The story of how Seijun Suzuki's career as a prolific Japanese director was prematurely derailed by his studio bosses at Nikkatsu, due to his stubbornly insubordinate creative interpolations and unconventional approach to narrative, has become somewhat legendary over the years. The short version of the story tends to focus on two films that were released concurrently with each other by Criterion on two separate occasions - as spine numbers 38 and 39, on DVD in 1999 and in an overhauled Blu-ray/DVD edition in 2011. The films definitely belong together, as they each focus on yakuza themes. Tokyo Drifter, from early in 1966, is Suzuki's uber-cool, ultra-stylish, neon lit gangster fantasy saga, while 1967's Branded to Kill stars Japanese action icon Joe Shishido as an ambitious but loopy hit man engaged in ruthless competition to be the supreme assassin of the criminal underworld. As it turned out, the latter film's barely comprehensible story line, and Suzuki's indifference to making his movies sufficiently accessible to mainstream audiences, drove his producers to exasperation, so they canceled his contract and effectively blacklisted Suzuki from directing any more feature films for the rest of the 20th century, eventually resurfacing in 2001 with Pistol Opera, a film that practically picks up where Branded to Kill left off.
Well, that's not an entirely accurate recounting of the facts, but that's basically how the mythology of Seijun Suzuki seems to have been passed on according to any number of articles I've read over the years. The truth, as usual, is more complicated than that, as Suzuki did continue to make films throughout the 70s, 80s and 90s, but they were certainly few and far between in comparison with the hectic pace he established in the first phase of his career: an astonishing 40 films between 1956 and 1967 - approaching four films a year when you do the math.
But as I said, much of the attention that Suzuki has earned in recent times tends to focus on those two early Criterion titles, even though his output is among them most amply represented in the Collection. One of the films that's too easily overlooked, maybe because it's kind of buried in drab packaging in a nearly bare-bones DVD dating from 2005, is Fighting Elegy, his second-to-last job for Nikkatsu. On the surface a frenzied comic romp about rowdy young men gone wild, it came out in the fall of 1966, smack dab between Tokyo Drifter and Branded to Kill. In my view, Fighting Elegy is a much more personal and heartfelt film than either of the highly stylized and sometimes brazenly experimental works that bookend it. But don't assume based on that assessment that it's any less bonkers.
Fighting Elegy draws much more from Suzuki's life story and Japan's pre-WWII history, a shared experience that many of the adults of his time could relate to and place themselves in. Whereas a neck-deep entanglement in the yakuza crime syndicate could serve as a rich metaphor for any number of interpersonal conflicts and concerns that viewers might relate to, the social milieu of this film was much more ordinary and common: a military prep school (or two) of the type that many young men approaching the age of conscription were sent to in order to toughen them up for use as cannon fodder in the imperialist campaigns that the government was starting to engage in by the mid-1930s. I hardly need to elaborate on the emotive and thought-provoking possibilities inherent in a story of young men coming of age at a crucial juncture in their nation's history, just on the brink of a promised glorious triumph that swiftly deteriorated into profound, abject tragedy.
The set-up involves a particular young man, Kiroku, who boards with a family that's converted to Catholicism. He develops a crush on their beautiful and musically talented daughter Michiko, and struggles mightily to maintain the stern ascetic discipline of a young soldier in training. His awkward efforts to repress emerging sexual energies fuels a raging irritability that lands him in a lot of fights, which in turn get him expelled, sent to a different school and mounting pressures to exercise self-control lest he prove himself unsuitable for service to the Emperor.
Of course, what Suzuki does with all that narrative potential may appear to some to fall short of the mark, as we're presented with a succession of slapstick brawls, brutal beatings and silly boner jokes that probably won't make a lot of sense to viewers who haven't acclimated to his madcap style or spent much time watching Japanese films of the 1930s (or films from later decades that sought to capture the spirit of those times.) While I won't claim to be any sort of expert on Asian cinema, I can say that I've watched enough of those kinds of movies in recent months to feel like I get where Suzuki is coming from as he lampoons the testosterone-fueled ethos of his formative years. A pair of podcasts I recorded earlier this year on the Eclipse Series sets Kinoshita and World War II and The First Films of Akira Kurosawa certainly delve into that mindset. Along this line, I can also recommend titles like Kobayashi's The Thick Walled Room and The Human Condition (almost the polar opposite of Fighting Elegy in their relentlessly serious tone), Kon Ichikawa's Fires on the Plain, Kinoshita's Twenty-Four Eyes and especially Suzuki's own Story of a Prostitute which offers up something close to a female-perspective counterpart to the story told in Fighting Elegy. And then there's Yukio Mishima's incredibly harrowing Patriotism, released just a few months earlier, that amplifies quite valuably the events that are portended in the final scenes of Fighting Elegy as a group of soldiers march into Tokyo to participate in an attempted coup that played a significant role in radicalizing Japan's ruling authorities even further.
With sufficient background then, I think a viewer is better prepared to glean more value from watching Fighting Elegy than might otherwise result. Without it, there's still a lot to appreciate, as Suzuki's directorial instincts, supported by a highly capable crew, create some rather wildly amusing action sequences, hilarious sight gags and even a few scenes of evocative beauty toward the end, when the tone abruptly shifts from farcical to elegiac, as befits the title that Criterion chose to go with when translated from the Japanese. It's listed on IMDb and elsewhere as The Born Fighter, a sobriquet for the belligerent yet sympathetic Kiroku that was just as descriptive of the inspired visionary Seijun Suzuki, who no doubt poured a bit of his own soul into this project and brought the character to life.
Next: Wings