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Jo Shishido,
Jo Shishido,
Tomio Aoki,
more...
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Seijun Suzuki,
Seijun Suzuki
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: Criterion
: Foreign, Japan, Gangsters, Yakuza, Criterion Collection
: 92 min.
: Japanese
: English
see additional details...
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Youth of the Beast marked a turning point in director Seijun Suzuki's career. No longer content to just crank out production-line gangster films, here Suzuki starts to assert his own voice. The plot is fairly typical for the genre: chipmunk-cheeked Jo Shishido stars as ex-cop Jo Mizuno, who muscles his way into the shadowy world of the yakuza. He gets hired by the clan that killed his former partner while double-dealing with the clan's rival. Yet the plot contains some particularly Suzuki-like details. Why is Jo's partner more interested in guns than in women? Why does Hide, the notorious gay gangster, always slash the face of anyone who mentions his mother? What does this all have to do with the Takeshita School of Knitting? Suzuki's audacious style heightens the absurdity and artifice of both the genre and the medium with pop art colors, loopy camera placements, and bizarre, dream-like images: a feather-clad dancer silently struts behind soundproofed two-way mirrors, a pink dust storm serendipitously occurs while a pimp whips a junkie prostitute. The film is a dizzying visual feast, whose tone Seijun Suzuki would amplify to absurdist heights in his later films, Tokyo Drifter (1966) and Branded to Kill (1967). ~ Jonathan Crow, All Movie Guide
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by talltale
June 15, 2005 - 3:34 PM PDT
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7 out of 8 members found this review helpful
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If Sam Fuller had been Japanese, he might have come up with something as unusual and fun as YOUTH OF THE BEAST, the 1962 film by a director (Seijun Suzuki) whose work I knew nothing of, but who proves to have an interesting command of plot, composition, color, humor, blood, jazz-influenced music and general entertainment values that cut across cultural lines.
Ahead of its time in the open presentation of a gay character, the movie also offers more nudity than was generally seen back in the early 60s. Criterion has released the DVD in that company's usual splendid condition, so expect to be surprised at many of the terrific visuals. Do not expect a "classic" in the usual sense (or even the "camp" sense), as this is more a "pop" art classic of its particular time and place. While I'm glad I saw it, I'm not certain I'd want to spend much time seeing many more of these films, at least not in too quick a succession.
Do watch the interviews with the director (who is now old and somewhat forgetful) and the lead actor Jo Shishido (old, but sharp as a tack and much more interesting). I had wondered where the odd title came from, as I could not figure out to what it referred. Turns out the director couldn't either. He says the producers probably chose it because the movie was marketed to "youth"--which I suppose makes a tad more sense than choosing the title because they planned to market the movie to beasts. |
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GreenCine Member Rating
(Average 7.13)
52 Votes
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