Product Description

When a mysterious stranger muscles into two rival yakuza gangs, Tokyo's underworld explodes with violence. Youth of the Beast was a breakthrough for director Seijun Suzuki, introducing the flamboyant colors, hallucinatory images, and striking compositions that would become his trademark. The Criterion Collection proudly presents the film that revitalized the yakuza genre and helped define the inimitable style of a legendary cinematic renegade.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #77860 in DVD
• Brand: Image Entertainment
• Released on: 2005-01-11
• Rating: Unrated
• Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
• Formats: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, Special Edition, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: Japanese
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 92 minutes

Amazon.com
Seijun Suzuki's delirious take on pulp-gangster films blows the lid off the genre with mad energy and stylistic excess, twisting a cliché-riddled revenge plot lifted from Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo (which also inspired Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars) into a wild yakuza explosion. The somber black-and-white opening with a single color element--a pink flower lying on the floor--explodes into bright color, blaring music, and random violence. Chipmunk-cheeked Suzuki regular Jo Shishido hides behind dark glasses as the brutal thug Jo, who auditions for the Nomota mob boss by beating up underlings in his own nightclub (we watch the spectacle from behind soundproof glass while a go-go dancer shimmies in the foreground). Quickly establishing himself as the outfit's most ruthless debt collector and enforcer, he visits a rival gang (headquartered in a loft overlooking a movie house) and before long is playing the two against one another. The tangled plot also involves the Nomota honcho's gay brother, a scheme against his sixth wife, and the mysterious Takeshita School of Knitting, all set at a barreling pace and spiced with jagged narrative leaps, avant-garde riffs, and glowing colorscapes that would make Douglas Sirk jealous. In one bizarre scene, a raging wind whips an amber-hued desert into a surreal dust storm just outside the picture window of the Nomota boss's living room window as he blithely flogs his mistress. Suzuki's cinematic madness finds its culmination in Branded to Kill and Tokyo Drifter. --Sean Axmaker

Customer Reviews

Another Seijun Master Piece
I must dissagree with Sean's analysis. While Branded to Kill is certainly a stylistic masterpiece. This film makes Tokyo Drifter seem like a game of Candyland. Ever tongue in cheek, Seijun once again takes a brilliant jab at the Japanese psyche, and wounds once again. With all the camp of a B movie, the cinematic brilliance of an Orson Welles in Hong Kong, Seijun takes on, once again, the crippled self-image of postwar Japan. Replete with a visceral display of corruption, and the seedier underbelly of power that has held sway through out Japan's last several centuries.

Knock-out 60's crime thriller!
This is one of the best Japanese crime films of the 1960's, to have seen release in the United States! It is also, arguably, one of the best films by the amazing "outlaw" director, Suzuki Seijun. This was Suzuki-sensei's "breakthrough" film; in as much as it was the first film where he truly let his flamboyant, dizzying, artistic sense come forward. Full of intense, innovative, eye-popping visuals, the film never loses its solid, pulp fiction narrative flow. This is thanks, in part, to a great script based on the novel by Japanese "hard-boiled" master, Oyabu Haruhiko. A great story (though somewhat typical in the Japanese "gangster" tradition), brilliant direction, and wonderful performances (especially by the always great, Shishido Jo)-- all help to make this an outstanding example of the Japanese thriller!

Every cop is a criminal...
Suzuki Seijun hasn't made a dull film yet. A contract worker for most of his career, he could take the most cliche-ridden assignment and turn it into gold.

"Youth of the Beast" ("Yaju no Seishun") is no exception. A typical revenge-plot, with the "good cop" posing as "bad cop" to get in good with the gangsters before enacting his vengeance, Suzuki takes it up a notch with innovative camera work and vivid, colorful imagery. By no means the wild ride of something like "Branded to Kill," it is still a quality Yakuza flick, Suzuki-style. There is more than a hint of "Yojimbo" in this film, but the similarities are soon forgotten.

Suzuki's visuals are well-served by tough-guy standby Shishido Jo, famous for his plastic surgery to give himself a more rugged look. Veteran of many of Suzuki's flicks, he brings an authenticity and a grounding-point in the convoluted world of gang-politics. Watanabe Misako brings a nice tenderness to the tough-guy world, as the wife of a detective who was killed.

The Criterion DVD for "Youth of the Beast" is fairly bare-boned, on par with their release for Suzuki's "Fighting Elegy." The picture is lovely, the original soundtrack and dialog are preserved, and it is a film not likely to be offered elsewhere. One could have hoped for more on the DVD release, but it is nice to have it available at all.