Nikkatsu Crime Retro: THE WARPED ONES

Rated NR; 75min; Director:Koreyoshi Kurahara (1960)

Location: Alamo South Lamar

This show is a part of the Fantastic Fest Signature Series, Click to See More

NO BORDERS, NO LIMITS
1960s NIKKATSU ACTION CINEMA Retrospective

The label said it all: Nikkatsu akushon.

Nikkatsu was a studio that had been around since the silent days and akushon was "action," written in the katakana alphabet for foreign words. During their peak, from the late 1950s to the early 1960s, Nikkatsu action films evoked a cinematic world neither foreign nor Japanese. It was a mix of the two, where Japanese tough guys had the swagger, moves, and even the long legs of Hollywood movie heroes. It was a place where the Tokyo streets, Yokohama docks, and Hokkaido hills took on an exciting, exotic aura, as though they were stand-ins for Manhattan, Marseilles, or the American West.

The aim of this retrospective series, first presented at the 2005 Udine Far East Film Festival, is not to challenge the critical consensus, but rather to broaden the discussion by presenting a representative non-Suzuki selection from all periods of Nikkatsu Action. And by doing so, we hope to provide an opportunity for Western audiences to discover some surprising new classics of Japanese genre cinema, and hope that these dramatic, stylish, and entertaining films might some day stand alongside those already enshrined in the critical canon and eventually be made available on home video for a new generation of enthusiastic fans.

With NO BORDERS, NO LIMITS: NIKKATSU ACTION CINEMA author Mark Schilling live in person to introduce each film.

"An important rediscovery on many fronts." - Tim Lucas, VIDEO WATCHDOG

One of director Koreyoshi Kurahara’s boldest departures from studio convention was this frantic, black-and-white portrait of youth culture gone wild, starring Tamio Kawachi as Akira, a punk who hangs out at a jazz coffee house, living and breathing the wild Western music. One day he picks the pocket of a hooker's client (with her cooperation), but is caught and sent to jail. There he meets the like-minded Masaru (Eiji Go), and when they get out, they steal a car in the Ginza and pick up the hooker, who arranges the same scam with her latest John. Celebrating, they drive to the beach, where they find the reporter who snitched Kawachi to the cops, together with his artist fiancée Yuki (Noriko Matsumoto), whom they grab and take to the beach, where Kawachi rapes her. The lawless trio then rent an apartment together with money from selling the stolen car, living together and sharing sex as they would cigarettes. But one day, Akira runs into Yuki at the jazz bar, where she tells him she is pregnant with his child. To Akira this announcement is just another crazy riff in the jazz solo that is his world, but actions, he will see, do have consequences: sometimes violent, fatal, and absurd.

Released not long after Godard’s BREATHLESS, THE WARPED ONES (also known as SEASON OF HEAT) has similarly amoral characters, frenetic pace, and dynamic hand-held cinematography, but Kurahara’s vision is, if anything, more extreme, even to the point of existing in a world of its own, beyond normal comprehension. Kawachi’s punk, especially, transcends the usual social and moral categories, like an animal in human form. (Kurahara reportedly told Kawachi to think of his character as a "hungry lion roaring at the sun.") A fascinating experiment in style (not to mention the limits of human behavior), Kawachi's famously uninhibited performance catapults the film into the highest ranks of "bad youth" cinema, and perfectly captures the essence of Beat. A stylistic and amoral high point of early 60s cinema, THE WARPED ONES was actually released in dubbed form in the US by Radley Metzger's Audubon Films as THE WEIRD LOVEMAKERS.

Kid Policy: 18 and up; Children 6 and up will be allowed only with a parent or guardian. No children under the age of 6 will be allowed.

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