Underworld Beauty, Kanto Wanderer, Tattooed Life

Seijun Suzuki’s heyday in the fifities and sixties was spent fighting constraints, both within Japan’s studio system and the not-particularly-respectable yakuza genre, his specialty. He made around forty films during this time, mainly splashy and stylish noirs with titles like Age of Nudity, Fighting Delinquents, and our favorite, Detective Bureau 2-3: Go to Hell Bastards. Of the three films here, the strongest is 1958’s Underworld Beauty, which captures the feel of a pulp novel as well or better than any film we’ve seen. The other two are well above average, thanks to Suzuki’s insistence on warping genre conventions with offbeat casting and plot. Tattooed Life’s highly stylized samurai battle, though only a few minutes long, is especially interesting for its clear influence on Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill. Seijun had a long hiatus, prompted by a firing after one too many “incomprehensible” movies; now, happily, he’s still working well into his seventies and finally getting the respect he deserves.