomiko Ishii) wears what Suzuki has called "nice" yellow. Suzuki lets abstract stylization color the movie's reality in other ways, too, like in the internal monologues the women have about Shintaro, which Suzuki and Kimura stage as cut-ins in which each woman sits in a setting bathed in her particular shading. There's another scene in which theatrical lighting is suddenly employed, the only light being a circular spotlight following Sen across a bedroom, while superimpositions of one image atop another heighten the reality at other times. As usual, there's never a dull moment with Suzuki.
In the DVD's 20-minute interview featurette in which Suzuki and Kimura speak separately, Suzuki says that any explanations of the characters' color scheme were invented later, and that the original motivation was simply to help viewers distinguish the characters from each other. That nuts-and-bolts notion is indicative of the pair's entire approach to Gate of Flesh. Like most any other contract moviemakers on any other movies under similar circumstances, their concerns during production were, above all, practical: how to stay within the prescribed budget and shooting schedule, how to block scenes and, in this case, how to keep the nudity discreet and avoid the censors. But that's the beauty of Suzuki's movies. While he was churning out three or more each year for Nikkatsu, his B-movies with A-movie production values created beauty in unexpected places. That's never been truer than in the beautiful squalor of Gate of Flesh. Suzuki also freely talks about his experiences as a soldier in WWII, and the one-time anti-American feelings that he admits influenced Gate of Flesh.
Also of note is the fact that the Gate of Flesh DVD includes a rare Criterion Collection Easter egg. As the credits for the interview roll, an arrow appears in the lower right corner. If you select it, you'll see seven minutes of close-up footage of the handwritten notes and storyboard-like sketches on the pages of Suzuki's tattered, softbound Gate of Flesh script, which he clutches and often consults during his interview.
For more information about Gate of Flesh, visit Criterion Collection. To order Gate of Flesh, go to TCM Shopping.
by Paul Sherman
