Customer Reviews

Branded to Kill

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This review is for the Criterion Collection DVD edition of the film.

This move is one of the most odd gangster films I have seen.

The film follows a gangster [who] is known as the "number 3" killer and is epeatedly threatened by the "number 1" killer.

This film contains nudity to a degree of which I am surprised was legal in Japan at the time the movie was filmed. The film has several clever tricks by the characters to avoid being shot and there is some witty humor in the film also.

The director of this film was fired by the studio after aming this film and was blacklisted for 10 years.

The Criterion Collection DVD has 2 special features on it. There is an 11 minute interview with the director Seijun Suzuki, and a slide show of Japanese movie posters and lobby cards from the collection of John Zorn, who also wrote the liner ntes thant come with the DVD.

I really can't understand how people see this movie as being "incoherent" or "boring". Maybe I've seen too many mst3k movies...now those, THOSE movies that are riffed are incoherent! Plain and simple it's a yakuza movie, there, was that so incoherent? I just saw it on IFC and I loved it. I personally enjoyed Tokyo Drifter more, I really dug the groovy music. And artsy...you haven't seen artsy until you've seen the skateboard video memory screen. They take artsy over the top; of the 44 minutes about 5 minutes is actual skateboarding the rest is weird random images but still good. And boring...at least to me it was boring is Gerry -- it's just walking in the desert. Maybe not boring to others but it was just too much for me. Anyways Branded To Kill and Tokyo Drifter are great movies and not at all boring.

Here it is: BRANDED TO KILL is director, Seijun Suzuki's best movie. Japanese film lovers will tell you that Seijun is one of Japan's greatest filmmakers. Therefore this film should not be overlooked. If you like action, then prepare yourself for a real treat. You will not regret owning this film.
Forget that this film is Japanese, has subtitles, and was released in 1967. This film is a classic masterpiece. Heck, even the director got fired after its release. The film is fast paced and beautifully shot. The musical score is so smooth and keep in mind, we're talking no special effects. There is a scene where a man is literally on fire for over 20 seconds.
All in all, the story is straightforward. A Yakuza gangster is hired to kill 4 people. He learns that he is the Yakuza's third best killer. He does not know who the #1 killer is but he wants his spot. The women in this film are beautiful and the action is intense. Take a chance and see why this film has inspired so many over the years.

My Television has become the talk of the town thanks to those nifty "Color Bars" on this heaven sent DVD...whenever I throw a party the first thing I do is pop this hot mama in the plaver and drop on those hot "bars" up on my screen and ...Boom! next thing I know...I've got my pick of any female in the house!!! OH YEAH!!! Shieat, my nezra! I'd gladly pay 1,000 bananas just for this sexy mamba-jamba of a DVD...you buy it too and see what happens to your sex life!! Oh! I gotta go! Looks like another fine honey done got her eyes transfixed on my "Bars"!!! BOI!!!!!

"Branded To Kill" takes every Japanese gangster-movie cliche within arm's reach, stands it on its head, and points and laughs.

No wonder no one got the joke back in 1967, especially not director Seijun Suzuki's bosses at Nikkatsu. They were a studio which prided itself on being the #1 purveyor of cinematic yakuza mayhem, and when they saw Suzuki's middle-finger salute to a genre he thought was getting tired and repetitive, they made sure he didn't work in that town again for at least a decade. But Suzuki had the last laugh: not only did he come back in triumph (and is now currently recognized as being one of the greats of Japanese cinema), he even got the chance to sort-of-remake "Branded" as "Pistol Opera" at the ripe young age of 81.

Watching "Branded to Kill" now, it's easy to see why it drove the Nikkatsu suits up the wall. The "hero", Goro (Jo Shishido, with his chipmunk-like facial implants), is the #3 hitman in Japan, gunning for the top slot after the mob turns against him. See, he was given this assignment, and after he screwed it up (a butterfly landed on his gunsight), the rest of the mob went gunning for him. He returned the favor, in between boff-sessions with his girlfriend. Goro is one weird egg, all right: he gets sexually aroused by the smell of cooking rice. But he's nothing compared to the #1 hitman, to whom he gets handcuffed to for most of the third act in a "Defiant Ones"-like plot twist.

But you know something? The plot is scarcely even the point. In fact, Suzuki makes his contempt for the by-the-numbers script by reducing all its most important elements to throwaways and focusing on the weird, mannered elements that make the story so pungent. That goes right up to, and including, the ending, which has to be the ultimate anti-yakuza-machismo cinematic statement of its kind, with Mr. #1 Killer getting his in an empty boxing ring.

It's easier to swallow "Branded" today, because the bizarre, surreal black humor and the whacked-out smell the whole thing exudes had absolutely no precedent then. Consider the recent "Ghost Dog," which contains several direct visual quotes from "Branded," but lacks that movie's stinging self-knowledge.

This film was actually the culmination of Suzuki's urge to explode genres from the inside with farce and comedy. He had already done so, to varying degrees, in previous movies, but the meddling of Nikkatsu's board of directors nixed most of those experiments: many of his best movies are in tatters and are uneasy compromises between the flat-out action Nikkatsu wanted and the more intelligent satirical work he wanted to do. "Branded" works not only as a tear-down of the posturing machismo of tough-guy movie genres, but of audiences' very expectations of the same.

An anti-hero hitman who sniffs steaming rice. How much more off-the-wall can you get?

Suzuki does some amazing stuff with this movie. Weird and amusing editing, and interesting and funny sequences blended with disturbing action.

