Jô Shishido gets a job with one Yakuza gang that's at war. He's tough, he's got a record, and they're impressed. He then goes to the rival Yakuza gang and gets a job with them, spying on the first gang.

Seijun Suzuki's crime drama clearly is modeled on Yojimbo, but the two directors ran the story to different ends. Kurosawa's movie has a satirical edge, with his lone samurai caught in a war between silk merchants (capitalists),who co-opt gamblers (Yakuza); way down in the subtext is the implication that both groups are self-serving and will destroy Japan. They are also stupid and cowardly. A clever samurai can serve Japan by destroying them both.

Suzuki's movie makes it all yakuza, and they are overtly tough, smart, and not in the least cowardly. Also, Shishido has a backstory and motive. Suzuki is more concerned with showing us the big cars, the beautiful suits and offices, and the mangled corpses. There's no angry humor in his movie. Just death and destruction. Which was very popular in the movies at this time.

I think one of the aspects of Youth of the Beast, the late genre- filmmaker master Seijun Suzuki's breakthrough, to take into account is that the story moves at a breathless pace. It's not that it is a story that is hard to follow - there are a good many characters to get to know, and after a black and white prologue (though at first I wasn't sure if it was a 'show-end-at-beginning' thing before going into full color for the majority of the film),we're put right into the physical space of this seemingly violent thug played by Jô Shishido (also named Jo here, good call) - it's that Suzuki, I think, is not so much interested in the story as in how a film MOVES. After all, it is a movie, right? Let's get that motion picture moving and vibrant and with energy. This is like a shotgun blast of 60's crime cinema that makes us feel a lot of things through a lot of intense visual choreography of the frame and what is in it (i.e. the old Scorsese axiom, cinema being a matter of what's in the frame and what's out, is paramount to Suzuki)/

Youth of the Beast is not necessarily the most remarkable film as far as the story goes, and I'm sure there have been other Yakuza films and other gangster thrillers that have similarities; in a sense this isn't unlike Yojimbo/Fistful of Dollars/Red Harvest, though this time the main character has more of a motive than in that story. What's remarkable is the direction and how the tone is brutal and yet it's staged in some creative ways. There's times when you know a character is about to lunge at someone else, or that we get a piece of visual information like a knife being held under a table or somewhere else, before that character lunges and strikes. Other times it's more about how he'll pan the camera, like when the car full of the one crime family gets ambushed by another car (the music cue here is especially, terribly exhilarating, and the rest of the score has a wonderful jazz rhythm to it),and when we see those faces of the guys with their masks on and how he pushes in.

Hell, even just how Suzuki uses color cinematography is impressive, all of those reds (the woman being whipped on the carpet),and how he'll have a backdrop like at the movie theater where the Yakuza do some of their business and a film screen projecting some movie or other is in the background of the frame. It feels like one of those moments where post-modernism is creeping in to Japanese cinema, and of course Suzuki would continue making such advances with Tokyo Drifter and particularly Branded to Kill. The movie is hard and rough, violent and the characters' motivations - well, I should say Jo, who is basically undercover playing one side and then another until it's an all-out war - are intense enough that the cast rises above what could be basic (even boiler-plate) B-movie pulp. I don't know how much input Suzuki had on the script, but he knows how to keep his actors moving and being interesting, whether it's Jo, who is the stand-out of the film, or his 'friend' who has a thing for the ladies.

This is pulp Japanese cinematic excellence, all feeding off of a vision that is unique.

Seijun Suzuki is one of the more polarizing and ambiguous figures in Japanese cinema. Genius? Madman? Something in between? Perhaps it doesn't matter, the differences between these positions are in any case, quite sleight. An amazingly prolific director - he directed over forty films in the 1960s alone - his very productivity helped lend credibility to those who dismissed him as B-movie man, preeminent among these to be sure, but a B-movie man nonetheless. In recent years, however, his work has been increasingly appreciated, particularly in the West.

