Branded to Kill

Koroshi no rakuin

Japan

1967

87 Min

Black and White

2.35:1

Japanese

Currently 4.1/5 Stars.
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PROD Kaneo Iwai, Takiko Mizunoe

CAST Jô Shishido, Mariko Ogawa, Anne Mari, Kôji Nanbara, Isao Tamagawa, Hiroshi Minami

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 (chipmunk-cheeked superstar Joe Shishido) with a fetish for sniffing boiled rice 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. –The Criterion Collection

Director

Seijun Suzuki

Seijun Suzuki (鈴木清順, Suzuki Seijun?), born Seitaro Suzuki (鈴木清太郎 Suzuki Seitarō) on May 24, 1923, is a Japanese filmmaker, actor, and screenwriter. His films are renowned by film enthusiasts worldwide for their jarring visual style, irreverent humour, nihilistic cool and entertainment-over-logic sensibility. He made 40 predominately B-movies for the Nikkatsu Company between 1956 and 1967, working most prolifically in the yakuza genre. His increasingly surreal style began to draw the ire of the studio in 1963 and culminated in his ultimate dismissal for what is now regarded his magnum opus, Branded to Kill (1967), starring notable collaborator Joe Shishido. Suzuki successfully sued the studio for wrongful dismissal but was blacklisted for 10 years. As an independent filmmaker he won critical acclaim and a Japanese Academy Award for his Taishō Trilogy, Zigeunerweisen (1980), Kagero-za (1981) and Yumeji (1991).

His films remained widely unknown outside of Japan until a series… read more

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Ciprian David

8Apr13

A neurotic nightmare of overwhelming proportions having Jô Shihsidos close-ups desperately holding together the melancholy of an absurd dance of assassins, guns, sex and paranoia.

WBA and Elisabeth Maurer like this

sewslow

12Mar13

Astounding

TFCHooligan69

10Mar13

Ridiculously entertaining in its absurdity. An instant favourite after having seen it for the first time tonight in a theatre. Too damn cool.

ElTigreNegro

5Mar13

Seijun Suzuki invents "cool" cinema with this satire of gangster movies. If anybody tried to make this movie in the big hollywood system these days they too would get fired.