Pretty much everyone who was alive in the country at the time seems to remember the ever-present TV spots featuring the image of Yakushimaru in her ‘sailor suit’ school uniform wielding a tommy gun, or can sing the full lyrics to her #1 hit theme song four decades later, but, in the hands of uncompromising auteurist director Shinji Sômai, ‘Sailor Suit & Machine Gun’ stands out as so much more than just a flash-in-the-pan moment of pop supremacy.
Attacking this unlikely tale of a high school girl who unwittingly becomes the boss of a down-on-their-luck yakuza clan with nigh-on Wellesian audacity, Sômai entirely jettisons such expected youth movie staples as romance, music and coming-of-age cliché, instead delivering a movie which largely plays out like a peculiar hangover from the yakuza movies of the ‘70s, complete with frantic pacing, gritty location footage and harrowing outbursts of extreme violence, but imbued here with a weird ‘Terry & the Pirates’ kind of vibe, as the four loveable rogues who comprise Yakushimaru’s gang learn to respect and revere her.
In technical terms meanwhile, Sômai turns the movie into an astonishing tour de force, utilising painstakingly orchestrated extended takes, extreme high angles and a constantly moving camera to pull us through multiple worlds and spaces within the duration of a single shot, creating a disorientating, ever-shifting environment within which cast members - apparently driven to distraction by being forced to rehearse each scene upward of one hundred times prior to shooting - enact exchanges of raw and strange emotional intensity.
Clearly revelling in the outrageous / emblematic imagery he was able to wring from his iconic star, Sômai frequently pulls the film into a realm of outright pop surrealism, whether posing Yakushimaru in the lap of a bodhisattva statue, or tying her to a crane and repeatedly dunking her in a vat of liquid cement - a tendency which takes a more nightmarish turn in the second half of the film, when our heroine finds herself kidnapped by one ‘Fatso’ (Rentarô Mikuni), a deranged, Sadean Bond villain-type character who, amongst other things, crucifies Hiroko-san on a cubist cross, forces her to balance on an active landmine, and briefly threatens to subject her to vivisection before gun-toting help eventually arrives.
Shredding genre expectations and cinematic norms like confetti, Sômai pulled off an incredible balancing act here, creating a movie that is so provocative, so wildly stimulating and so damned fun that it’s difficult to imagine the teenage target audience left theatres anything less than totally exhilarated by what they had just seen, even as the nation’s critics and cinephiles were meanwhile no doubt queueing up to hail the director as the natural successor to Welles, or Godard, or whoever else.
Feeling like the ultimate culmination of the unruly car crash between commercial and artistic agendas which overtook Japanese cinema in the era immediately following the late ‘70s collapse of the nation’s studio system, ‘Sailor Suit..’ stands alongside Ôbayashi’s ‘House’ and Kazuhiko Hasegawa’s ‘The Man who Stole The Sun’ as one you need to see, irrespective of what you make of it all afterwards.
Arrow’s blu-ray edition comes complete with extremely groovy artwork (by Michael Lomon) and an unusually lengthy and informative booklet.
In fact, it’s fair to say they absolutely blew me away, rocketing straight to the top of my hypothetical list of ‘90s Japanese crime films, rivalled only by the early works of Takeshi Kitano - who indeed makes an appearance in the first of the films, playing a near-parody of his usual screen persona, as the shabby, expressionless psychopathic killer charged with hunting down a group of five agitated misfits who have signed their own death warrants by ripping off a fortune from a Shinjuku crime syndicate.
Beautifully staged, intricately and intelligently plotted, relentlessly brutal and perversely funny, it’s a nigh-on perfect crime movie, but Ishii’s name-only sequel is even better, amping up the action sequences to a Hong Kong-like level of kineticism and fully embracing a neon-saturated vision of ‘90s Tokyo as a dystopian, neo-noir wonderland, as it switches the gender of the heisters and mixes their travails with the tale of a lone, katana-wielding avenger seeking vengeance for the death of his wife.
The central set piece of the second film - in which five previously unconnected women impulsively join forces and manage to turn the tables on a heavily armed gang who hold up the jewellery store in which they happen to be browsing - is hands down the most jaw-dropping sequence I have seen in any film this year. They eventually take off together through the city streets, weighed down with stolen ice and laughing manically, and the fraught and desperate set of relationships which subsequently evolve between these female characters lends ‘Gonin 2’ a sensibility which feels near-unique in the ultra-macho realm of Japanese crime cinema.
Both of these films are beautifully shot, but the 20+ year old, tape-sourced DVDs which currently represent the only English-friendly means of watching them look absolutely terrible. HD upgrades/restorations are painfully overdue. Basically anyone who can manage to get these out on blu-ray has my money immediately.