In large measure, this uptick in esteem is can be traced to the film industry finally catching up to Suzuki. His classic mid-60s films (Youth of the Beast, Gate of Flesh, Tokyo Drifter and Branded to Kill) featured a powerful combination of brutal, explicit and often sadistic violence, morbid humor, a keen sense of the ridiculous and a visual and narrative style that is fractured and often hallucinatory, all held together (or, rather, defiantly not held together) by a totalizing nihilism that denies any higher or greater meaning to actions beyond the demonstrable consequences of action itself. This made for cinema that, at the time, was incomprehensible to many viewers, and Suzuki was famously fired by Nikkatsu in 1967 for making films that "make no sense and make no money." Decades later, however, the potency of his best films is keenly appreciated by many cinephiles raised on Pulp Fiction and Natural Born Killers (both almost completely derivative of Suzuki's work).

Suzuki himself identified Youth of the Beast as marking the beginning of his most creatively fertile period, and all the distinctive elements of his film-making are in evidence, and meshing perfectly. The basic story - a mysterious tough muscles into the center of a war between rival gangs, then begins pursuing ends of his own as he plays each off the other - is strongly reminiscent of Kurosawa's Yojimbo, but where Yojimbo is a period piece set in a down and out town of the Edo period, Youth of the Beast is a (post)modern gangster film set in contemporary (1960s) Tokyo. Mifune's iconic role as the amoral ronin Sanjuro Kuwabatake is here filled by Jo Shishido as disgraced ex-detective Joji 'Jo' Mizuno.

The film opens with police investigating the apparent double suicide of a detective and his mistress (we later learn that it was actually a double murder). The initial sequence plays at being a traditional police procedural, with middle aged men in rumpled suits and worn hats speaking clinically of the dead. The camera pans to a table and an incongruous splash of color, a single cut red flower in a vase. It is an image of fleeting life that is repeated as the film's closing frame.

Suddenly, the film jumps to full color with a blast of hard bop from the soundtrack, cutting to a crowded street in Tokyo and the maniacal laughter of a woman. The camera soon finds 'Jo' Shisado, who explodes into violent action, attacking three men, pummeling one of them to the ground and kicking him repeatedly before fastidiously wiping the blood from his shoe onto the fallen man's shirt. He then turns with an air of total indifference and strolls into a hostess bar.

His outburst provides an entree into the Tokyo underworld; the men he thrashed were low-level yakuza soldiers, and the ease with which he dispatched them attracts the attention of the local underboss. Soon, he meets the big boss, Hideo Nomoto, and becomes a hit-man for Nomoto's gang. It rapidly becomes apparent that Jo is playing a deeper game. He forces his way into the office of Nomoto's chief rival, earning a place on his payroll as well, this time by providing intelligence on Nomoto's activities. He plays the rivals off one another, eventually achieving the cataclysmic annihilation of both gangs.

The great strength of Youth of the Beast is its combination of superb visual flair and unremitting nihilism. Suzuki's shots are almost invariably dynamic in their composition, a riot of color and movement against a gritty background of corruption and decay. They create at once a hallucinatory detachment and a gut level immersion in the violence. Even the relatively static shots are intensely poetic and loaded with symbolism. Several scenes take place in the office of Nomoto's hostess bar. The entire back wall of the office is a one-way mirror, looking out into the nightclub. The floor of the office is set below the floor of the club. It is a perfect visual depiction of an "underworld" existing side by side with everyday life, but invisible to most people.

One aspect of the film will likely be extremely disturbing to many contemporary Western viewers. Suzuki's films were often possessed of a violent and virulent misogyny, and this is no exception. The female characters are invariably unsympathetic; prostitutes, addicts and murdering adulteresses. One scene features a pimp humiliating an addicted woman while she begs for a fix. In another, Nomoto beats a call girl with his belt and then rapes her. The movie reaches its climax when Jo leaves the woman who orchestrated the murder of his partner to the tender mercies of a straight razor wielding psychopath. It is a fitting end to one of the most relentlessly violent films of its era.