Seijun Suzuki
Three tales of love told through wildly intoxicating, colorful stories. When platinum redhead Ovreneli Vreneligare was just a little boy, he fell in love in the park. Sharing a juice box with the stunningly gorgeous Milocrorze, he took her home to his cat, Verandola Gorgonzola, and made her his girlfriend until the fickle beauty abandoned him, and he covered the hole in his heart with a pot lid he found lying on the ground. This is only the beginning of his story but it’s not the end of his heartbreak. MILOCRORZE: A LOVE STORY is a candy-flavored anthology of hopeless l’amour, and it has many victims.
Recently appointed dean at a film school, Kimuro Hajime develops a special concern for one of his students, Daisuke. The brash, headstrong young man is fixated on with the Second World War. He feels a sense of frustration at the irrational sacrifice of young people's lives during the war six decades earlier. Daisuke finds that he can vent his frustrations to Kimuro, who experienced the war firsthand. Kimuro's wife, Emiko, is also troubled by memories of the war. She lost a loved one in the war and has never gotten over it. And Kimuro himself also has something from the past that he has yet to face. He believes that the burden of his unresolved past will eventually be the death of him. When Daisuke's neurosis causes him to quit school, life changes for all three of them.
Jun, a 16-year-old teen, refuses to stand while the national anthem is being played at his graduation ceremony. This event will totally change his life, as he involuntarily becomes the new hero of a rebel anti-system youth. Singer Muy's pop music and his friend, Nozomi, with whom he shares his sadness and hatred for the society that surrounds them, help him bear his terrible loneliness.
A baby, John, who was abandoned in the church with a horse-headed koto on his side. His grandfather was once a Morin Khuur player and died in the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. The brilliantly colored images have an avant-garde charm while hiding the sadness of the war, and will grab the viewer's heart.
Works commemorating the 70th anniversary of the founding of Japan mapping Supervision Association
Amechiyo (the banished prince) falls in love with Tanukihime (a princess of raccoon dog disguised as human). This is an operetta which includes comedy, singing and dancing, and a love story.
Made for in 2005, this video interview features director Seijun Suzuki and production designer Takeo Kimura. These longtime collaborators discuss the making of GATE OF FLESH.
Existential study on a misplaced workers and ex-prisoner who moves through the city and his influence on other characters' lives.
In the sixties, director and screenwriter Seijun Suzuki (1923-2017) was the great innovator of Japanese cinema. Extremely creative and eccentric, his narrative world is strongly influenced by Kabuki theater. His testimony crosses with that of his collaborator and close friend, artistic director and screenwriter Takeo Kimura (1918–2010). Between the two of them, they remember how they made their great masterpieces about the Yakuza underworld for the Nikkatsu film company.
As one of Suzuki's last fims, it is related to his 1967 Branded to Kill, either as a remake or sequel. The plots of both films involve a third-ranked hit man deposing the top-ranked hit man to claim the top rank.
A humanity drama set in Asakusa. Natsumi, a third-year high school student, moved to Tokyo when his grandmother died. Haruka, the flower-shaped stripper who is the mother, cannot hide the dreadfulness from the sudden appearance of her daughter. Living together is always addicted, Natsumi refuses her mother. On the other hand, Haruka is faced with a lover's debt problem.
Young female embalmer Miyako is called in to restore the body of a young man who has committed suicide, before the funeral. While performing the embalming process she finds herself pricks by a needle buried deep in the boy’s flesh where it should not be. During the night the head is removed from the body and stolen, Miyako begins a desperate search for it so she can finish her work. Miyako search finds her encountering organ harvesting, religious cults, incest, psychopathic schizophrenics as well as some very dark secrets from here own past.
Fu and Suzu are two pretty anarchist girls who decide to take to the road. They set off on a journey to visit the tomb of a small pig by name Pupu. On the way, Suzu decides to drop in on a man with whom she had had an affair in the past. All would indicate she would like to blackmail him. Going their way, they meet a gay couple and a golf player in a blue convertible.Because of Suzu's unbalanced personality, they are always in trouble. Wherever they may be, however, the hero TrunkMan invariably appears in time to save them. Suzu eventually falls in love with the hero, all of which makes for a delicate situation as regards Fu who decides to leave her.
Kenichi is a half-Japanese, half-Chinese man of the underworld. You can sell him anything except children's organs. His domain is in Kabukicho, a gangland controlled by various Shanghai gangs intent on taking control. His former partner-in-crime, Fu-Chun, is rumored to have returned to Kabukicho, having fled years earlier after killing the number two of gangland boss, Yuan. Yuan wants to get even and attempts to do so by using Kenichi.
A comedy about the uproar in a yakuza office, before the dissolution ceremony the next day. The day before the dissolution of the Yamamuro group, it is reported that the leader of the hostile organization was assassinated by someone.
