Tokyo Drifter

The Japanese film industry had its share of rebel directors in the 1960s, but the powerful studios tolerated mavericks only when their films were consistently successful. Japan kept busy churning out two and three full features a week for a nation still not entirely wired for television. Over at Nikkatsu, director Seijun Suzuki felt that his potential was being wasted in program thrillers with assembly-line scripts. His low seniority didn't give him script or cast approval. With a small group of like-minded, ambitious writers, Suzuki had begun to doctor his scripts, or shoot scenes in a way not cleared by his production manager. The pictures improved, but not Suzuki's standing with the front office. Tokyo Drifter was conceived as a lightweight thriller to promote one of Nikkatsu's newest young discoveries, the handsome, boyish Tetsuya Watari. The plan was to make a straightforward drama about a young criminal's efforts to go straight and succeed romantically with his true love, a sensual but innocent nightclub singer. Seijun Suzuki was given the luxury of color and a slightly longer shooting schedule. Instead of playing it safe, he elected to radically alter the film's style. The basic storyline is unchanged, but everything else about Tokyo Drifter is designed to attract critical attention. Colors more gaudy than a Hollywood musical undermine the sober Yakuza themes, along with absurd action sequences and a nightclub that could only exist in an artist's fantasy. Tetsu Hondo, alias "The Phoenix" (Tetsuya Watari) is loyal to his benevolent crime boss Kurata (Ryuji Kita), who approves of Tetsu's longing for the beautiful singer Chiharu (Chieko Matsubara). When Kurata disbands his gang and goes legit Tetsu remains faithful, even submitting to a brutal beating by rival mobsters. That gang decides to steal a large office building belonging to Kurata, in a raid that results in the killing of a businessman and a secretary. Forced to leave Tokyo, Tetsu becomes involved in the problems of a Kurata ally in a Southern port city. His life is saved more than once by Kenji Aizawa (Hideaki Nitani), a worldly-wise ex- Yakuza who now functions as an independent agent, or "drifter". Kenji tells Tetsu that his loyalty is misplaced, that sooner or later even his beloved father figure Kurata will turn on him. Back in Tokyo, Kurata caves in to threats of blackmail by his rivals, who demand Tetsu's death. Tetsu doesn't believe it when the thug Tatsuzo, The Viper (Tamio Kawaji) tells him that he's been targeted by every hood in the city. Against Kenji's advice, he returns to the city to right wrongs and protect his beloved Chihara. We can well imagine Nikkatsu's frustration with director Suzuki after screening his finished Tokyo Drifter: the movie veers wildly from its mission to provide a feel-good acting showcase for the handsome Tetsuya Watari. But the star has only a handful of scenes with the film's leading lady, and none that set him up as a screen lover. Tetsu has determined that women have no place in his destiny as a true-blue lieutenant to the big shot Kurata. When Chihara sees Tetsu from the window of a train and cries out, he chooses to ignore her. With his who-cares-if-it's-combed hair and color-coordinated jackets, our rogue hero certainly looks like a cool customer. He nevertheless comes off as a creampuff next to Hideaki Nitani's stalwart Kenji, a realist with a big heart and a Bogart-like attitude toward trouble. Nitani had starred in Suzuki's Underworld Beauty, but Nikkatsu wanted to billboard young Watari as a romantic star, and generated a full promotional campaign stressing his relationship with Chieko Matsubara. Chihara cuts a fine figure as the anguished torch singer, yet Tetsu spends most of the movie distancing himself from her. And how macho can a Yakuza be, when he trades conversation with his fellow criminals about the merits of a particular electric hair dryer? Actually, it would be difficult for any rational character to emerge from director Suzuki's extreme stylization. Many of the sets are designer fantasies adapted from Pop Art and the esthetics of Japanese Manga action comics -- comics that one restless receptionist reads incessantly, laughing at the jokes. Rooms are often painted in bright colors, and some setups arrange the characters against flat backgrounds in ways that suggest a living comic book. Out in the snow-covered scenery, Suzuki will throw an unmotivated blue filter across the image, a wedge of color that has no meaning other than to disrupt the "natural" scene. Forget conventional realism -- the gangster hangouts and foreign-influenced nightclubs are pure fantasy. Multi-colored iron pipes crowd the key nightclub's staircases, and hoods strolling to the manager's office pass below a glass floor and stare upwards at club patrons dancing mindlessly away. The ballroom where Chihara belts out her songs is a vast, usually empty space that is painted a