Branded to Kill: Suzuki's Hit-Man Film That Got Him Sacked

In 1967 a Japanese studio director named Seijun Suzuki delivered a black-and-white gangster picture to his employers at Nikkatsu, and it cost him his career. The studio boss, Kyusaku Hori, watched Branded to Kill, declared it incomprehensible and unprofitable, and fired the man who made it. Suzuki, who had cranked out roughly forty programme pictures for Nikkatsu on tight budgets and tighter schedules, found himself blacklisted from the industry for the better part of a decade. He sued the studio and eventually won, but the years in the wilderness were real. He had been sacked, essentially, for making a film that was too much itself.

The joke of film history is that the picture Hori found worthless turned out to be one of the most influential crime films ever made in Japan, a touchstone for a generation of filmmakers who would later plunder it for cool. What looked in 1967 like a director losing control of a simple hit-man story looks now like a director dismantling the genre on purpose, taking the yakuza picture apart to see what it was made of and reassembling it wrong on purpose. It is a revisit that rewards patience and punishes anyone who arrives expecting a conventional thriller, because being unconventional is the entire content of the thing.

The premise, such as it is

Goro Hanada, played by the cheek-augmented Nikkatsu star Joe Shishido, is the number three killer in a shadowy ranking of Japanese assassins. He is good at his work, married to a nakedly treacherous wife, and possessed of one memorable quirk: he becomes aroused by the smell of boiling rice, and sniffs it before a job the way another man might take a drink. He takes assignments, executes them with cold professional skill, and dreams of climbing the rankings toward the mythical Number One Killer, an assassin nobody has seen and everybody fears.

A job goes wrong. During a hit, a butterfly lands on the barrel of Hanada’s rifle at the decisive moment, and his shot kills the wrong person. In the world of the film, a botched contract is a death sentence for the man who botched it, and Hanada finds himself transformed from hunter to hunted, pursued by the organisation he served and, eventually, drawn into a strange, intimate duel with Number One himself. That is the skeleton of the plot. Describing it straight is almost dishonest, because the plot is the least of what Branded to Kill is doing, and Suzuki treats narrative clarity as an obstacle to be cheerfully bulldozed.

Why it works: incoherence as a style

The standard complaint about Branded to Kill — the one that got Suzuki fired — is that it makes no sense, and the standard defence is that its senselessness is the point. Both are true, and the film is more interesting if you hold them together. Suzuki was a contract director handed generic scripts, and his response over his final Nikkatsu years was to invest less and less in the story and more and more in the surface: the composition, the editing rhythm, the sudden tonal lurches, the sheer graphic force of a black-and-white frame. By Branded to Kill the surface has more or less eaten the story alive.

The craft on that surface is genuinely startling. Suzuki and his cinematographer stage killings as pure geometry — a man shot through a drainpipe, a target dispatched via the plumbing of a building, assassinations engineered so the bullet travels an absurd, beautiful path to its victim. The editing refuses to smooth transitions; scenes collide, time skips, a sex scene and a gunfight bleed into one another until the film’s two obsessions, death and desire, become formally indistinguishable. The rice-sniffing fetish, ludicrous on paper, functions as an organising image: this is a film about appetite, about men who cannot separate their professional violence from their private hungers, and Suzuki keeps braiding the two until the distinction dissolves.

Shishido is the perfect vessel for it. His surgically swollen cheeks give him a permanent look of a man mid-chew, absurd and slightly grotesque, and he plays Hanada with a deadpan seriousness that lets the surrounding lunacy register as lunacy. The film needs a still centre to spin around, and his blank professional cool provides it. When the duel with Number One finally arrives, the two killers are forced into a proximity so total — sharing space, watching each other, unable to act — that the film tips from crime picture into something closer to absurdist theatre, two men handcuffed by their own reputations.

The collector’s cross-reference

The most important thing to know about Branded to Kill on a revisit is how much of later cool cinema was quarried out of it. Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai borrows its melancholy, ritualistic hit-man and its interest in assassination as a code; Park Chan-wook and a wave of South Korean stylists absorbed its willingness to let violence become graphic design; Quentin Tarantino’s magpie sensibility owes it a clear debt. When you watch a modern film in which a killer is presented as a figure of doomed, deadpan cool operating by arcane rules, you are frequently watching a descendant of what Suzuki did here, whether the filmmaker knows the ancestor or not.

