Episode 125 - Seijun Suzuki’s Tokyo Drifter & Branded To Kill

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This time on the podcast, Ryan and James are joined by Justin Vactor to discuss Seijun Suzuki’s films, Tokyo Drifter and Branded To Kill.

About the films:

Tokyo Drifter

In this jazzy gangster film, reformed killer Tetsu’s attempt to go straight is thwarted when his former cohorts call him back to Tokyo to help battle a rival gang. Director Seijun Suzuki’s onslaught of stylized violence and trippy colors is equal parts Russ Meyer, Samuel Fuller, and Nagisa Oshima’”an anything-goes, in-your-face rampage. Tokyo Drifter is a delirious highlight of the brilliantly excessive Japanese cinema of the sixties.

Branded To Kill

When Japanese New Wave bad boy Seijun Suzuki delivered this brutal, hilarious, and visually inspired masterpiece to the executives at his studio, he was promptly fired. Branded to Kill tells the ecstatically bent story of a yakuza assassin with a fetish for sniffing steamed rice (the chipmunk-cheeked superstar Joe Shishido) who botches a job and ends up a target himself. This is Suzuki at his most extreme’”the flabbergasting pinnacle of his sixties pop-art aesthetic.