For those who've been initiated into a deeper level of familiarity with the legendary cinematic career of Seijun Suzuki, Branded to Kill is known as the infamous act of creatively anarchic overreach that got him fired from his job as a contract director for Nikkatsu Studios. In hindsight, the film gives many viewers, even those who admire it quite a bit, the impression of being made by someone who had come to the end of his wits, who perhaps recognized that his tenure was already in jeopardy and so decided that he would cash it all in, going down in a balls-out blaze of glory that practically dared his bosses to make the move that would terminate his deal and in the process make them look like short-sighted foolish Philistines who just didn't get it.
The fact that Branded to Kill has gone on to develop a cult following over the subsequent decades after its abortive initial release (at first buried by the studio and only issued in forced compliance with the verdict of Suzuki's successful lawsuit), and a fairly exalted reputation among the critical cognescenti as the pinnacle of Suzuki's oeuvre, only solidifies such sentiments. I suppose there's not really much of a point for me to make in arguing against such a consensus. So I'm willing to go along with it to the extent that, at least for the moment, after watching it afresh after my first spellbound run-through less than a week ago, it does seem like a one-of-a-kind flowering of Suzuki's peculiar visual and narrative sensibilities. But I'm not quite ready to concede that it's his best overall film. Most important? Maybe. It's just the one that invoked the wrath of studio-bound censorship, the worst kind of censorship that there is, in that it sought to prevent a work of art from ever being seen, well before the repressive authorities of government or other cultural overlords had even had a chance to levy their verdicts.
So the story goes that Branded to Kill was squelched by the Nikkatsu suits because Suzuki was too stubbornly persistent in his habit of directing films that made neither enough sense nor enough money to satisfy the studio's expectations. While that's enough to supply the ingredients for an adequately plausible alibi for Nikkatsu, it seems to me that the underlying problem was Suzuki's tenacious insubordination in regard to his boss's decrees. It wasn't so much that the big boys didn't understand or appreciate his films that got on their nerves. The bigger problem was that he simply didn't follow orders. After pressing up against the limits that had been imposed upon him in his two previous efforts (Tokyo Drifter, a similarly-themed yakuza action flick about a hitman who falls out of favor with the mob, and Fighting Elegy, a more personal look back at the dire years preceding the calamities that occurred toward the end of World War II), Suzuki gave every indication that the scoldings he had received from the higher-ups had practically no effect in diminishing his wayward tendencies of thinking for himself and coloring way outside the lines in the expression of his craft. He was a man who felt secure enough, under the protection of his contract, to just go ahead and make the films he wanted, turn them in at the deadline, and turn his attention to whatever next project landed in his queue. When he submitted Branded to Kill to the studio, he apparently had no conscious thoughts of making a provocative statement or intentionally crossing a line. A prolific director of 40+ films over the course of the preceding decade, Suzuki was as ready as he ever was to just take a new assignment, examine the material and explore the possibilities. But he never got the chance, at least not within the prevailing studio system in which he'd been raised.
As it turned out, in terms of career advancement opportunities, Suzuki was guilty of pressing his luck, or at least assuming too much in regard to his invincibility. Which is not to say that I regret his decisions in the slightest, except to the extent that his getting fired by Nikkatsu certainly deprived us from seeing the other invigorating works that he would have produced over the course of the next ten years he spent on Japan's blacklist of banned directors, if he had just rocked the boat a little less vehemently. But we can't rewrite the past. Branded to Kill was borne from a special combination of artistic curiosity and ennui in regard to commercial considerations, as Suzuki found himself in possession of a basic plot, cast and crew that pushed him to make the movie that he did, consequences be damned.
The skeletal outline of Branded to Kill does reveal itself after a second or third viewing, once the initial bewilderment upon first discovery has had some time to settle. Hanada, a high-ranking yakuza hitman, is approached by an old hard-drinking buddy who wants to get back into the assassination game. He grudgingly agrees to give his pal a shot, but it doesn't go well, leading to some complications with the gang that hired him, and problems as desultory as a mechanical automotive breakdown following the first botched job. After being picked up on the road by an alluring yet creepy femme fatale, Hanada returns home to his wife, a woman strongly inclined to keep her man content. However, he's unable to shake off the instant attraction he felt for the mysteriously morbid but beautiful woman who now haunts his imagination. A warped love triangle develops, along with further intrigues as he's drawn into another complicated task of knocking off several targets who have incurred the wrath of his superiors.
