Youth of the Beast
1963
Directed by Seijun Suzuki
Written by Ichiro Ikeda and Tadaaki Yamazaki
Starring Joe Shishido
Let's put it this way: in one of the bonus features on Youth of the Beast, an aged Joe Shishido holds up his script to show the original title of the film, Knock Off The Bad Guys: Leave It To Me.
This ain't Citizen Kane.
Youth of the Beast fully embraces its yakuza movie status from minute one--this is a movie about bad men, and the badness that they do. Like a bubblegum pop version of Michael Mann, Suzuki's film follows two gangs at war, the nasty stranger who jumps in the middle, and the blood that gets spilled in the process. (Isn't that the same plot as Sanjuro?) Joe Shishido, a baby-faced Japanese actor with an odd facial scar (a scar that he thought would keep him from working) is the stranger, and it is on his shoulders that the movie rest--even though it takes about 30 minutes to figure out what the hell is going on. Youth of the Beast is a definite product of it's time--the production company was producing up to 3 movies a week, the music is awful and jarring, and with few exceptions, the shot location was determined by whatever tv set wasn't being used at the time. Still, Joe and Suzuki give the movie a hell of a lot of attention, and although the final twist is ruined early in the film, Youth of the Beast has enough amped-up insanity that it is worth the headache the music induces. Yakuza films have lost a bit of their zany roots in the last few years, due to the work of auteurs like Beat Takashi, but it's refreshing to watch somebody throw all the elements back into the goofball-crazy blender that got the genre back on the road to success. They don't make movies like this anymore--and that's because everybody thinks silly is the same thing as irony.
Thankfully, Suzuki owned a dictionary.
-Tucker Stone, 2006
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