Critics reviews

It's a veritable pop-art extravaganza, complete with James Bond flare, Vincente Minnelli-esque musical numbers, a Western-inspired saloon straight out of Pioneertown, and mordant product placement...for hair dryers.

Released well after its maker had taken leave of such trivialities as narrative cohesion, this deconstructed gem functions more as a collection of tropes than a story: a hood trying to go straight, doomed molls, rival hitmen and blind, misplaced loyalty. Suzuki warps everything through a Pop Art prism to produce a mad jumble of hyperchromatic images of Day-Glo suns and blown-out black and white.

A technicolor explosion of style akin to the Pop Art of the era, Suzuki and [art director] Kimura employ color in bold and unique ways, one sparkling cinemascope frame followed by another. "A man's life bleeds away in crimson colors," we're told. In this film, it does so, remarkably.

Classical genre filmmaking visibly gives way to a new Japan - a glimpse of a new hairdryer called (in English) "Charm Lady" - and Suzuki's interest in the groovy stuff that's initially on the fringes, like the mad dancers upstairs in the club where the gangsters parley, the whole film increasingly aestheticised even as the rhythm stutters and drifts like its hero.