Twenty Actors

My twenty favorite actors, unranked, except for the top two. Where possible, I used images from my favorite performances.

Check out Nathaniel's list, and his links to other lists.

The Films of Seijun Suzuki: Underworld Beauty (1958)

In this new blog series, Tim Brayton of Antagony and Ecstasy and yours truly, Mike Phillips, will be looking at the films of Japanese director Seijun Suzuki, who's acknowledged, at least by those who have heard of him, as one of the masters of yakuza cinema, contemporary Japanese cinema, and cinema that you might need to watch more than once to completely understand. We'll be looking at ten of his films from various points in his 50-year career; we're skipping some of the more well-known ones such as Tokyo Drifter, which Tim covered elsewhere, and Branded to Kill, and we're limited to the films that are available on DVD.

We're starting the series with Underworld Beauty (1958), the first of the string of increasingly bizarre yakuza films that made him famous. Their strangeness and constant deviation from the Nikkatsu studio formula led to his discharge after he directed his masterpiece, 1967's Branded to Kill. He sued, won, was blacklisted, and made films only intermittently for the next decade. He had a career renaissance in the early 1980s starting with his Japanese Academy Award-winning film Zigeunerweisen, and another 20 years later with 2001's Pistol Opera and 2005's Princess Raccoon. Now 86 and still directing, he recently completed his 54th feature, A Goldfish of the Flame, which appears to be an erotic, adult take on the story that inspired Hiyao Miyazaki's most recent film, Ponyo. If there's anyone qualified to make a gonzo film about sex with goldfish, it's Seijun Suzuki.

But on to Underworld Beauty, which is in many ways a pretty straightforward yakuza film. A gangster, Miyamoto (Michitaro Mizushima), is released from prison, retrieves the diamonds that were the object of the botched robbery that landed him there, and attempts to make amends to a friend who lost his leg in the same robbery by selling the jewels and giving him the proceeds. Things, as you might have guessed, don't work out quite so smoothly.

I was most impressed by how the film used the stolen diamonds, which prompt a symphony of greed, disloyalty, and murder, as more than just a MacGuffin. They become identified with both Miyamoto and Akiko, the reckless younger sister of his crippled friend (and likely the "underworld beauty" of the title). Like diamonds, their relationship is forged through heat and pressure, and the most dazzling shootouts occur in a steam bath and in a coal-filled boiler room. This strikes me as more thematic cohesiveness than you'd get in a routine crime film, although I can't claim to be an expert on them and I might be mistaken attributing that to any Suzuki authorial "stamp." But the Suzuki extravagance is certainly here, apparent in the fixation on half-naked female bodies (many of them mannequins) and operatic scenes of violence (my favorite was Miyamoto's destruction of Arita's mannequin studio).

Tim: I should probably make it clear to everyone before we get to far that I haven't dug too deeply into Suzuki's filmography myself; in fact, Underworld Beauty is only the second one of his films that I've ever seen (though I have been an admirer of the Criterion Collection covers for his movies since time immemorial). So thanks, Mike, for putting this idea out there in the first place. It's a learning experience for me as much as anything.

So, on to the movie: I completely agree with you, that the use of the diamonds in the film is unusually clever for a plot-driving device. I was particularly taken with the very late shot of the diamonds lying on a pile of coal, shining in the fire light. It really tied up in a neat bow the theme of diamonds (our heroes) being created through great pressure from filthy, common coal—and at the same time, it stresses how at heart, the diamonds haven't ultimately changed: they're still just lying around in a coal bin, getting filthy. I was expecting that to be the final shot of the movie, in fact, and I was a touch let down when the final scene faded up. It felt like a studio-mandated pat conclusion, but maybe I'm reading things into it that aren't there.

I might also add, the diamonds are a metaphor for Underworld Beauty itself: take a perfectly common substance (the yakuza picture), apply pressure (Suzuki's artistry), and what comes out is far more beautiful than it ought to be. I'll admit to having seen very few 1950s Japanese crime movies directed by someone not named Kurosawa, but there was a level of artistry here, a certain command of the frame and the camera, that I for one don't tend to expect from B-films. The scene where Akiko is posing for the nude study, for example: the way that Suzuki choreorgraphs the actress's movements with the camera,and even the exact locations of the cuts are all perfectly placed to tease the audience as mercilessly as possible. It's great technical filmmaking, even if it's ultimately in service to a bawdy joke.

