Youth of the Beast | Concentric Ocelot Party

They say you’ve got to know the rules before you break them. Which would suggest that Japan’s Seijun Suzuki must have been some kind of prodigy at film-rule stuff before deciding to chuck all that nonsense and to just go and be awesome instead. 1963’s Youth of the Beast is generally considered his ‘break-out’ feature, introducing the ‘kaleidoscopic’ style that became his trademark- a brand of film less concerned with narrative cohesion and more with wringing the optimal quantity of “Hell yeah!” out of every scene.

So this isn’t really a review. Just a note that, when your film opens with the Nikkatsu logo…

…and your main character is this guy, the cheerfully chipmunk-cheeked Jō Shishido…

…it’s pretty amazing when, in an early scene, this happens…

So Youth of the Beast is a pretty cool tale of a solitary man using his wiles and a fair amount of ammunition to play two rival gangs off against each other. Yes, it’s basically like a Japanese incarnation of A Fistful of Dollars.* But I’m not sure how Shishido kept his cover while hanging out on cinema hoardings too.

Anyway, this isn’t really a review or anything, just me geeking out over a goofy film joke that’s about as delightfully self indulgent as that time in Jea-luc Godard’s Une femme est une femme where Jeanne Moreau shows up to let us know how filming is going on François Truffaut’s Jules et Jim.

But yeah, Youth of the Beast is generally pretty amazing. So rather than waxing lyrical about it with boring old words you could find in any reasonably-priced dictionary (and a few prohibitively expensive ones too), here’s a bunch more screen-caps instead, that more effectively capture Suzuki’s sense of odd-framing, vibrant mise-en-scene, and tasteful female nudity…