Zipping forward through the requisite eighteen years, the child has of course grown up into a beautiful ersatz Snow White, apparently none the worse for having been raised by a gaggle of capering, comedic dwarf-men. Back at the royal court though, there’s trouble brewing, as our heroine’s not-quite-father the king has resorted to hiring a ‘woman exorcist’ and her unscrupulous, devil-worshipping consort to rid the kingdom of a both kaiju-esque cyclops and a seven-headed fire-breathing dragon, and… well, you get the general idea.
Yes, it’s another smash hit from the mysterious, myth-shrouded film industry which brought us the likes of Wolf Devil Woman, Kung Fu Wonder Child, Zodiac Fighters and Golden Queen’s Commando, mashing up the bizarro mutant fairy tale outlined above with Harryhausen-via-Tsubaraya special effects, wire-fu heroics, red-tinted Satanic horror, warped fragments of Chinese folklore, weird-ass, human-toothed bear-suits, glowing-eyed flying heads and costumes jointly inspired by Elric of Melnibone and the late Mike Hodges’ ‘Flash Gordon’, all accompanied by stolen music from ‘Space Battleship Yamato’ and ‘Battlestar Galactica’, along with some Parliament-esque funk-rock which inexplicably soundtracks the film’s comedic sequences.
A relentless torrent of fearless visual imagination, it’s fair to say that if this had played on British TV when I was ten years old, nothing else would have been discussed in the playground for YEARS. In fact we’d still probably be talking of it in hushed tones to this day; a fair reflection I feel of the sheer, outsized magnitude of the effort Hsin-Yi Chang and his collaborators put into this insane masterwork. Their determination to wring pure excitement and joy out of the presumably minimal resources available to them is writ large here, glowing, shining, zapping, flaming and exploding from every fuzzy-edged frame. (And if you think I’m exaggerating, just check out these three minutes, and tell me you’re not in for the full ninety.)
All of which makes it all the more tragic that the vast majority of ‘70s/’80s Taiwanese genre cinema remains trapped within a tape-sourced, pan-and-scan netherworld of bootlegs and frequently deleted youtube uploads - a circumstance which somehow makes the glorious excesses of films such as this one seem even more unreal and extraordinary.For the time being, Golden Ninja Video’s raw scan of a battered theatrical print seems about the best viewing option we’re ever likely to get for this one. (True, the old school, burned-in HK-style subtitles make it quite difficult to figure out what’s going on much of the time, but on the other hand, they also allow us to enjoy people saying things like, “Listen, now I will speak in the voice of the cock,” so, y’know - swings and roundabouts.)
In short: ‘Tough Guys Don’t Dance’ is absolute, 24 carat, deranged macho/camp genius from start to finish.
On first viewing, it’s easy to imagine the project originated with Mailer chilling at home one evening with a mountain of coke, watching a double bill of ‘Blue Velvet’ and ‘Out of the Past’ before exclaiming, “fuck, I can make one of these things, how hard can it be” - at which point he immediately got Golan & Globus on the phone to talk budget and casting, and, a year or so later, the American critical establishment found itself trying to come to terms with the existence of a flick which, on the face of it, functions on a similar wavelength to ego-driven disasterpieces like Duke Mitchell’s Massacre Mafia Style (1974) or John De Hart’s Champagne & Bullets (1993), despite emerging from the mind of a man on the opposite end of the social/artistic spectrum.
To some extent, 21st century internet wise-asses have perhaps come closer to comprehending the grandeur of Mailer’s cinematic vision - but, as usual, they’ve also woefully missed the point, meme-ifying possibly the least extraordinary moment in the film, whilst lazily assigning the dreaded “so bad it’s good” label to the whole shebang, in spite of the fact that, though his script often walks a perilous line between earnestness and outright parody, the overdriven, baroque excesses of Mailer’s lampoon of the hard-boiled style here cannot possibly have been anything less than entirely intentional.
I mean, he may have been a maniac, but he was too smart not to have realised what he was creating here… and for my money, the fact that he did it anyway makes the result even more outrageously enjoyable.
Whatever your take on Mailer’s intentions is though, one thing’s for sure - you’ve got to be careful trying to drink fluids whilst ‘Tough Guys Don’t Dance’ is unfolding, because you’ll find a spit-take worthy “WTF did s/he just say?!” moment waiting to hit you about once every forty seconds. I would try to make an effort to pepper lines from this film into my conversation for years to come, except for the fact that Mailer’s lingo is so consistently outlandish and offensive that I very much hope life will never lead me into circumstances where I have cause to employ any of it.
