“The Man with a Shotgun” Japanese Theatrical Poster

Director: Seijun Suzuki
Cast: Hideaki Nitani, Izumi Ashikawa,
Yuji Kodaka, Yoko Minamida, Akio Tanaka, Eiji Go, Keisuke Noro, Asao Sano, Jun Hamamura
Running Time: 84 min. 

By Kelly Warner

Nikkatsu was always fond of mixing genre tropes from American movies into their films (sometimes they admitted it was less a case of influence and more a copy and paste job). Usually we think of American gangster films as the main influencer on what Nikkatsu was doing with its action movies, but the western was another genre that they occasionally took notes from in an attempt to recreate Hollywood style in Japan. Seijun Suzuki’s 1961 effort The Man with a Shotgun is a neo western set in Japan without working in stylistic postmodern revisionism like, say, Sukiyaki Western Django. It’s set in a woodland village overrun with gun-toting hoodlums that might have found its savior when a gunslinger in a cowboy hat strolls into town.

Samurai movies often operate similarly to westerns (which is part of why you see Seven Samurai and Yojimbo remade as westerns in the States), but rarely do you see an actual Japanese western. What’s interesting about Man with a Shotgun is that, with the exception of the weirdness in seeing these western themes play out in rural Japan, it’s actually a fairly honest, straight shooting film. No goofy tongue in cheek. Hideaki Nitani plays the titular Man with a Shotgun, a drifter named Ryoji who makes his money hunting (though we never actually see this in the movie) who wanders into a mountain village hoping to take advantage of its relatively untouched wilderness. He gets more than he bargained for, though, when he’s immediately jumped by thugs in the woods. Ryoji fights them off singlehandedly. This impresses the thugs who say that their boss likes to test all the new blood that come wandering into town. The first sign that there is a nefarious crime element in these here woods.

Ryoji is quite the character. He has a belt of shotgun shells around his waist, tucks his trousers into his boots, wears gloves and a hat nearly at all times, and carries his shotgun with him everywhere. It’s a testament for much costume design can do for a character without the actor ever needing to speak. But Nitani (Tokyo Drifter) is a more than capable actor and, for the most part, keeps the role from getting lost in camp. I mean, he grabs an accordion and sings for a bit, so there’s still some camp, but he manages better than most. He walks into the film like John Wayne as a do-gooder with a dark past and makes quick work assessing how the village operates. He’s the white hat gunslinger and quickly makes enemies with the local black hat, a roguish thug named Masa (Smashing the 0-Line’s Yuji Kodaka). But there are worse men than Masa, and they all work for a wealthy mill owner. The mill owner employs most the village and, for secret reasons, has enlisted nearly every roughneck who passes through town to be one of his enforcers. The pathetic, lone lawman of the village (Voice Without a Shadow’s Toshio Takahara) does what he can to keep order but he’s more ridiculed than respected. And when that sheriff starts looking too deep into the death of a loved one, he’s injured by one of mill’s thugs, leaving a void where the law used to be.

Ryoji the drifter steps up to wear the badge while the sheriff recovers, but the people in town are slow to throw their trust behind him. To complicate matters, the suspicious mill owner hires the blackhat Masa to sort out ‘justice’ on his own. But unknown to Masa, the wealthy mill owner has ulterior motives. Man with a Shotgun’s second half is so full of betrayals and reversals it’s insane. At some point, you give up trying to keep track of who’s on what side of things and just hope the favorite characters make it out alive in the end. The film does surprise the viewer in terms of what characters you end up rooting for, though. Ryoji is likeable and cool but it’s the rogue Masa and the sadsack sheriff that I came to enjoy the most. By the end, Masa becomes an unlikely hero (though remains an enemy to Ryoji) and the sheriff grows a spine in his attempt to save his town.

More characters wield guns in this movie than the usual Japanese film. This feels like a natural extension of the western themes, as the lone gunslinger wanders into the town run by well-armed crooks. About the only thing Suzuki doesn’t accurately translate are the drawn out standoffs, but some of this feels intentional. In one scene, Masa and Ryoji are going to duel for the right to be sheriff. Then the duel is downgraded to a fistfight. Then the fistfight is canceled in favor of a more traditional passing of the torch from the previous sheriff to the next. It’s like the director is purposefully eschewing your expectations of the genre conventions.