An exciting 'psychic movie' starring Kanako Enomoto, adapted from the manga series by Yukio Tamai. Police detectives searching for clues related to a serial murder case seek out help from high schooler Yurika, who possesses latent split personality psychic abilities. The mystery deepens once Yurika is brought face-to-face with the crime scenes.
When an artist dies, the official cause of death is judged to be a stroke, but his daughter suspects foul play. She recruits the services of an assassin, who by chance encounters an old friend...
A difficult request brought to the unlicensed genius surgeon Black Jack. It was supposed to be born as twins, but it was an operation to separate what had been taken into another body. The second in a series depicting the episode of the birth of Pinoko.
A Japanese businessman travels to Iceland and has a series of misadventures while venturing to a remote area to perform a traditional burial ritual where his parents died several years back.
A semi-autobiographical film about a young man from Tokyo who moves to Hirosaki in the early Shōwa era. A straight-to-video production made for the Hirosaki Senior High School Alumni Association that also incorporates footage from contemporary Hirosaki, and features cameos by regular Suzuki performers like Tamagawa Isao and Nogawa Yumiko.
Artist Yumeji has gained fame and recognition for his skills at painting as well as notoriety for his untamed lifestyle. Despite his betrothal to a beautiful and timid young woman of high birth, his libido turns to his many female models. Despite this freedom from constraint, his lust and artistic sentiment cause him nothing but an increasing awareness of the elusive embodiment of true Beauty. While traveling he encounters a mesmerizing widow who relentlessly searches for her husband's body in the nearby lake, believing him killed at the hands of a ferocious roaming bandit. Infatuated with her beauty, he feigns to help her look for the corpse, only to unlock the mystery himself thereby sending him to further depths of debauchery and despair. This is the third and final film in director Suzuki Seijun's critically acclaimed Taisho Trilogy.
The Masked Belle Poitrine is a magical girl tokusatsu comedy series created by Shotaro Ishinomori, and the 11th installment of the Toei Fushigi Comedy Series. The series ran from January 7, 1990 to December 30, 1990 for a total of 51 episodes.
A dog Shiro often swims 2 miles to meet a dog Marilyn. Owners of these dogs fell in love.
In New York City, several stone tablets have been unearthed that tell a tale about the Gold of Babylon. Two Mafia families are after it as well as Lupin the 3rd himself. An old drunken woman named Rosetta appears to know much about this treasure than meets the eye. While Zenigata has made a group of female partners that will lure Lupin the 3rd into handcuffs, the race is on for the gold of Babel.
Umiemon is a naniwa-bushi singer who travels with his wife to the United States in hopes of achieving fame and fortune.
A man looking to transplant cherry blossoms along the countryside encounters a blind woman who accompanies him for the journey.
A single mother is being investigated into the death of her ex-husband, which brings to the fore the obscure details of her past.
The Oedo Investigative Network investigates a mysterious fire one evening. Could it be connected to a mysterious man in an eyepatch who just came into town?
A light-hearted portrayal of three strange days in the life of a high school girl who is told she will die in three days. The best entertainment of student films, which became a legend. Many students aspired to film after seeing this film and many others gave up directing at the time.
A surreal period film following an university professor and his eerie nomad friend as they go through loose romantic triangles and face death in peculiar ways.
A member of the jieitai ("Self-Defense Force"; i.e. Japanese military) is on leave and finds a woman giving birth in a graveyard in the former Yoshiwara district. He takes her to an inn to gove birth, and stays on a few days as she recovers, but becomes fascinated with the strange people he meets there, particularly the owner, who visits a house in his courtyard every day to talk and give food to his mother. He says she is very sick and can't leave bed, but no one else has ever been inside or seen her.
A police detective tries to investigate the mystery of a victim who was shot in the head, but no bullet was found.
A model must cope with the stress of fame after a marketing executive transforms her into a sports celebrity.
Three cinephile university students have a go at making their own Super-8 film.
In postwar Japan, an editor visits her old Professor who is working on a modern translation of a legend about a mummified Buddhist monk who was revived, only to turn into a sex fiend that terrorized a rural village in pre-modern Japan. The story begins to have uncanny resonances with things going on in the present.
After botching his latest assignment, a third-ranked Japanese hit man becomes the target of another assassin.
Like a girl runaway, Tsuyu moves to Osaka to work as a bar hostess. She meets the owner of a model school, Yoko, and seriously thinks about becoming a fashion model. Yoko tells her that she can move in to Yoko’s house to take lessons, while making a living at the same time.
Kiroku boards with a Roman Catholic family and falls for the daughter Michiko. He ignores his feelings, joins a gang, gets in fights and, eventually, becomes involved with the radical Kita Ikki group.
