NO BORDERS, NO LIMITS: NIKKATSU ACTION & '60S JAPAN

Ramen Westerns come to the Brattle

By JONATHAN DONALDSON

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Postwar Japan signaled the opening of Japanese cinema to reconciliation with Western influences. One particularly overlooked subgenre encapsulates the action thrillers produced by the legendary Nikkatsu studio. For years, these films were overlooked as nonacademic, but by the 1980s the works of the subgenre's master, Seijun Suzuki (Branded to Kill) began to bring recognition and re-evaluation to a number of great films. Nikkatsu films reveal themselves to be sincere, interesting, (albeit misogynistic and xenophobic) and full of a brand of hyperbole where every tire screeches. A series titled "No Borders, No Limits: Nikkatsu Action & '60s Japan" features mostly obscure non-Suzuki Nikkatsu films and hits the Brattle Friday night beginning with a pair of rarely screened "buddy-films"—1967's A Colt Is My Passport and 1960's The Warped Ones.

A Colt Is My Passport (director: Takashi Nomura) tells the tale of two elite assassins on the run from the very same yazuka crime-lords who hired them to dispose of an influential client. The heroes soon find themselves alone and imperiled in the ever-shrinking city of Yokohama, which seeks to devour them. An underground railroad leads them to a shady lodging for laborers where they find protection from a beautiful and destitute servant in search of an escape of her own. Colt is a stylistic hodgepodge of Hollywood glam elements set against the vulgar texture of quayside truckers and boat workers. The gangsters are striking in dark suits and gigantic American cars; the music a brilliant pastiche of the most recognizable spaghetti Western scores. This confluence of elements allows viewers to see the heroes simultaneously as gangsters, sheriffs, and samurais alike—especially in the startling showdown at sunset that ends the film. Fans of pensive, tough-guy films of the McQueen variety will see similarities, but characters here grapple with a much more traditional society.

The Warped Ones, by contrast, is an unrelenting and campy morality tale about hedonism and its consequences. The story follows the spree of two animalistic hoodlums and the perpetually cackling prostitute who joins in the revelry of their constant thugging. They steal a car and commence to brutally kidnap and rape a woman who, along with her fiancée, had been a police informant against them. She becomes pregnant and in sick twist of today's norms, she implores her attackers to '"morally soil'" her fiancée also in order to exonerate her own conscience. Amusingly, the crimes of the antagonists are literally fueled by a mediocre soundtrack of American jazz. At one point, one of the shirtless cretins shouts, "I need black music!" as if it were crystal-meth. Unlike another ridiculous and violent cultural commentary that comes to mind, –Russ Myers' Beyond the Valley of the Dolls– it's not clear how much Kurahura intends for the film to be a comedy. At times, the underlying philosophical principles of the film are too freely revealed, creating fissures in much of what was probably unintentionally overdone. The salon scene comes to mind, when a group of pretentious painters surround and comment on one of the hoodlums as if he were a piece of art: Those eyes reflect the boredom of society! Still, as a 1960 release, The Warped Ones is a cutting edge cult classic in the making and film not to miss.

NO BORDERS, NO LIMITS: NIKKATSU ACTION & '60S JAPAN

FRI. 4.18-THU 4.24

Brattle Theatre

40 Brattle St., Harvard SQ., Cambridge

617.876.6837

$7.50-$9.50

FOR SHOWTIMES VISIT BRATTLEFILM.ORG