As Hanada goes about his lethal business, he finds his emotions getting the better of him as his loyalties flit between his wife and the woman who captured his fancy. He's also caught up in a dangerous competition between himself, consigned to the #3 overall spot among the hired killers in his syndicate, and other gunmen at the top of the list, including the mysterious, perhaps mythical #1. As events unfold, Hanada zeroes in on his ultimate target; predator becomes prey, leading to the kind of ultimate showdown that we've come to expect in such films, every bit as formulaic and predictable as everything else that has already transpired up to this point.
But to just settle for a plot exposition, or pick apart its various elements, would be to entirely miss the point of Branded to Kill. The movie exists more as an exercise in style and rarefied aesthetics than in any kind of a thoroughly contemplated critique of the social or psychological conditions that drive some men to become professional assassins or criminal overlords, or some women to passionately offer themselves up as lovers or adopt a diffident stance of alienated sexuality in order to attract or frustrate men like Hanada. Suzuki clearly seems to be aware of such warped, perverse dynamics, and there's enough content in the story to stir up reflections on the power of erotic attraction, masculine competition and fetishistic obsession. But he has almost no interest in explaining these quirks of human nature, or even pausing long enough to let us ponder their existence, before choosing to dazzle us instead with a surfeit of visual flourishes that no doubt amuse him even as they leave many of us simultaneously scratching our head and gasping with astonishment, at least the first time through.
So let that trailer suffice as a sampler of what you'll see and experience in Branded to Kill. I'm not going to bother myself trying to describe or even refer to my own list of personal highlights after a few trips through the film. That would be like describing my favorite dips and climbs on a world class roller coaster. I'd rather just get back in line and ride the damn thing all over again, than tell you about it. The most famous sequences have been broken down in many other reviews, and as I see it, they're best just perceived and appreciated as such, as there's no big symbolism or condensed psychological package to decode. Suzuki's method of abstracting the visual and stylistic essence of the story's various plot points, action sequences and incongruous narrative revelations supersedes the effectiveness of written summaries. What he communicates to me here is a resilient confidence to creatively choreograph and film the parts of the story that he finds interesting. At the same time, he's content, probably even insistent, to casually excise the mundane bits that his own immersive familiarity with genre conventions, or sheer boredom with the drudgery of stitching together a paint-by-numbers story line, render superfluous. Tony Rayns' observation in the Criterion liner notes that Suzuki was, in this film, "editing a ninety-one trailer" of all the highlights and compelling moments that seized the director's imagination, is a more astute and concise a wrap-up of what Branded to Kill achieved than anything else I've read about it so far. In my opinion, it takes a back seat to Suzuki's movies that have much more to say about real life - titles like Gate of Flesh, Story of a Prostitute and maybe even Youth of the Beast (though I should probably watch that one again - it's been awhile - before leveling such an assertion.) In this film, it seems to me that we get a lot of tasty sugar and refreshing fizz, though not much in the way of nourishing substance. But as a capstone to one crucial phase of an artist's lifetime achievements, Branded to Kill is bold, audacious and uncompromising, a final and authoritative slam-dunk to Suzuki's impressive subset of entries in the Criterion Collection (seven films on disc, including his Eclipse Series offering Take Aim at the Police Van, plus an eighth title, 1960's Everything Goes Wrong, available on Hulu.) As we see in two supplemental interviews included in the 2011 reissue of this film, Suzuki's disinterest in taking any kind of lesson from being so rudely dismissed just as he was reaching a new peak of aesthetic brilliance provides an ample testimony to his strength of mind and character, even as unhinged as all indicators from this brazenly unpredictable film might otherwise persuade us to believe.
Next: Zatoichi the Outlaw
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