I'll admit, what jumped out at me most was the sex in the movie, but I know that we'll have plenty of opportunities to talk about sex and nudity in this and every other Suzuki film, so instead of going there now, my second observation about it: this seemed, to me, an unexpectedly American movie, especially the lighting and the musical score, which could have both been taken intact from the early noir period. Change the character names, and this could easily pass for a Hollywood crime drama of the same decade. Part of Suzuki's craziness, or was this a tendency in Japanese genre films at the time that I'm just not aware of?

Mike: I think you're probably right about the studio-mandated happy ending—it should have ended with the diamonds getting lost in the coal pile, to be eventually fed into the boiler and destroyed (if diamonds do, indeed, burn), which would have put this ending on par with the gold blowing away in Treasure of the Sierra Madre. What little I've read about Nikkatsu's policies indicates that Suzuki probably had control over how to shoot things, but not what scenes to shoot. The studio assigned directors to projects at random, and I'm guessing they mandated other things too.

Re: Sex. Since the next film we're covering is called Young Breasts, I join you in abstaining from that conversation here. But it's interesting to note that post-Suzuki, Nikkatsu was pretty much relegated to making softcore porn films for a number of years before recovering enough to branch back out into other genres.

And I'm totally with you on the similarities with American films. I don't have much to base this opinion on because I know next to nothing about pre-Suzuki Japanese crime films, but I have to believe that at least some of this is intentional. Although with some, the sheer iconographic hegemony of the putative "source" film might be misleading me: can any movie have a chase through a sewer tunnel without reminding me of The Third Man? But other sequences seemed like deliberate homages, including the alley chase where we only see shadows (shades of Panic in the Streets). One thing that bothered me about the noirish shot setups was that the lurching camera, which often had to maneuver into the right position to nail that gorgeous or ironic shot, took on its own personality, as if the cameraman was part of the scene and had to step out of the way of the action. It drew too much attention to the camera work, to the detriment of the effect the shot might have had without the visible maneuvering. It may be that this early in Suzuki's career he was still working out the kinks (pun intended) of his style.

Tim: Yeah, I noticed the same wobbly camera moves that you did. I have to be honest, part of me found them charming; they add to the hand-made DIY quality of the whole work. Though I'll agree that they detract from the effectiveness of those individual shots.

And I absolutely must concede your greater point, which is that Underworld Beauty finds Suzuki trying and not always succeeding to nail down his style. I think the fact that we both saw so much American film noir influence speaks to the fact that he wasn't being so creative here as he'd be later on, not that I'm any kind of expert on late Suzuki. But the last thing you could say about Tokyo Drifter is that it's beholden to any kind of pre-existing tradition, except imaybe that it cuts together any number of disparate elements from other movies. Whereas Underworld Beauty, though it certainly has flashes of craziness (mostly in the scenes of violence), seems a great deal more tentative. It's worth pointing out that if Wikipedia is to be believed, this was the first film in which the man born "Seitaro" Suzuki was credited by his nom du film, Seijun Suzuki. Almost as though, after knocking out a few standard-template pictures for Nikkatsu, he wanted to reinvent himself and his aesthetic, but it took him some practice before he really figured out how to make a "Seijun Suzuki film."

But I don't want to lose sight of the movie we have, in all its proto-Suzuki goodness. For starters, we haven't even mentioned the two leads, Michitaro Mitzushima as Miyamoto, and Mari Shiraki as Akiko, who I think both did a really fantastic job. Mitzushima is great especially, doing a sort of parody of the American gangster trope. Being unaccustomed to the "lower-tier" of Japanese actors in the '50s—the ones who didn't get to work with Kurosawa and Ozu, basically—I wasn't prepared for Mitzushima's take on the material, which is so... flinty? hard-boiled? It calls out for clichés like that, because it's a performance so knowing about the clichés in the character.

