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Youth of the Beast - Criterion Collection | 
 enlarge | Actors: Yuriko Abe, Kensuke Akashi, Tomio Aoki, Hideaki Esumi, Eiji Go
Studio: Criterion
Category: DVD
List Price: $29.95
Buy New: $16.00
You Save: $13.95 (47%)
New (39) Used (12) from $13.69
Rating:  11 reviews
Sales Rank: 64557
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, Dvd-video, Special Edition, Subtitled, Widescreen, Ntsc
Languages: Japanese (Original Language), English (Subtitled)
Rating: Unrated
Region: 1
Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1
Number Of Discs: 1
Running Time: 92 Minutes
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.3
Dimensions (in): 7.5 x 5 x 0.5
MPN: PMIDYOU060D
ISBN: 0780029666
UPC: 037429203323
EAN: 9780780029668
ASIN: B0006HC0FU
Theatrical Release Date: 1963
Release Date: January 11, 2005
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com
Seijun Suzuki's delirious take on pulp-gangster films blows the lid off the genre with mad energy and stylistic excess, twisting a cliché-riddled revenge plot lifted from Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo (which also inspired Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars) into a wild yakuza explosion. The somber black-and-white opening with a single color element--a pink flower lying on the floor--explodes into bright color, blaring music, and random violence. Chipmunk-cheeked Suzuki regular Jo Shishido hides behind dark glasses as the brutal thug Jo, who auditions for the Nomota mob boss by beating up underlings in his own nightclub (we watch the spectacle from behind soundproof glass while a go-go dancer shimmies in the foreground). Quickly establishing himself as the outfit's most ruthless debt collector and enforcer, he visits a rival gang (headquartered in a loft overlooking a movie house) and before long is playing the two against one another. The tangled plot also involves the Nomota honcho's gay brother, a scheme against his sixth wife, and the mysterious Takeshita School of Knitting, all set at a barreling pace and spiced with jagged narrative leaps, avant-garde riffs, and glowing colorscapes that would make Douglas Sirk jealous. In one bizarre scene, a raging wind whips an amber-hued desert into a surreal dust storm just outside the picture window of the Nomota boss's living room window as he blithely flogs his mistress. Suzuki's cinematic madness finds its culmination in Branded to Kill and Tokyo Drifter. --Sean Axmaker
Product Description
A disgraced cop infiltrates two rival yakuza gangs and pits them against each other to avenge the murder of a friend. Japanese audiences literally burst into applause in reaction to the startling originality of suzukis audacious imaagery surreal action sequences & mind-boggling displays of lurid sex/violence. Studio: Image Entertainment Release Date: 01/11/2005 Run time: 92 minutes
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| Customer Reviews: Read 6 more reviews...
 A Fast Suzuki! April 25, 2008
P. Dombrowski (Within 35-miles of Chicago)
Certainly faster-paced and more violent than some if director Seijun Suzuki's other outings. Star Jo Shishido (a frequent leading man in Suzuki films) is a man on a mission and nothing is going to stop him. He's out to get revenge on a group of Yakuza. It's a Seijun Suzuki flick.. you can expect great sets, compelling camera angles, fantastic costumes, bad guys afflicted with warped sexuality.
One of the chief baddies has a cat. This movie was made a few years before "You Only Live Twice", the James Bond movie that introduced us to arch-enemy Ernst Stavro Blofeld (eventually parodied as "Doctor Evil").. is this an inspiration for those later films? I think so, Hollywood might have been borrowing from this Japanese Maverick for decades, long before Quentin Tarantino acknowledged his influence.
p.s., More than a decade after this was made, Jo Shishido used the same angry intensity to play an old-school yakuza boss in Part 4 of Kinji Fukasaku's "Yakuza Papers"/"Battles Without Honor & Humanity" series, a dramatization of the rise of Japanese organized crime.. this time, without any glory or chivalrous intent on the part of the gangsters.
