Guys, Girls & Guns

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

For decades, Japanese film history has been held hostage by the good taste of directors like Akira Kurosawa and Kenji Mizoguchi, whose tactful, subtle films are endlessly screened in retrospectives and reissued on DVD. Consequently, the world regards Japanese cinema as little more than a series of trembling melodramas and black-and-white samurai films. That’s why the series beginning tonight at the Japan Society, “No Borders, No Limits: 1960s Nikkatsu Action Cinema,” is such a liberating blast of hot cigarette smoke and cool, jet-set jazz. The eight movies that comprise the series, shot between 1960 and 1969, are the hamburger to the steak served by Messrs. Kurosawa and Mizoguchi. Unavailable on DVD, they’ve never been screened in America and are only now being seen thanks to an outfit called Outcast Cinema, which is laboriously subtitling each film by hand at every screening.

If Kurosawa was for the classes, then Nikkatsu action was for the masses. The first movie studio in Japan, Nikkatsu nickel-and-dimed its best talent into alienation before World War II, but after the war it got rich distributing Hollywood product. Twelve years later, the studio decided to jump back into movie production, but while its fat wallet attracted top talent, its movies repulsed audiences. Suddenly, in 1956, Elvis Presley hit the charts, Japan joined the United Nations, and Nikkatsu released “Season of the Sun,” its first “sun tribe” movie and its first big hit. The “sun tribes” were young kids cruising the beaches of Southern Japan, where jazz, casual sex, hard drinking, and fistfights were always on the menu. Officials tore their hair out over these amoral youth flicks, but French master François Truffaut praised them and Japanese audiences came in droves. Before long, Nikkatsu was minting young male celebrities at warp speed and needed vehicles for its stable of studs — and what says “macho” better than action movies? The studio feverishly paired visionary directors with marketable hunks and thus created Nikkatsu action. Just as art and convention were being upended on these shores as the 1960s began, the Nikkatsu movies rejected the familiar samurai togs for ice cream suits, snappy fedoras, and Mary Quant miniskirts. “I’m not interested in going to East Asia,” a floozy says in Toshio Masuda’s “Like a Shooting Star” (1967). “I’d rather go to Paris.” This was Japan’s version of the French New Wave, except bleaker, more stylish, and aiming primarily to entertain rather than enlighten. Rigorously cosmopolitan, these characters never walked into an izakaya and ordered sake; instead, they swooped into posh Western nightclubs and guzzled whiskey.

In “Like a Shooting Star,” male superstar Watari Tetsuya strolls along, whistling the theme music, stealing cars, and knocking off thugs for money. Stranded in the sticks for a year while waiting for the heat from his last job to cool down, he runs a bar that serves women and booze to sailors until he gets trapped in the crosshairs of chipmunk-cheeked Jo Shishido (the actor famously had plastic surgery in 1956, including cheek injections, which gave him his trademark look). “I’m a robot who kills people for money,” Mr. Shishido says, through his massive cheeks, as he and Mr. Tetsuya exchange blows in purple and silver hotel rooms before meeting their grim fates as casually as most of us meet our friends.

Mr. Shishido shines darkly in Takashi Nomura’s stark “A Colt Is My Passport” (1967), a movie as cool as its title. A frantic tour of the Tokyo underworld, the film lasts only as long as a single held breath, as an ice-cold hitman (Mr. Shishido) tries to get out of town after a hit goes wrong. A spaghetti western with a massive, shimmering score to match, “A Colt Is My Passport” is a compassionate portrait of the smutty people clinging to the underside of the Japanese dream. It all ends in a final gundown so bleak and abstract that it seems to mark the conclusion not just to this film, but to every action movie ever made.

But if these movies heralded the birth of a new generation, then Koreyoshi Kurahara’s “The Warped Ones” (1960) heralded its death. One of the last of the “sun tribe” films, it is a stunning huff of cinematic fumes that will leave your veins ringing with raw, dirty jazz. Tamio Kawachi delivers a once-in-a-lifetime performance as a manic drifter just out of prison who takes revenge on the reporter who sent him to the big house by raping the guy’s girlfriend. Spliced together by a jazz-drunk speed freak, the movie spirals out of control, jumping from rape drama to black comedy of manners to youth-gone-wild picture before ultimately hurling itself off a cliff and into the abyss. It’s the kind of movie that encourages kids to riot and primes men’s appetite for destruction.

“I know a place full of booze and loose women,” a character says in “Like a Shooting Star.” So do I. It’s called Nikkatsu-land, and this series will probably be your only chance to go there.

Through October 5 (333 E. 47th St., between First and Second avenues, 212-832-1155).


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