I was amused to see that this film influenced Jim Jarmusch in his recent effort, GHOST DOG. There are at least two scenes from BRANDED TO KILL that ended up being reinterpreted in GHOST DOG.

A very fun film, and another Criterion triumph.

Suzuki's Branded to Kill has to be one of the most incredible Japanese films ever made. The director effortlessly combines screwball comedy, 60s noir, French New Wave, spaghetti Western (yes, that's right, spaghetti Western), and black comedy with healthy doses/dollops of surrealism, the Japanese ghost story, eroticism and cynicism.

Obviously the emphasis is on style, and it's here by the truckload. The story of a yakuza whose manic drive to be Killer Number One--instead of his current Number Three status--it shows the protagonist, Hamada, nonchalantly shooting a woman, assassinating a few other guys (one with an amazingly comic plumbing technique), and, near the end of the film, vying with the real Number One for that very spot. When you hear Japanese spoken throughout the film, it's just as comic (if not more so) to hear whoever refers to their killer ranking in Japanese-inflected English: "Number One", "Number Three", etc.

The main musical theme of the film is without question an homage to the Ennio Morricone soundtracks of numerous spaghetti Westerns, and every time a gunshot is heard, it has the same echoing twang heard among the canyons of the same genre of film. The sex scenes are highly erotic--taking this far from the realm of a traditional noir--and the scenes of gunplay often verge on the hysteric.

Yet noir this is; near the end of the film, Hamada is shown in an extended sequence of overt paranoia--will the real Number One kill him even as he walks around his own apartment? And the black-and-white cinematography, the occasional odd angles of shots, and the markedly cynical bent of the entire film mark it as such, no question.

A female character, Misako, functions as the unique, unusual Japanese counterpart of the femme fatale, but she's much more than that. Often appearing ghostlike in various scenes, she's Hamada's alter ego, reminding him of his frailty (she's a fanatic butterfly collector, and it's a butterfly that ruins his assassination of a key hit), and echoing the intensity of his own insecurity re his status, his psyche, his life.

This is a film that should absolutely be seen by anyone seriously interested in what film can do. No wonder this film in particular was a major influence on Tarantino, Jarmusch, and a whole host of other film makers--American and otherwise.

I was inspired to seek out Branded to Kill as it's long been one of Jim Jarmusch's favorite films, and he's long been one of my favorite filmmakers. You could say that his interest in Japanese pop culture first came to the fore in Mystery Train, the darkly comic tale of two Japanese tourists on a pilgrimage to the Shrine of Elvis (Graceland). But it's Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, which mostly clearly takes its inspiration from Seijun Suzuki's bizarre, yet strangely beautiful Branded to Kill. Certainly, the external trappings are different (Suzuki's film is in B&W, it's set in Japan, RZA most definitely did not compose the soundtrack, etc.), but the central characters are cut from the same inscrutable cloth. Arguably, Ghost Dog also takes its inspiration from another non-American noir released in '67--Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samourai with Alain Delon as, you guessed it, a bird-loving hitman of few words (a film that, in turn, inspired John Woo's The Killer).

Branded to Kill plays out like a cross between an American noir from the '50s (like Kiss Me Deadly), a French New Wave post-noir (like Breathless or Le Doulos), and a Japanese "art" film (like Woman in the Dunes). At first, you think Goro (Jo Shishido) is one odd dude (with his chipmunk cheeks, wierd rice obsession, insatiable libido, etc.), but then you meet the women in his life...both of whom, his wife (Mariko Ogawa) and butterfly-obsessed mistress (Mari Annu), are about as strange as it gets (so strange--and downright kinky--in fact, that accusations of misogyny would not be completely misplaced).

If you've been looking for something different, you've definitely found it in Branded to Kill. If the plot is as incomprehensible as that of, say, The Big Sleep, it doesn't really matter. It's all about the look and feel of the thing, best exemplified by the set pieces, most of which are quite spectacular (and constructed more out of ingenuity than cold hard cash). Recommended as much to fans of Jarmusch and Melville as to fans of Takeshi Kitano, yet another filmmaker who has mastered the art of the surprisingly sympathetic (and silent) hitman. And you'll never look at a butterfly the same way again--or a bowl of rice, for that matter.

Trivia note: Masatoshi Nagase from Mystery Train and the Suzuki-inspired trilogy that began with The Most Terrible Time of My Life, also appears in Pistol Opera (2001), Suzuki's sequel to Branded to Kill (released when Nagase was only a year old!).

...I just had to chime in with a WOW. So "this is how No. 1 works"? Stunningly shot in BW, insanely scripted, and lovingly acted: I wouldn't trade this movie for all the rice steam in China. Buy it, you'll be glad you did.

I think the term "incoherent" is flung around far too much in reviews, when they actually mean "implausible." Even if they don't make sense, most movies have a logical flow. "Un Chien Andalou" has a "plot" of sorts, in that events happen in sequential order. Jan Svankmajer's shorts have events in sequential order. Even people who have a little too much fun in the editing room usually come up with something that at least presents events in a somewhat coherent fashion.

But this movie IS incoherent. Frankly, I don't care if it's New Wave or not, the entire middle third is basically just hosing us with random images, and that's not good filmmaking unless you've been brainwashed by our nation's film schools. I wasn't sure if this was utterly sincere or if Seijun Suzuki was poking fun. I'm all for art in genre movies, but not silliness.

If you're a fan of "Ghost Dog: Way of The Samurai", then this film is worth checking out to see where Jarmusch got his inspiration. Otherwise, just don't bother; it's incoherent, it's boring, and it's the kind of thing that turn anybody without a film degree away from "art cinema."