different bright color every time we see it. Suzuki uses this "interior landscape" as a cinematic laboratory for odd angles and expressive compositions. The only correlative in Hollywood pictures is another mostly empty ballroom in Jack Webb's Pete Kelly's Blues, that likewise serves as a stylized arena for an armed showdown. As if that weren't enough, Tokyo Drifter's Tetsu is frequently shown whistling and singing the main theme song, a ballad about, naturally enough, an alienated gunman. Like a singing cowboy, Tetsu warbles as he hikes through the snow or stalks an enemy with his gun drawn. Clearly not meant to be funny, these musical moments create a bizarre cultural collision: the sublime clashes with pure corn. Seijun Suzuki's play with these absurdities is largely successful. Eccentric comic relief is provided by the dandyish thug playfully named Tatsu, whose attempts to murder Tetsu repeatedly fail. Suzuki's ploy falters only once, in a somewhat tiresome barroom brawl in a "hick" town. American sailors and servicemen become an easy target in a fight apparently purposely staged to look fake. A row of B-girls cheers the home team ("G.I.'s are chicken!") and the foolish Americans end up in a pile outside the bar's western-style swinging doors, like something from a Popeye cartoon. What Tokyo Drifter has that Nikkatsu didn't see is a self-conscious awareness of its own status as a genre myth. It appears a reaction to the Pop Culture influences of1966, especially the stylish but ever-more juvenile spy spoof movies that came in the wake of the James Bond craze. In hindsight, Tokyo Drifter can be seen to continue the process of deconstructing the traditional Yakuza movie. The cynical treatment given notions of loyalty and honor would soon be exported from Japan to Italy, via Sergio Leone's Fistful of Dollars. Seijun Suzuki's visual stylistics -- wild art direction and playful eccentricity -- re-energize the Yakuza action genre. Criterion's Blu-ray of Tokyo Drifter is a vast improvement over their initial non-enhanced DVD offering of ten years ago. The film's bright colors come in an amusing variety of pastels and complementary tones that remind us of high-emotion sequences in Vincente Minnelli films, like the conclusion of Some Came Running. New extras give us the impression that director Seijun Suzuki jazzed up his routine assignments and jeopardized his career out of sheer artistic boredom. Speaking in a pair of interviews from the late 1990s, Suzuki explains that disobeying his employers was an artistic necessity that he never regretted. He complied with the edict to reprise the title tune "x" number of times in the movie, but his alterations to the tone of the Tetsu / Chihara romance defied the studio's instructions to billboard its new star personality. Interestingly, when selected scene stills are excerpted for use in Criterion's featurettes, Tokyo Drifter looks like an abstract exercise in composition, blocking and camera movement. The actual "action" in the final nightclub confrontation isn't particularly convincing, but the camera direction generates excitement on a sensual level: all those colors seem to swirl around in our heads. Also included is an original trailer, and an insert essay by Howard Hampton. It is essential reading for viewers confused by Seijun Suzuki's "jazz with a color camera" approach to the Yakuza thriller. For more information about Tokyo Drifter, visit The Criterion Collection. To order Tokyo Drifter, go to TCM Shopping. by Glenn Erickson

Seijun Suzuki isn't necessarily a familiar name to many fans of foreign cinema -- he was practically unknown outside of Japan for decades -- but in the early 1990s, his "rediscovery" stateside made him an instant cult hero to fans of genre cinema with maverick visions. Suzuki was nothing if not a maverick, a prolific filmmaker who cranked out one assignment after another in the low-budget end of Nikkatsu Studios in the 1960s -- war movies, youth dramas, roman porno and especially yakuza thrillers -- on tight shooting schedules, and managed to inject them with madcap energy, inventive style and wicked wit. Tokyo Drifter (1966) is one of Suzuki's greatest, and by that I mean one of his wildest, weirdest and most unpredictable. Ostensibly a gangster thriller about a rival mobs locked in a war over a business venture after one outfit tries to go legit, it plays like a mix of spaghetti western and samurai melodrama relocated to the pop-art splendor of 1960s Japan, a world of swinging discotheques and sleekly austere nightclubs on the one hand, and grimy waterfronts and seedy hideouts on the other. Suzuki opens the film on the latter: a gangland beating on the docks in overexposed black and white. It's a rough and ready introduction. As a trumpet brays a tune that sounds like a nightclub version of a Morricone theme from a lost Sergio Leone film, the object of the abuse refuses to lift a finger while. But as the thugs leave he