Tokyo Drifter

TOKYO DRIFTER (1966)

I rerented this Seijun Suzuki flick because I was jonesing for some Suzuki. I had seen this one at the P.F.A. retrospective and it hadn't been one of my favorites. I had liked it, but it hadn't rocked my world. I'm here to tell you that removed from the context of other Suzuki movies, when watched along other movies, Tokyo Drifter's outrageous charms because more compelling. Do yourself a favor and rent it. Now. Really. You'll thank me.

This was Suzuki's next to last flick for Nikkatsu studio, and this, in tandem with Branded to Kill, got him fired from the studio for making "incomprehensible" movies. In this one, the main character is a Yakuza bodyguard (the charismatic Eiji Go) who, with his boss, is trying to go straight. They're both sucked back into the life by a competing faction that want their assets, and the bodyguard, to try and ease the pressure he's caused by all his butt-kicking, starts wandering. As he does, people from various areas both protect and cross him until, with the help of similar drifter, he realizes that he can trust and rely on no one but himself.

Only the slightest taste of Suzuki's genius for color and composition I should admit that all of the stuff above works fine for me, and if Tokyo Drifter had just been done as a straight-forward of above, I would have liked it fine. But Suzuki's amazing sense of style and content really kicks into overdrive on this movie, and so he starts tweaking the film. The wanderer is always singing a song his girlfriend, a nightclub singer, would sing for him. It's called, surprise, "Tokyo Drifter." But Suzuki pushes this conceit way beyond musical limits until the song becomes not just as much of a character as the wandering bodyguard, it becomes even more so. Tokyo Drifter is about a man who aspires to become a pop song, both immortal and ephemeral, and in the end, somehow does. Years before Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, Seijun Suzuki constructed a flick about a man who manages to abstract himself, and did it in a movie filled with gun fights, show girls and showdowns. I know I tend to be the real cheerleader most of the time, telling you time and again, that you must see this, you must see that, etc., etc. But really, if any of this sounds at all intriguing to you, you MUST see it.

More about this movie

and more about Seijun Suzuki & Tokyo Drifter