In the film’s final act, we learn that more people are connected in this town of nobody’s than we ever could’ve predicted. And after the film’s true villains reveal themselves, it’s up to an unlikely trio to see that justice is served. It’s fun and not too complicated. You can sense they might’ve been trying to complicate things with all the backstabbing in the plot, but this comes across more as an eagerness to entertain and fill every scene with some sort of unexpected new development.

Stylistically, Suzuki isn’t trying many crazy new things here. The most visually striking scene is a bar room brawl (another western staple), in which every saloon patron splashes the fighters with their beer during the bout. The screenplay by Yoshikazu Ishii and Takeo Matsuura gives nearly everyone in the large cast a scene of note. Hideaki Nitani, who is often the supporting player in many a Suzuki film, seems to enjoy the chance to play center stage. His character is larger than life but he is up to the challenge. Yuji Kodaka is so much more interesting here than his work as the hero journalist in Smashing the 0-Line and plays Masa in an interesting gray area. Toshio Takahara is endearing as the pitiful sheriff. And Izumi Ashikawa (I Hate But Love) has some good dramatic moments in her role as the sheriff’s relative who wants to defend his honor but also finds herself falling for Ryoji.

This isn’t the sort of movie that’s going to win over new members to the Seijun Suzuki fan club. But for those already in the club, it’s lots of fun to see the director trying his hand at a Japanese western. The Man with a Shotgun is slight entertainment, but it’s never slacking or taking your viewership for granted. It’s good fun and easy to recommend to curious viewers.

Kelly Warner’s Rating: 7/10

About this release: The Man with a Shotgun is available in the Arrow Video box set, Seijun Suzuki: The Early Years Vol. 2 – Border Crossings: The Crime and Action Movies. The other films included in the box are Eight Hours of Terror, Smashing the 0-Line, Tokyo Knights, and The Sleeping Beast Within. It’s another strong set by Arrow. None of these films have been available before on DVD in the States and a few haven’t even made it to DVD in Japan, so it’s a real treat to be able to see these uncovered gems. They all look and sound good. Strangely, the newest film in the set, The Man with the Shotgun, features the most wear on its print. Extras include a 49 minute Tony Rayns feature where he discusses the five films, Suzuki’s early years as a director, the stars in the film and how they figured into Nikkatsu’s Diamond line. It’s a good, easily watchable piece with nice bits of history for fans. Jasper Sharp lends a scholar commentary track to Smashing the 0-Line and that’s also definitely worth a listen. Sharp calls Smashing the 0-Line his favorite of the set and Rayns also spends a good time talking about it. My favorite is Eight Hours of Terror. My least favorite is Tokyo Knights, which really feels like it would’ve fit better with the previous set of Suzuki’s early films as it is more of a ‘youth movie’ to me. Everything in between is an entertaining B-movie that shows Suzuki growing in his early years as a filmmaker. This set, far more than Early Years Vol. 1, gets a hearty recommendation from me for fans of classic Japanese cinema and Seijun Suzuki. It is a limited edition so if you have your heart set on owning a copy, it’s best not to wait too long.

“Smashing the 0-Line” Japanese Theatrical Poster

AKA: Secret Zero Zone
Director: Seijun Suzuki
Cast: Hiroyuki Nagato, Yuji Kodaka,Sanae Nakahara, Mayumi Shimizu, Tomo’o Nagai, Kaku Takashina, Emiko Azuma, Shoichi Ozawa, Ryohei Uchida, Keisuke Noro
Running Time: 83 min.

By Kelly Warner

One of my favorite film heroes is the investigative journalist. Seekers of truth armed only with pen and notepad, overturning stones to reveal the misdeeds of powerful men who thought justice couldn’t touch them. Films about the journalist righting wrongs like Spotlight or All the President’s Men are worthwhile reminders of the importance of a free press in a functioning society. But films about journalists behaving badly are often just as entertaining and important. Ace in the Hole is a classic, Shattered Glass showed the world that Hayden Christensen could act, and Network, Nightcrawler, and South Korea’s underrated thriller The Exclusive: Beat the Devil’s Tattoo are all solid examples of the journalist or media company that is so desperate for a story that they either conjure one up out of the blue or twist the facts in order to reach a larger audience. Seijun Suzuki’s Smashing the 0-Line is another such film, focusing on two reporters, one who goes by the book and one who makes the news happen for him.

