Maybe the greatest hitman movie ever made. I can’t think of a better one, at least. Director Seijun Suzuki has a hell of an eye on him. His work here is concentrated Cool, bold, strange and mysterious. It seduces us like a sexy person’s walk. Suzuki finds the poetry in pulp without looking down on it. He dives into the trash can headfirst.
The script is delicious junk. Chipmunk-cheeked Joe Shishido is a jaded assassin (Japan’s THIRD best hitman, we, and he, are reminded many times) who gets hired for a job that we THINK is going to be what the movie is about, but NOPE. He finishes that job in about ten minutes of screen time and a few hails of bullets. He then gets hired for another job and we think, okay, THAT’s the big story here, but NOPE. It’s just a stepping stone to something more weird. Along the way are the kind of lurid details that mark real pulp fiction, from extreme close-ups on bullet wounds to the most raw depictions of sex allowed on the 1967 screen (lots of naked frolics with Shishido’s two-timing wife played by Mariko Ogawa). My favorite sleazy moment though is when Suzuki, for no reason, angles his camera to look up the dresses of three seated female extras in the foreground while Shishido passes by the background.
Despite its splashy sensationalism, the film bombed its original release in Japan. The studio, Nikkatsu, hated it and prematurely ended their contract with Suzuki, which resulted in a lawsuit and Suzuki’s ten-year blacklisting in the industry. It’s a fitting, if unjust, story for such an outlaw film, made even better when it eventually found a cult, got cited as an influence by the likes of Jim Jarmusch and embraced by The Criterion Collection.