Branded to Kill (1967)

Branded to Kill (Koroshi no rakuin)
Directed by Seijun Suzuki
Written by Hachiro Guryu, Takeo Kimura, Chusei Sone, and Atsuye Yomatoya
1967/Japan
Nikkatsu
Repeat viewing/Netflix rental

[box] No. 1: This is how Number 1 works: first he exhausts you, and then he kills you.[/box]

Seijun Suzuki did it his way.  And didn’t work again for ten years.

Goro Hanada (chipmunk-cheeked Jo Shishido) is No. 3 hitman in Japan.  We soon find out he has a fetish for the smell of rice cooking.  He and the wife have rough sex throughout the film.  He is hired by a yakuza organization as bodyguard for a client.  The wife begins an affair with the yakuza boss.  The bodyguard operation is successful, but not before the body count approaches the double-digits.  Hitchhiking home, he is picked up by the mysterious beauty Misako.

Misako, a connoisseur of dead butterflies and birds, hires Goro to perform four hits.  She also knows how to boil rice and I don’t have to explain what happens with that.  One of Goro’s hits goes badly wrong.  The rest of the movie is devoted to a cat-and-mouse game with Japan’s No. 1 killer.

Suzuki put every bit of his sense of the absurd and experimental style into this film.  He was promptly fired on the ground that his films “make no sense and no money”.  The studio was right about that and yet Suzuki’s films have lived long after conventional potboilers had completed their brief but profitable runs.

The convoluted plot doesn’t really matter.  This is Suzuki’s chance to do what he loved best – make the most over-the-top scenes of death and sex oddly beautiful.  I can’t exactly recommend this film, but I think it would be worth it to try at least one.  You might like it.