Ostensibly a convoluted tale of murder, amnesia and paranoia set in Mailer’s adopted hometown of Provincetown, Massachusetts (indeed, much of the film is shot in his house), almost every male character in ‘Tough Guys..’ is riven with homosexual panic, unhealthily fixated on reaffirming their masculinity and sexual prowess whilst being driven on to ever greater outrages by the looming spectre of priapic psycho-cop Wings Hauser (napalming the joint, as per usual), whilst every almost every female is meanwhile an unhinged, scheming nymphomaniac.
The only notable exceptions are the great Lawrence Tierney, who, playing an obvious stand-in for Mailer himself, is the only cast member with the chutzpah to actually invest the director’s outré dialogue with a sense of gravitas, and Isabella Rossellini, who spends the bulk of her limited screen time looking as if she’d rather be anywhere else on earth than appearing in this horrible movie.
Perhaps triggered by the sheer absurdity of Mailer’s scripting and the oversized bravado of the performances, the film begins to take on a fascinating, otherworldly aura as it progresses, complete with a botched séance, ritualistic weirdness transpiring deep in the woods, and characters claiming to be possessed by the ghosts of dead whores. In fact, as the idea of a nameless, malign spirit lurking beneath the surface of a small, picturesque town begins to predominate, it’s difficult not to pick up on a distinctly Lynchian vibe going on here, to the extent that some scenes pretty much play out like tributes to (or parodies of) the director’s signature style.
This is interesting, in that, whilst the presence of both Rossellini and the late Angelo Badalamenti (RIP) on soundtrack duties suggests the possibility of a concrete connection, ‘Tough Guys..’ actually began shooting just one month after ‘Blue Velvet’ premiered, and years before ‘Twin Peaks’ fully nailed down the aesthetic which Mailer was - unwittingly? - pre-empting here. Go figure.
Anyway, regardless - let’s just say that ‘Tough Guys Don’t Dance’ is an insane, unrepeatable masterpiece which you need in your life, and leave it at that.
I could’ve told you - never call Vinegar Syndrome ‘small potatoes’!
You’ll find no yakuza power struggles, no sudden outbursts of violence and no sexual perversity in Takeshi Kitano’s third film as director, but nonetheless, for me it represents both the purest expression of the ‘detached’ cinematic style he developed across his pioneering early work, and his most deeply affecting work as a filmmaker.
Action, technique and narrative exposition are all minimised here to such an extent that Kitano’s simple tale of a deaf garbage collector (Shigeru, played by Claude Maki) who finds a discarded surfboard and decides to learn to use it feels almost like an ambient form of cinema; a meditation on the transitory beauty of day-to-day life, often veering closer to one of the director’s naïve, faux-childlike paintings than to anything resembling commercial filmmaking.
Given that both Shigeru and his girlfriend (played by Hiroko Ôshima) are deaf, it seems fitting that the vast majority of the dialogue spoken by supporting characters in the film consists of inconsequential nattering, of far less significance than the more basic information conveyed by their actions and positioning within the frame. Although this is not a silent film, Kitano allows us to enter the confined, wordless world of his central characters in a way that feels both natural, and almost kind of welcoming.
Even more-so than in his other early films, Kitano takes the time here to present a side of Japan’s urban sprawl which is rarely depicted on screen; a thin strip of grey, undefined beach, surrounded by nondescript pre-fab buildings and concrete highway infrastructure define the limits of Shigeru and his girlfriend’s world. This space serves a backdrop for their gentle, low-key interactions with strangers and casual acquaintances, and, when the action (such as it is) moves to a surf-meet further up the coast, it’s difficult not to share the love the director clearly feels for the awkward formality and quiet surrealism with which such events are conducted in his home country.
Narrative information within ‘A Scene at the Sea’ is cut down to the extent that we don’t know how Shigeru and his girlfriend met, or what the length or extent of their relationship has been. We only have faintest idea where they live, and are never made aware of them having any other family members. As you will have noted, we don’t even know the girl’s name - which again seems entirely consistent with the couple’s existence in a world where such things simply don’t matter. All that matters to her is that she is with him.
In fact, we don't even really know the reasons why Shigeru feels so strongly drawn to the sea (aside from the fact that it’s there, and it’s beautiful), or what triggers the climactic events at the film’s conclusion.
What I do know though, is that, when Joe Hisaishi’s deceptively saccharine jazz score rises over the closing shots, there will not be a dry eye in the house - guaranteed.
Available on blu-ray or streaming in the UK from Third Window Films.
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Happy new year everyone - thank you for reading, and I'm hoping against hope that I'll be able to return to regular posting schedule here through 2023, so, watch this space.
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