Seijun Suzuki - Rise and Fall at Nikkatsu

Rise and Fall At Nikkatsu

In 1954, the Nikkatsu Company reopened its doors after having ceased all film production at the onset of the war. It lured many assistant directors from the other major film studios with the promise of circumventing the usual long queue for promotion. Among these wayfarers was Suzuki, who took an assistant directing position there at approximately 3 times his previous salary. He worked under directors Hidesuke Takizawa, Kiyoshi Saeki, So Yamamura and Hiroshi Noguchi. His first screenplay to be filmed was Duel at Sunset (落日の決闘 Rakujitsu no ketto, 1955). It was directed by Hiroshi Noguchi. In 1956, he became a full-fledged director.

His directorial debut, credited to his real name, Seitarō Suzuki, was Victory Is Mine, a kayo eiga, or pop song film, part of a subgenre that functioned as a vehicle for hit pop records and singers. Impressed by the film's quality Nikkatsu signed him to a longterm contract. Nearly all of the films that he made for Nikkatsu were program pictures, or B-movies, production-line genre films made on a tight schedule and shoestring budget that were meant to fill out the second half of a double feature. B-directors were expected to work fast, taking any and every script that was assigned to them, and they refused scripts only at the risk being dismissed. Suzuki maintained an impressive pace, averaging 3½ films per year, and claims to have turned down only 2 or 3 scripts during his years at the studio. He later said of his work schedule (and wrongful dismissal):

Actually making movies was painful work, as I often said to my wife. I had already wanted to quit four or five years before. I told her I hated this foolish, painful process. She told me I shouldn't say such a thing ... that if I talked that way, it would come true. And it eventually did. For me, it was a relief. I felt this way from the very start.

His third film and first yakuza action movie, Satan's Town, linked him inexorably to the genre. Underworld Beauty (1958) marked his first CinemaScope film and was also the first to be credited to his pseudonym Seijun Suzuki.

Having enjoyed moderate success, his work began to draw more attention, especially among student audiences, with 1963's Youth of the Beast which is considered his "breakthrough" by film scholars. Suzuki himself calls it his "first truly original film." His style increasingly shirked genre conventions, favouring visual excess and visceral excitement over a coherent plot and injecting madcap humour into a normally solemn genre, developing into a distinctive "voice". Tony Rayns explained, "In his own eyes, the visual and structural qualities of his '60s genre films sprang from a mixture of boredom ('All company scripts were so similar; if I found a single line that was original, I could see room to do something with it') and self-preservation ('Since all of us contract directors were working from identical scripts, it was important to find a way of standing out from the crowd')."

If you hear the word B-movie, you will probably laugh heartily, but a B-movie director has his own worries. In newspaper ads the main feature usually has the most prominent place, and I'm way down at the bottom. The B-movie director's biggest worry is the question 'What effect will the main feature have that is shown before your film?' Films from Nikkatsu usually have the same plot: the main character falls in love with a woman, he kills the bad guy and gets the woman. This pattern is repeated in every film, so you concentrate on finding out all you can about who the actors are, who the director is, and the approach this director has. This is what the B-movie director does. For instance, the main feature's director has a habit of filming a love scene a certain way; this means that I have to handle it in another way. The director of the main feature has it easy. He doesn't have to find out how I work at all. He can just do whatever he wants. So actually a B-movie director has a harder task than his colleague who does the main feature. Because of this the studio should give me more money than him, actually, but it's just the other way around.

This development was furthered with the assistance of like-minded collaborators. Suzuki considered the production designer to be among the most important:

The Bastard was the real turning-point in my career, more so than Youth of the Beast, which I made just before. It was my first time with as designer, and that collaboration was decisive for me. It was with Kimura that I began to work on ways of making the fundamental illusion of cinema more powerful.

His fan base grew rapidly, but did not extend to studio president Kyusaku Hori. Beginning with Tattooed Life, the studio issued Suzuki his first warning for "going too far". He responded with Carmen from Kawachi after which he was ordered to "play it straight" and had his budget slashed for his next film. The result was Tokyo Drifter, an "ostensibly routine potboiler" made into a "jaw-dropping, eye-popping fantasia". Further reduced to filming in black-and-white Suzuki made his 40th film in his 12 years with the company, Branded to Kill (1967), considered an avant-garde masterpiece by critics, for which Hori promptly fired him.