After yakuza boss Kurata dissolves his own criminal empire, a rival kingpin offers a position to Kurata's top operative, Tetsuya "Phoenix Tetsu" Hondo. When the fiercely loyal Tetsu declines, Otsuka taps unstoppable Tatsuzo the "Viper", a ruthless gun-for-hire, to assassinate him. As the Viper trails his target through the countryside, the agile Phoenix Tetsu grows concerned that one of his former associates has betrayed him.
Volunteering as a "comfort woman" on the Manchurian front, where she is expected to service hundreds of soldiers, Harumi is commandeered by the brutal Lieutenant Narita but falls for the sensitive Mikami, Narita's direct subordinate. Seijun Suzuki's Story of a Prostitute is a tragic love story as well as a rule-bending take on a popular Taijiro Tamura novel, challenging military and fraternal codes of honor, as seen through Harumi's eyes.
‘Tattooed Life' begins with a parasol wielding Yakuza assassin attacking a rickshaw. It almost looks like feudal Japan until somebody pulls a gun and we're reminded that it's the 20th century. Post-shooting, the assassin delivers his bounty to his brother (to pay for his art school education) before getting ambushed in one of the few rickshaw-jacking incidents in film history, and being rescued by his art-student brother. In the aftermath, one brother is marked for death by the Yakuza, and the other brother won't go to art school with blood on his hands, so they decide the perfect way to deal with such hardships is to become fugitive construction workers in northern Japan . And why not?
A young man with a strong sense of justice is torn between two girls: the flighty Taneko and the serious Suzuko. With wisdom, courage and honor in a Japanese spirit of manliness he wins the day.
Akira Kobayashi stars as a coal-miner who leads a rebellion against a nasty tyrant.
In the shady black markets and bombed-out hovels of post–World War II Tokyo, a tough band of prostitutes eke out a dog-eat-dog existence, maintaining tenuous friendships and a semblance of order in a world of chaos. But when a renegade ex-soldier stumbles into their midst, lusts and loyalties clash, with tragic results. With Gate of Flesh, visionary director Seijun Suzuki delivers a whirlwind of social critique and pulp drama, shot through with brilliant colors and raw emotions.
Two brothers seek revenge on the yakuza responsible of the death of their father.
Tajima is a private detective in charge of his own company, Detective Bureau 2-3. When warring criminal gangs go overboard by robbing U.S. military munitions, Tajima steps in to stop what the cops can't.
Handsome young Katsuta tries to follow the yakuza code, but even his boss doesn't believe in it. Diamond Fuyu is less ethical, and allows the idiotic Tetsu to trick a schoolgirl he fancies, Hanako, into a type of bonded prostitution. Because of gang conflict, the Izu family (to whom Katsuta belongs) has their last gambling den taken over, and he seeks revenge. This brings him back into contact with a former lover who is also a card trickster - she is also Diamond Fuyu's sister, and is now married to Okaru-Hachi, who has mastered a clever card cheating trick called Okaru, which involves the deft use of mirrors.
Based on the loosely autobiographical novel of the same name by Toko Kon. Ken Yamanouchi stars as Togo Konno, the titular bastard.
When a mysterious stranger muscles into two rival yakuza gangs, Tokyo's underworld explodes with violence.
An unofficial sequel to Million Dollar Match (1961) which also starred Koji Wada as a young energetic boxer. This story deals more with betting action surrounding a boxing match, concentrating mostly on the high-powered Yakuza gambling dens.
A high-school vigilante protects his community from the extortions of mobsters from a neighbouring city.
On summer vacation, university student Shintaro gets involved with a magic troupe as they travel from festival to festival.
A college student takes over the family business in the field of organised crime.
Nikkatsu finally responds to Suzuki's growing discontentment by giving him a bigger budget and a better script. This episodic collection of "real coast guard action stories" was the perfect vehicle for Koji Wada. Whatever negative press he had received for Tokyo Knights was quickly forgotten. He became the new "teen star." And Suzuki: "the director to watch."
Ryoji, a wanderer, arrives in a remote mountain town, carrying a shotgun and claiming to be a hunter. He quickly becomes embroiled in a web of trouble surrounding the town's mill.
Wada Kōji is a chivalrous young man who leads a group of youths that take on a yakuza boss.
Katiri is a reporter so ambitiously amoral that he’ll sell out anyone—including his partner and the drug dealer he’s sleeping with—to get a scoop. But what happens when an even more ruthless female gang boss kidnaps his sister?