Youth of the Beast July 2, 2007
John Farr
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
An audacious early outing from cult Japanese director Seijun Suzuki and the Nikkatsu studio, "Beast" is a hip, pulp-gangster flick with a twisty revenge plot involving murder, dope, go-go dancers, and salacious double crosses. (One kingpin even has a gay brother who slashes the face of anyone mentioning his mother!) With its surreal color palette, bizarre set pieces, and rapid cuts, the film has a unique visual flair--not to mention a killer crime-jazz score. And as the cop-turned-crook out for payback, Shishido is as hard-boiled as they come. For a lurid spin on the yakuza genre, unleash the "Beast."
Style Made Substance October 12, 2006
Planetary Eulogy (Asheville, NC USA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Seijun Suzuki is one of the more polarizing and ambiguous figures in Japanese cinema. Genius? Madman? Something in between? Perhaps it doesn't matter, the differences between these positions are in any case, quite sleight. An amazingly prolific director - he directed over forty films in the 1960s alone - his very productivity helped lend credibility to those who dismissed him as B-movie man, preeminent among these to be sure, but a B-movie man nonetheless. In recent years, however, his work has been increasingly appreciated, particularly in the West.
In large measure, this uptick in esteem is can be traced to the film industry finally catching up to Suzuki. His classic mid-60s films (Youth of the Beast, Gate of Flesh, Tokyo Drifter and Branded to Kill) featured a powerful combination of brutal, explicit and often sadistic violence, morbid humor, a keen sense of the ridiculous and a visual and narrative style that is fractured and often hallucinatory, all held together (or, rather, defiantly not held together) by a totalizing nihilism that denies any higher or greater meaning to actions beyond the demonstratable consequences of action itself. This made for cinema that, at the time, was incomprehensible to many viewers, and Suzuki was famously fired by Nikkatsu in 1967 for making films that "make no sense and make no money." Decades later, however, the potency of his best films is keenly appreciated by many cinephiles raised on Pulp Fiction and Natural Born Killers (both almost completely derivative of Suzuki's work).
Suzuki himself identified Youth of the Beast as marking the beginning of his most creatively fertile period, and all the distinctive elements of his filmmaking are in evidence, and meshing perfectly. The basic story - a mysterious tough muscles into the center of a war between rival gangs, then begins pursuing ends of his own as he plays each off the other - is strongly reminiscent of Kurosawa's Yojimbo, but where Yojimbo is a period piece set in a down and out town of the Edo period, Youth of the Beast is a (post)modern gangster film set in contemporary (1960s) Tokyo. Mifune's iconic role as the amoral ronin Sanjuro Kuwabatake is here filled by Jo Shishido as disgraced ex-detective Joji 'Jo' Mizuno.
The film opens with police investigating the apparent double suicide of a detective and his mistress (we later learn that it was actually a double murder). The initial sequence plays at being a traditional police procedural, with middle aged men in rumpled suits and worn hats speaking clinically of the dead. The camera pans to a table and an incongruous splash of color, a single cut red flower in a vase. It is an image of fleeting life that is repeated as the film's closing frame.
Suddenly, the film jumps to full color with a blast of hard bop from the soundtrack, cutting to a crowded street in Tokyo and the maniacal laughter of a woman. The camera soon finds 'Jo' Shisado, who explodes into violent action, attacking three men, pummeling one of them to the ground and kicking him repeatedly before fastidiously wiping the blood from his shoe onto the fallen man's shirt. He then turns with an air of total indifference and strolls into a hostess bar.
His outburst provides an entree into the Tokyo underworld; the men he thrashed were low-level yakuza soldiers, and the ease with which he dispatched them attracts the attention of the local underboss. Soon, he meets the big boss, Hideo Nomoto, and becomes a hitman for Nomoto's gang. It rapidly becomes apparent that Jo is playing a deeper game. He forces his way into the office of Nomoto's chief rival, earning a place on his payroll as well, this time by providing intelligence on Nomoto's activities. He plays the rivals off one another, eventually achieving the cataclysmic annihilation of both gangs.