I think it's actually with the characters and the performances that the film really seems most like what I associate with Suzuki's films, more than the occasional bursts of highly-choreographed violence (which you mentioned before, and I'd love to hear you elaborate on your thoughts there). In a typical American crime film that's striving for some kind of artistic merit, we usually see characters given extra amounts of characterization, so that they seem like real people grounding this outrageous story. The characters in Underworld Beauty seem almost to be the exact opposite—though they're given plenty of details establishing who they are, they always feel extremely fake, like they're narrative elements in the shape of people, and they're aware of it.

Mike: I did like Mitzushima's deadpan squint as Miyamoto, and I absolutely loved the fact that he always had that black hat cocked over his eye. But Shiraki's character made absolutely no sense; it wasn't the actress's fault, as the screenplay jerked her around so you couldn't guess her motivations from one scene to the next, but Shiraki didn't do anything interesting to salvage it for me. The nonsensical character goes with the film's B-movie origins, but I'm blaming Shiraki for not finding anything interesting in the character. The supporting characters tended to blend into the background as toughs in trenchcoats, but that's to be expected—how many American noirs developed their supporting characters with more than a trait or two? Two stood out, one in a good way, one in a bad way. Arita, the diamond thief and "artist," was positively frightening, veering wildly between deadly cold when he retrieves the diamonds from his associate's abdomen and almost Renfield-like squeaking when he finally has one in his mitts; but the strutting, cowardly toady whose name I didn't catch seems to be a staple comic-relief character in these films, and I could do without him. It makes you wonder why a gang boss would have such a preening buffoon around, but I suppose they're like court jesters (with guns).

The Perverse Suzuki Violence(TM) that struck me the most was Miyamoto's recovering of the diamonds in Arita's shop; surrounded by half-finished nude mannequins, Miyamoto bitch-slaps Arita into a moaning wreck crawling on the floor amid detached heads. It's so damned operatic, with its carefully choreographed movements around the studio, like you'd get in a classic Hollywood dance scene, only with nude mannequins instead of backup dancers. It's pretty short, nothing like the extended shootout that closes the film, but it's a good preview of the weird sex-and-violence concoction we'll get with later Suzuki films. And I can't say for sure, but I'd guess either Suzuki or someone else at Nikkatsu had seen Stanley Kubrick's early film Killer's Kiss, with its finale inside the mannequin factory; at least the mannequins in Suzuki's film make sense.

But again I'm making connections I'm not sure it's OK to make. I read that he hadn't even heard of, say, John Huston before he started directing, and that his brother stated that he stopped being influenced by anything beyond his early twenties (which would have been in during WW2), so is it safe to say he was taking notes during Kubrick's more forgettable films? I feel like a bit of a fake proclaiming this film's stylistic and thematic ancestors, but given the lack of information on Suzuki, I guess we'll have to take that risk, at least until we get to his better-known films.

Tim: I must confess that I've never quite gotten around to Killer's Kiss. But whether it influenced Suzuki or not—my gut says "probably not"—that mannequin sequence was a real marvelous bit of filmmaking, and no mistake. You compare it to a dance sequence, which is probably the best way to describe it.

More than just the bravura style on display, though, what really got to me was the strange erotic charge of it. I was idly reminded of something I once read, that in Japanese porn for a long time (maybe still?) there are very strict limits on what parts of the human body you can show on camera, so the filmmakers have to be creative in their visual metaphors—hence things like the evergreen "tentacle rape" subgenre. Decades earlier, there was of course no Japanese porn industry to speak of, but I was struck the same way: all those bare mannequins stood in for the more explicit nudity that Suzuki plainly wanted to show (that nude modeling scene!) but couldn't. So instead he went crazy with what he could put in the movie, and it gives the whole thing a peculiar sense of being absolutely sexual without any real sex to speak of. Sort of like how, when you're watching, e.g., a Ginger Rogers dance and she spins so fast her dress reveals a great deal of thigh, and it feels so much naughtier than an actress going full frontal in the 1970s: it so palpably oughtn't be there, in that time, that even the tiny hint of the human female form seems outrageously kinky.

Ah! but we weren't going to talk about sex yet. And with the next film on the docket titled Young Breasts, I suspect we're going to have a great deal of sex to discuss in the very immediate future. So let us her leave the young Suzuki, still trying to figure out exactly who he was as a filmmaker, and move on to... well, still young Suzuki, but at least a young Suzuki who was out and proud about making sexploitation.