After viewing all 17 of the films I owned on disc by the auteur this month,I decided to search online for any Suzuki titles that might be around. At the bottom of the first page of results,I was thrilled to find a rare Suzuki had recently appeared online,with English Subtitles,leading me to tell Capone to stop crying.
Note:Some spoilers in review.
View on the film:
Wiping Capone's tears away in the middle of his Taisho era trilogy (all also reviewed), directing auteur Seijun Suzuki continues to build on the expansive canvas marked out in the Taisho trio, but pausing the abstract aspect of those works, in exchange for continuing with his long-term editor Akira Suzuki and fellow regular comparator, art director Takeo Kimura (here co-working with Yuji Maruyama) for a dazzling explosion of the Japanese New Wave (JNW) Film Noir Pop-Art surrealism which has been a major recurring visual motif across Suzuki's credits.
Turning a abandoned amusement park in Japan into 1930's Prohibition-era San Francisco, Suzuki twirls a ultra-stylised Screwball Comedy satire on Americana from the opening shot of a Film Noir gangster shown in silhouette wearing a hat and a cigar in his gob, which Suzuki spins out to left-field Musical numbers (a recurring occurrence in his credits) bursting with glossy Pop-Art colours and played on razor sharp JNW jump-cut editing.
High-kicking a tribute to Charlie Chaplin with a gleeful laughing in the face of the Klan and the racist politics of the period, Suzuki takes prime American iconography in Umiemon (played by a superb Ken'ichi Hagiwara,who can whisk Umiemon's care-free arrival to the US, together with a growing tough edge, with a impressive ease) travels to meet Al Capone,due to believing Capone is President.
Keeping the surreal comedic weirdness bouncing, Suzuki snaps shimmering neon lights, cowboy hats and bustling Jazz clubs (a major recurring location of Suzuki's) with a surrealist flourish of the wide-angle outdoor shots basking in the other worldly appearance of Umiemon's (a major regular motif of Suzuki) local town, getting screen-wiped across the pond by fantastic long tracking shots along the side streets of San Francisco where Umiemon hopes to make his dreams of fame,and meeting Capone come true.
Taking place at the end of the Taisho era, and coming after Suzuki had made two titles in his Taisho trilogy, which emphasised a abstract, meditating mood,rather then be focused on the plot, the screenplay by Suzuki's art designer Kimura & Atsushi Yamatoya brilliantly uses the path of Suzuki's then-recent work, to go in a delightfully left-field direction, throwing Screwball Comedy gum balls at Umiemon's attempt to blend in with the locals.
Noticeably featuring a prominent amount of dialogue in English for their adaptation of Sueyuki Kajiyama's novel (who tragically died of cirrhosis of the liver at just 45 years old) the writers use the language divide for a tasty spoof of the ripe, bar-room brawling tough guys of American crime,that Umiemon finds cause his dreams to go up against animated mob shoot-outs,which cause Capone to cry.