looks down at a toy gun, jumping out of the image as single drop of red into the monochrome landscape, and mutters "Don't get me mad." Suddenly Suzuki blasts the screen with comic book color and pop-art hues. The grit just turned groovy. Matinee idol Tetsuya Watari is the Tetsu, aka Phoenix, the Tokyo drifter of the title. Looking like the young, Japanese pop-star incarnation of Alain Delon in his dark glasses and sporty suits, Tetsu is the unfailingly loyal right hand to Kurata (Ryûji Kita), a one-time yakuza godfather gone straight. Thus his refusal to fight, proof of the honor of his vow to steer clear of the rackets. It only encourages ambitious rival Otsuko (Eimei Esumi), a fast-rising thug headquartered in back of a discotheque perpetually filled with gyrating kids, to move in on Kurata. Call it a hostile takeover, gangland style. "Money and power rule now," Otsuko smirks to Kurata. "Honor means nothing." Honor means everything, however, to Tetsu. After Otsuko has his girlfriend kidnapped (he rescues her without raising a fist, merely hijacking the getaway car for a crazed joyride) and sends a hitman after him, Tetsu is pushed too far and comes back on Otsuko's gang with his guns drawn, but it's too late. By the time the dust settles, Tetsu takes the blame for killing he didn't commit and goes on the lam, hunted by the cops and Otsuko's gang alike as he wanders the lonely landscape, whistling his own theme song. At least until he hits the next gang town and violence erupts once again. Suzuki stylizes the entire film to the point of abstraction. Though rife with shootouts and fistfights, there is almost no blood in the film. Instead, Suzuki punctuates the imagery with slashes and splotches of red. With little money for sets, Suzuki turned studios spaces into strikingly austere suggestions of nightclubs, where killers hide behind every out-of-place roman column, and office spaces. He one showdowns in the snows of Northern Japan and another on railroad tracks as an engine races toward them. The seasons change with capricious disregard to the calendar. Cameras looks down from the rafters or up through glass floors, creating vertiginous angles and impossible spaces. A clash in a club modeled on a 19th century saloon erupts into a comic barroom brawl right out of an American western spoof, with showgirls dashing bottles over the heads of the scuffling customers. A deadly showdown between "Phoenix" Tetsu and his deadly rival, "Viper" Tatsu, takes place in the margins of this slapstick interlude. In this world of shifting loyalties and compromised values and double-crosses, Tetsu is the last honorable man, a character who might have stepped out of a Jean-Pierre Melville film and into a delirious, color-soaked landscape of a Vincent Minnelli musical turned gangster war zone. That Watari isn't much of an actor hardly make a difference. Suzuki turns him into an impassive, unreadable figure, all honor and discipline without any detectable personality under his blank expression and resigned attitude, even when he sings his theme song to the endless string of killers sent to finish him off: "I'll even let love pass me die in the name of duty / I'm the Tokyo drifter." By the end of the film, it's become an abstraction of gangster movie tropes jump-cut together into a pulp fiction on acid, all delirious, delicious style and narrative invention. Criterion original released Tokyo Drifter on DVD in a distorted, non-anamorphic widescreen master in 1999, an early DVD release for the company (the spine number is 39) and one of the company's few substandard releases. This edition is freshly mastered from a new high-definition digital transfer of a 35mm low-contrast print for DVD and Blu-ray. The blown-out, overexposed look of the black-and-white pre-credits sequence is part of Suzuki's visual palette. According the Suzuki, the director of photography suggested using some monochrome stock that had gone bad and he agreed to try it. The rest of the film is a richly-saturated, color-coordinated riot of hues and contrasts. The image is bright, intense and sharp, a significant improvement over the earlier DVD and well worth the upgrade. Both the DVD and the Blu-ray feature the 20-minute video interview with Seijun Suzuki recorded in 1997 and featured in the original DVD release, along with a new 12-minute interview featurette with Suzuki (now almost 90 and assisted by oxygen tubes) and assistant director Masami Kuzuu. The former, in low-definition video, is a general overview with Suzuki discussing his time at Nikkatsu Studios, the latter (shot on HD video) is focused specifically on the production of Tokyo Drifter. "I never meant for it to be surreal," he explains. "That's just how it came out." Also features a trailer and a booklet with a new essay by critic Howard Hampton. For more information about Tokyo Drifter, visit The Criterion Collection. To order Tokyo Drifter, go to TCM Shopping. by Sean Axmaker