Branded to kill [Widescreen]

Hanado Goro, no. 3 gunman in the Tokyo underworld after killing no. 2 and bungling the fourth of a series of imaginatively executed ‘hits’, finds himself playing cat-and-mouse with the dangerous no. 1. Explosions of violence are punctuated by moments of unexpected lyricism and intermingled with bizarre humour (Hanado is sexually aroused by the smell of boiled rice). After making dozens of run-of-the-mill genre films for Nikkatsu, Sejun Suzuki began transforming the banal material assigned to him into farcically hyperbolic absurdist thrillers reinventing the yakuza film by drawing on Japanese comical literary, theatrical and cinematic traditions (see also “Tokyo drifter”), in the process attracting both a cult following and the ire of Nikkatsu. Cast includes Jo Shishido, Koji Nanbara, Isao Tamagawa, Annu Mari, Mariko Ogawa and Hiroshi Minami. In Japanese with English subtitles.