But why? We learn through flashbacks and his own admission that Jo is a former cop,framed by the yakuza and sent to prison for a crime he didn't commit. More significantly, it is revealed that the detective whose murder was investigated in the opening scene was his former partner. He knows that someone in Nomoto's gang is responsible for that murder, and he is bent on discovering the killer and dispatching him..but he's not at all particular about who else he kills in the process. The purity of his vengeance is eventually undermined, however, when he befriends one of Nomoto's henchmen, and, particularly, after he learns who the real hand behind the killing was. In the end, his success brings no satisfaction, only more death.
The great strength of Youth of the Beast is its combination of superb visual flair and unremitting nihilism. Suzuki's shots are almost invariably dynamic in their composition, a riot of color and movement against a gritty background of corruption and decay. They create at once a hallucinatory detachment and a gut level immersion in the violence. Even the relatively static shots are intensely poetic and loaded with symbolism. Several scenes take place in the office of Nomoto's hostess bar. The entire back wall of the office is a one-way mirror, looking out into the nightclub. The floor of the office is set below the floor of the club. It is a perfect visual depiction of an "underworld" existing side by side with everyday life, but invisible to most people.
One aspect of the film will likely be extremely disturbing to many contemporary Western viewers. Suzuki's films were often possessed of a violent and virulent misogyny, and this is no exception. The female characters are invariably unsympathetic; prostitutes, addicts and murdering adulteresses. One scene features a pimp humiliating an addicted woman while she begs for a fix. In another, Nomoto beats a call girl with his belt and then rapes her. The movie reaches its climax when Jo leaves the woman who orchestrated the murder of his partner to the tender mercies of a straight razor wielding psychopath. It is a fitting end to one of the most relentlessly violent films of its era.
 Every cop is a criminal... December 30, 2005
Zack Davisson (Seattle, WA, USA)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Suzuki Seijun hasn't made a dull film yet. A contract worker for most of his career, he could take the most cliche-ridden assignment and turn it into gold.
"Youth of the Beast" ("Yaju no Seishun") is no exception. A typical revenge-plot, with the "good cop" posing as "bad cop" to get in good with the gangsters before enacting his vengeance, Suzuki takes it up a notch with innovative camera work and vivid, colorful imagery. By no means the wild ride of something like "Branded to Kill," it is still a quality Yakuza flick, Suzuki-style. There is more than a hint of "Yojimbo" in this film, but the similarities are soon forgotten.
Suzuki's visuals are well-served by tough-guy standby Shishido Jo, famous for his plastic surgery to give himself a more rugged look. Veteran of many of Suzuki's flicks, he brings an authenticity and a grounding-point in the convoluted world of gang-politics. Watanabe Misako brings a nice tenderness to the tough-guy world, as the wife of a detective who was killed.
The Criterion DVD for "Youth of the Beast" is fairly bare-boned, on par with their release for Suzuki's "Fighting Elegy." The picture is lovely, the original soundtrack and dialog are preserved, and it is a film not likely to be offered elsewhere. One could have hoped for more on the DVD release, but it is nice to have it available at all.
 Youth of the Beast (1963) - Seijun Suzuki October 8, 2005
Donny (Planet Earth)
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
Youth of the Beast is a wild, erratic, over stylized pop gangster film that is hard not to like. Director Seijun Suzuki is a mad painter, and the film is his canvas. Scene after scene is filled with glorious colors, odd ball characters, inept dialogue, violent lunacy, cardboard acting, and enough humor for the film to be considered a comedy. All of this really never culminates to anything noteworthy, but the short ride is never boring, and Suzuki always uses the camera as an artistic instrument, instead of a techincal device. As a studio contracted director, Suzuki should be given a lot of credit for creating such oddly appealing films with what he was given.
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