This rarely seen gem from master Suzuki casts teenage heartthrob Koji Wada as a young misfit who suddenly finds himself the unwitting pawn in an escalating family feud that ultimately leads to tragedy. Lean, mean, and stylish as always, this tale of youth-gone-wild is both vibrant and touching. Suzuki contrasts tranquil glimpses of traditional regional life with the emergence of the new rock 'n' roll youth culture and the greed and seething cynicism of encroaching Westernism. Also released under the title "Go To Hell, Hoodlums!", this is a melodrama as colorful, shocking, and exhilarating as one would come to expect from Japan's master filmmaker.
A sharpshooter kills two prisoners in a police van at night. The guard on the van is suspended for six months; he's Tamon, an upright, modest man. He begins his own investigation into the murders. Who were the victims, who are their relatives and girlfriends, who else was on the van that night? As he doggedly investigates, others die, coincidences occur, and several leads take him to the Hamaju Agency, which may be supplying call girls. Its owner is in jail, his daughter, the enigmatic Yuko, keeps turning up where Tamon goes. Tamon believes he can awaken good in people, but has he met his match? Will he solve the murders or be the next victim? And who is Akiba?
When a middle aged salaryman is unknowingly used by drug traffickers he is dishonored and fires back at the Yakuza bosses, with destructive consequences.
Jirô wanders the streets with friends committing petty crimes that gradually escalate.
The story deals with a juvenile delinquent gang surviving through petty thievery. However, everything gets screwed up when they accidentally steal big bucks from the Yakuza.
A nightclub manager is in love with his pianist. However, she has a ranger boyfriend who's been permanently stationed in the mountain wilderness. Their only communication is by letter. As time passes the correspondence slows to a trickle. Then nothing. The manager persuades the girl to visit the boy. She does, but she's totally unprepared for her bizarre discovery.
A jazz bandleader, falsely accused of murdering his girlfriend, tries to stay one step ahead of the police as he dives into Tokyo's sin-city in search of the real killer in this dark and beautiful noir from master Seijun Suzuki.
The moment he's released from prison, the honorable gangster Miyamoto recovers the stolen diamonds he had stashed before getting pinched. When he returns to his haunt to make good by friend who took a bullet for him, he is diverted by the greedy boss Oyane and his insatiable taste for Miyamoto's precious stones. Replete with film noir style, "Underworld Beauty" is one of Suzuki's best nods to the American gangster genre.
Asako, a former telephone operator once heard the voice of a murder suspect which has continued to haunt her. Years later her husband invites his boss, Hamazaki, over for dinner and she realises his voice is suspiciously like that of the killer. Before she can investigate further, Hamazaki is found dead and her husband becomes the prime suspect…
Singer Akira Kobayashi stars as an alienated teenager named Yoshi in this juvenile-delinquent film from acclaimed director Seijun Suzuki. Yoshi falls in love with his social worker, leading to the expected complications. Sachiko Hidari and Hideaki Nitani co-star in this effort, which led to a sequel, Fumihazushita Haru: Aoi Chibusa II the following year.
Nobuo is a hot-headed hoodlum fresh out of reform school who struggles to make a clean break with his tearaway past.
A bus making its precarious way across a winding mountain road picks up some unwelcome passengers.
A Tokyo newspaper reporter goes after the Japanese king of cocaine trafficking but he's tricked by a woman who works for the gangster and gets framed for a murder he didn't commit.
A romantic adventure tale about a young guy working on a whale-hunting vessel and his love for a childhood sweetheart.
A sailor tries to help his younger brother, a horse-racing jockey, escape from the yakuza after double crossing them in a fixing scam. Seijun Suzuki's directorial debut.
A yakuza boss and his right-hand, Hawasaki, escape from prison. the film concentrates on their relationship, emphasizing loyalty and thier eventual betrayal, enroute they get involved in money trafficking, a cop killing and horse racing scams before the inevitable tragic ending. A patch-work production.
Ippei, a bored private detective hears from his assistant Hideko an interesting story that General Semyonov who has been exiled to Japan buried his gold bullion somewhere.
Private Detective Ippei Shizuno faces off against a serial killer and a wealthy woman's society who runs an illegal gun trade.
A remake of High Noon (1952) as a Japanese jidai-geki sword-fighting movie.
A reporter Takuo, who is sleeping in the newspaper room of the Maichō newspaper company, receives a sudden report from a reporter that the missing Akiyama JNR president was found dead.
Based on a mystery by Taiwanese-Japanese author Chin Shun-shin. After two elderly men in Yokohama quarrel over a Yang dynasty artifact, one of the men turns up dead with mysterious claw marks across his face. A detective takes up the case, and uncovers secrets dating back to war crimes committed during Japan’s invasion of China in WWII.
In post-war Japan, a publisher goes to visit her former teacher for help on a modern translation of a legend about a mummified Buddhist monk who was revived and who, centuries later, turned into a sex demon who terrorized a village in pre-modern Japan.
A short history of the Japanese 'Pink' movie, focusing on the output of the Nikkatsu studio.
