Nikkatsu Noir

Eclipse, the no-frills DVD line from Criterion, collects five lively B-movie gangster thrillers produced by Nikkatsu from their glory days as the home of Japan's wildest crime dramas of the late 1950s and ‘60s. Cult filmmaker Seijun Suzuki is the most famous director represented in the set. With Take Aim at the Police Van (1960), one of his early forays into the genre, he turns a routine potboiler into a hot-blooded conspiracy thriller featuring kidnapped girls, punk snipers, a stripper shot dead by an arrow, faked deaths, hidden agendas, and a prison guard (Michitaro Mizushima) turned dogged investigator trying to piece it all together. The earliest film in the group, Koreyoshi Kurahara's I Am Waiting (1957), is a mood-drenched tale of a bar owner, a runaway nightclub songbird, and a vicious thug, set in the grimy port town atmosphere of the Yokohama docks. Toshio Masuda's Rusty Knife (1958) is more gangster thriller than shadowy noir, about a crusading attorney and a former criminal who take on an arrogant mob boss. Crime-picture icon Jo Shishido stars in Takumi Furukawa's Cruel Gun Story (1964), an energetic heist flick that channels Stanley Kubrick's The Killing, and plays an assassin who gets double-crossed in Takashi Nomura's A Colt Is My Passport (1967), which is set to a distinctive spaghetti western-inspired soundtrack and explodes in a wild showdown finale. Viewers will uncover no masterpieces on the level of Tokyo Drifter or Branded to Kill here, but will find inventive little nuggets of genre fun with energy, attitude, and style. Offering no extras beyond liner notes for each title from Asian film expert Chuck Stephens, this is a strong optional purchase. (S. Axmaker)