Though the copy I saw of this early Seijun Suzuki potboiler was unsubtitled, my reaction (namely, madness and confusion) wasn't all that different from subtitled Suzuki. From what I could gather in my nonexistent understanding of Japanese, it deals with a group of young delinquents puttering about in motor bikes and pissing respectable citizens off, until they get involved with gangsters and a shipment of explosives. Not much info on this one -- it is virtually ignored in Branded to Thrill: The Delirious Cinema of Suzuki Seijun, the one book-length study on the director I know of, and the title (or at least the translation) has less to do with plot than with the exotic titillation promised by early Suzuki titles (The Naked Woman and the Gun, Young Breasts, Underworld Beauty). It is interesting for some embryonic Suzuki eccentricities (in one pirouette worthy of Nick Ray, the camera latches on to a character's point-of-view so the horizontal TohoScope screen can tilt to accommodate a woman's torso) and comments on late 1950s Japan (the young protagonist comes from a fractured home, lorded over by a shrewy mom while dad broods wanly). The closest the film offers as a positive model to the unruly tykes is a scraggly old ragpicker, though, typical of Suzuki's parodical ambivalence, he is always spotted through the filter of derisive fantasy (with deliberately artificial sets and a wise-guy riff on "When You Wish Upon a Star" oozing on the soundtrack). With Saburo Fujimaki. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce
|