Tokyo Drifter

Tetsu is a yakuza trying to go straight after his gang breaks up. His old boss has given up the business, but a rival organisation sees Tetsu as a threat. He leaves the city and drifts around Japan, and everywhere he goes his pursuers find him. The subject is not crime but loyalty going unreturned. Tetsu insists on staying faithful to his boss and everyone in the film tells him it is stupid; in the end they are the ones proved right. The form is what the film is really about. Seijun Suzuki abandons realism entirely: walls are painted a single colour, snow becomes white nothingness, a fight takes place in a room that is wholly yellow. The song keeps returning and the characters whistle it. In this period Suzuki was assigned to make fast, cheap B pictures for Nikkatsu; he accepted the scripts he was given and transformed the form on his own. The studio grew increasingly unhappy with that, and after his next film his contract was terminated, which caused a major controversy in Japan. Tetsuya Watari plays Tetsu and Chieko Matsubara his singer girlfriend. Who it is for: viewers after experiments in colour and form and anyone who likes sixties Japanese genre cinema. Who it is not for: those wanting a followable plot; the story is secondary and deliberately scattered.