Given the cult admiration afforded octogenarian director Seijun Suzuki in some circles—he counts Tarantino and Wong Kar-wai among his admirers—and the variety of subjects and genres he’s tackled (as a novice, I was caught off-guard by the trailer for Raccoon Princess his surreal new musical with Zhang Ziyi, but initiates were probably unsurprised), someone more well-schooled than I would probably be better equipped to comment on how successfully new Criterion DVDs of Youth of the Beast and Fighting Elegy function as points of entry to his hefty, ever-expanding oeuvre. I’m sure ardent admirers could argue for any number of favorites, but having only previously run into his bizarro postwar prostitute drama Gate of Flesh, the best I can do to locate these two films from the Sixties is to take them on their own terms, a task in itself.

1963’s Youth of the Beast, one of the many violent, kinetic yakuza thrillers that Suzuki churned out for Nikkatsu, reveals the director as something like the Douglas Sirk of the genre—so conversant with its tropes that he’s able to bend and break them, pushing us towards recognition of the overall artifice of the enterprise. It’s straightforward yet sticky, and throughout Suzuki is as comfortable dabbling in surrealism as he is in staging a fistfight. Detailing the quest of mysterious hitman “Jo” (his tag recalls the average Joes caught in the center of so many American noirs; the role is played here by Joe Shishido) to bring two notorious Tokyo gangs into war with each other, thus precipitating their downfall, Beast manages to best contemporaneous explorations into the gangster flick by the likes of Godard and the Nouvelle Vaguers in both the probing of genre limits and in delivering perversity and pleasure—simultaneously, in its best moments. If you thought Sin City was pulpy, watch this and see what you’ve been missing.

Although it was made three years later than Youth of the Beast, Fighting Elegy (described in an accompanying essay by Tony Rayns as a more personal project for the director) feels much older and is somewhat harder to classify. Kiroku (Hideki Takahashi) is a student in immediately prewar Japan who’s caught between dual loves: one for the chaste, religious Michiko, the other for (to quote the packaging) “savage, crazed violence.” On the surface it seems his lack of success with the former is the prime engine pushing him towards the latter, but as the film moves along and Kiroku morphs from wide-eyed bumbler into a steely street fighter (a change that Takahashi miraculously manages almost totally through degrees of squint), the film gradually reveals the institutional psychoses that shaped the generation of men who would lead their nation into conflict with the rest of the world. Though it may sound like grim stuff, Suzuki makes room for piano-side masturbation, kung fu parody, and just enough slapstick in his fight sequences to keep the movie slightly off-balance until its chilling conclusion: the onset of fascism. Read the historical note on the last page of the booklet to catch the full import of the film’s final minutes.

As usual, Criterion’s transfers are spot-on—the color in Beastlooks hand-painted while the blacks and whites of Fighting Elegy feel appropriately grungy and lo-fi while never falling into murkiness. For special features, Beastfeatures a brief interview with the director, and both films have their original theatrical trailers, but that’s about it. Take this more as an informational note than a critique—where a lovely multi-disc DVD set of Fanny and Alexander is designed to teach us to watch a familiar work in a different way, less adorned discs like these betray the desire to ensure the contents are merely available. For a director so well-known in Japan that he’s referred to by first name only, the effort couldn’t be more deserved.
—JEFF REICHERT