Branded to Kill is the last film that Seijun Suzuki made before his studio finally fired him for making films that “make no sense and no money”. I’d previously written about his eccentric and colorful Tokyo Drifter in this blog. Apparently tired of his shenanigans, the director of the studio tried to force Suzuki to make a more normal movie by cutting his production budget to the bare minimum. This is why this film is in black and white. But Suzuki didn’t let this deter him and turned in even crazier and more absurdist offering.

Here Joe Shishido stars as Goro Hanada, a professional hitman who is apparently ranked as the third best. After a seemingly routine hit, he is hired for a series of difficult assignments, fails at the final one due to a butterfly alighting on the barrel of his sniper rifle and thus ruining his aim, and finds himself being hunted in turn. In particular, he despairs when he learns that it is the mysterious number one-ranked hitman who hunts him. In between these misadventures, he has wild, crazy sex with his wife and gets involved with a femme fatale, Misako Nakajo, who appears to have a death wish.

The plot sounds simple in theory but while watching it, it’s obfuscated by all the weirdness that is going on and Suzuki’s liking of discontinuous editing cuts that don’t make much logical sense. For example, Hanada has a fetish for smelling steamed rice which drives him into a sexual frenzy with his wife. Misako’s love of death is symbolized by how her house is just covered with dead butterflies and birds. In one farcical scene Hanada and the number one killer mope around the house and go everywhere arm in arm because they won’t start fighting until one has a clear edge over the other. I’d even count Shishido’s distractingly bulging cheeks as part of the strangeness, apparently due to the actor’s decision to undergo plastic surgery.

It’s hard to decide how much of this is Suzuki being a brilliant visionary and how much is him just throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks. Some elements like the formalized rankings of hitmen and the use of psychological stress as a weapon are recurrent tropes to us by now but seem to have been new at that time and went on to influence many other filmmakers. There are also clear influences from things like the James Bond franchise, exaggerated here to the point of parody though I can’t say if this was the director’s intention. One thing is for sure, it’s so crazy that it’s almost impossible to predict what is going to happen next so you just have to keep watching.

Still, I think I very much prefer Tokyo Drifter to this both because its use of color allows it to be more stylistically interesting and because it’s just a more entertaining movie. Branded to Kill is much darker film in a rather serious way if you manage to look past the crazy stuff that strains your suspension of disbelief so it does have that going for it but it’s not quite enough to make it worth watching in my opinion.