Youth of the Beast

Youth of the Beast

(aka Yaju No Seishun)

D: Seijun Suzuki (1963); with Jo Shishido, Tomio Aoki, Eiji Go, Yuriko Abe.

Youth of the Beast opens with a black-and-white segment in which police look into the apparent murder-suicide of a detective and a young woman. Jo (the puffy-cheeked Shishido) appears in the next scene delivering a brutal beating to a man on the street. The thug's penchant for violence attracts the attention of a yakuza boss who immediately recruits him. Jo then cozies up to a rival gang boss and plays the two sides against each other until it's an all-out gang war. The double-agent gangster's motives become clearer as the film progresses, tying back into the detective's death in the opening segments. As with Suzuki's Tokyo Drifter, Youth of the Beast is deliriously over-the-top. Suzuki uses violence the way Jackson Pollock used paint, racking up more gun deaths in 90 minutes than the rest of the Japan film industry did in a year. If anything, this film is even more episodic and hard to follow than Suzuki's other movies. His films have more to do with the language of film itself rather than niggling details like plot and characterizations, with scenarios that warp the conventions of the gangster film to the point of playfulness. Jo's introduction to the first gang is a pistol-whipping in the office of a nightclub; a one-way mirror faces the nightclub floor and a stripper does an old-fashioned fan dance in the background while he's being brutalized. The second gang's boss, apparently a movie fan, has a black-and-white Japanese crime film playing on the back wall of his office at all times (creating a distressing figure-ground dilemma for the viewer). Several carloads of gangsters have a running gun battle in an open field, with various odd-looking Fifties Japanese cars scattered about and their drivers playing chicken with each other. A carload of gunmen, their faces grotesquely distorted by nylon stockings pulled over their heads, demands a briefcase full of cash from a carload of rival gangsters. They then toss what appears to be a bundle of dynamite into the car and watch the guys bail out, although it turns out to only be a few highway flares taped together. Jo gets into a gunfight while hanging upside-down by his ankles from a chandelier! The movie also shares Tokyo Drifter's sumptuous use of color and ornate shot compositions, though it doesn't have that movie's cheesy musical numbers. Full of high-octane editing, hard-boiled characters, a 120-mph pace, and a Sixties style that was far, far ahead of its time, this is another wildly inventive crime thriller from a criminally underappreciated director.