The two competing leads are played by Yuji Kodaka (Tattooed Life) and Hiroyuki Nagato (Shinjuku Incident). They’re friendly rival reporters from two different Tokyo papers. An early scene has them talking about going to a baseball game together and that’s pretty much the last time we ever get to see them enjoying each other’s company. Yuji Kodaka’s Nishina begins to worry about the unseemly practices of Nagato’s roguish Katori. Though Katori’s paper is proud of all the breaking news crime beat reporting that Katori digs up for them, they’re apparently unaware of how he helps to engineer the busts which he covers. In one of Katori’s first scenes, we see him leaving a woman in bed after some afternoon sex, only to open the door for the police so that they may arrest her for drug trafficking. Not long after that, Katori leads the cops to a raid on a boat which appears to be an Opium den. It doesn’t seem to matter to Katori that the woman might’ve loved him or that the boat was operated by a former classmate, things that Nishina tries to point out to him. Katori replies, “You’d protect a drug dealer just because he was a classmate of ours?” And though that morally gray question leaves Nishina momentarily stumped for a reply, Katori’s increasingly risky attempts to get the big story soon lead them further and further apart.

Katori bites off more than he can chew when he tries to use his tactics to flush out the leader of a drug running business. The drug business, which is linked to Hong Kong, starts going after Katori in response. They abduct his sister (The Wind-of-Youth Group’s Mayumi Shimizu) and threaten to rape her if he doesn’t comply. And then… he doesn’t. They’re just about ready to do their worst to the girl when Nishina and the police arrive at the last moment. Katori, now driven by rage (but no less an asshole), makes it his mission to expose the drug traffickers, even as his own paper begins to second guess keeping him under their employ.

It’s at this point that the film loses its momentum. When it’s a drama about Nishina vs. Katori, I was there for it. But then Katori goes missing in his pursuit of the truth and Nishina has to go undercover in the shipping lanes in order to find his ‘friend’ and I gradually started to lose interest. I’m not 100% sure why that is, other than I think it’s clear that the film works best when Katori is on screen, and when he goes missing the film loses something.

Hiroyuki Nagato, who plays the fundamentally flawed Katori, played a reporter much like Nishina in Seijun Suzuki’s The Sleeping Beast Within. Released just a few months apart, The Sleeping Beast Within and Smashing the 0-Line are strikingly similar films, both focusing on journalist heroes who take on the illegal drug trade. The Sleeping Beast Within was more interesting to me, as it took dark crime elements and dropped them on normal, unsuspecting people. Smashing the 0-Line’s protagonists are journalists, most of them working the crime beat, and as such it lacks the same punch when the villains focus their ire on the innocent. And where Sleeping Beast Within kept ratcheting up the tension until the final moment, Smashing the 0-Line doesn’t manage to do much with its final act. It’s like they ran out of twists or surprising character growth.

Filmed with the look of a docudrama, Smashing the 0-Line isn’t among the most stylish of Suzuki’s films. It’s reminiscent at times of a Kinji Fukasaku crime picture, complete with freeze frames and onscreen text reading criminal indictments. It’s interesting to watch the director play with such similar material as his previous film and make such a radically different movie. What’s most impressive is to see how good Nagato is here compared to the decent but kinda dull work he delivered in The Sleeping Beast Within. It’s a great performance. Yuji Kodaka is fine; he has more screen time than Nagato but the script and the audience understands it’s not his movie.

Smashing the 0-Line feels a bit like a stepping off point as Nikkatsu and director Suzuki transitioned away from mainstream genre fare of the 50s and moved towards the ‘borderless action’ style of the 60s. Though the film is not much of an action movie, it does have the grimy, liquored up, and unsparing qualities that the ‘borderless action’ movies were known for. Also worth noting how the film makes use of immigrants and westerners in its plot. The Chinese are Katori’s favorite criminal informants, Hong Kong is the source of many of the drugs, and American military deserters are some of the drug trade’s most loyal customers. At this point, Japan was beginning to turn the corner from the post-war cleanup but Smashing the 0-Line’s vision of the country seems more pessimistic and grim. It is full of background characters struggling with addiction and/or poverty. The moments I will likely remember most from Smashing the 0-Line are the slums and Katori’s eagerness to exploit their suffering for a cover story. It’s just a shame that, like the main character, the second half of the film loses its way.

Kelly Warner’s Rating: 6/10