The obvious sibling is Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï, released the same year, 1967, on the other side of the world. Both films strip the hit-man down to a ritual of solitude and professional cool; both are fascinated by the assassin as a monkish, self-erasing figure. The instructive difference is the register. Melville is glacial, controlled, minimalist, every frame lacquered to a cold shine; Suzuki is anarchic, cluttered, willing to look ridiculous. Watched together they are the two poles of the 1967 hit-man film — the same subject rendered as icy austerity and as fevered surrealism — and each throws the other into relief.

The other useful pairing is with John Boorman’s Point Blank, also 1967, another crime film that took a pulp revenge plot and fractured its chronology and geography until the genre became a delivery system for pure style. Three films, one year, three directors independently deciding the crime picture was a container they could pour anything into. If you want to understand the moment the international thriller stopped telling stories and started composing them, those three are your syllabus, and Branded to Kill is the most extreme experiment of the lot.

The verdict

Branded to Kill is not for everyone, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. A viewer who wants a clean, propulsive yakuza thriller will find it exasperating, and its deliberate incoherence can read as chaos rather than design if you are not in a receptive mood. But approached as what it is — a contract director’s gleeful sabotage of the genre he was hired to serve, made by a man who had clearly stopped caring whether the studio approved — it is exhilarating, a film that treats every frame as a chance to do something no yakuza picture had done before. Suzuki got fired for it. He was also decades ahead of the people who fired him.

This is a revisit, and the film’s strangeness makes spoilers less damaging than usual — there is no clockwork twist to protect, only a mood to walk into. Still, for the ending and the shape of the duel, I will keep the details below the line.

Spoilers below

The back half of Branded to Kill abandons even the pretence of a conventional plot and becomes a study in psychological siege. Once Hanada is marked for death by the organisation, Number One begins to hunt him, and the hunt takes a form no ordinary thriller would attempt: the two killers end up occupying the same apartment, bound together, each unable to sleep, eat or use the bathroom without the other watching, because to look away for a second is to die. Suzuki turns the climax of a gangster film into an endurance test between two men who have become so defined by their profession that they can no longer function as human beings. The rules of the ranking, meant to organise the world of assassins, have curdled into a trap that reduces both men to twitching, sleepless animals.

The film’s treatment of Hanada’s disintegration is its real subject. The cool professional of the opening reels comes apart under the pressure, his fetishes and his fears surfacing until the composed killer is a wreck. The women in the film — his treacherous wife, and the enigmatic Misako, whose apartment is decorated with dead butterflies and who seems to invite her own destruction — function less as characters than as forces pulling Hanada toward the merger of sex and death the whole film has been building toward. The butterfly that ruined his hit returns as a motif of fragile, fatal beauty, the small accident that turned a competent man’s life into a countdown.

The final confrontation, when it comes, is staged with Suzuki’s characteristic refusal to let a shoot-out be merely a shoot-out. In a boxing ring, of all places, the ranking is finally settled, and the resolution is both a punchline and a genuine collapse — the number one position revealed as a prize that means nothing, held by men whose victory is indistinguishable from their ruin. Hanada’s cry that he is the number one killer, delivered in the wreckage, is the sound of a man who has won the only thing he wanted and discovered it was worthless. Suzuki, sacked for making this, had smuggled a real idea inside the anarchy: the hierarchy these men kill and die to climb is a machine for turning human beings into empty rankings, and the top of it is a void.

My verdict: Branded to Kill is a genuine crime-cinema landmark, wilder and funnier and stranger than its reputation as a “difficult” film suggests, and its influence on everything cool and doomed in the assassin genre is impossible to overstate. Watch it, then put on Melville’s Le Samouraï for the icy inverse of the same idea, and Boorman’s Point Blank for the third point of that remarkable 1967 triangle. Suzuki spent a decade paying for this film. It has been repaying the rest of us ever since.