(All images are details from iPhone photos taken of the film playing from the FilmStruck app on Apple TV; built-in screen-capturing is disabled during playback from the Web and from the FilmStruck app on iPhone/iPad.)
The year is 1960: Suzuki takes on (is handed) a project about Shinjuku Sun-Tribe trash. Everything Goes Wrong [Subete ga kurutteru].
The year is 1960: Suzuki's resulting movie offers up a 3-minute chat, in the middle of a busy Tokyo crosswalk, shot via telephoto while cars whizz port and starboard of the characters Etsuko and Ono in the middle of conversation around an unwanted pregnancy — with... designs on abortion.
I'll speak curtly about this film which, I think if you see it, you'll understand the way I deliver these notes and thoughts —
The film that begins under the credits at the Shinjuku theater, shown in 1.37 within the 2.35 Scope widescreen of the movie proper, is a WWII film with lots of exploding mud and jungle palm called: "FIGHT TILL THE LAST DROP OF BLOOD."
Throughout there's a youth-party atmosphere; again: this is Sun-Tribe trash. This is a mix-up imagination of "youth gone wild" and the exaggerated Tokyo-world that is without parents, with 1-minutes statutes of limitations, and its title is A Clockwork Plum.
Jirô (Tamio Kawaji) goes nuts on this girl he fucks and throws her arcade-coins — the more nonsense that comes to the fore, absurd, in a Suzuki picture, the more one can feel his outrage — as rare a case in society as this degree of misogyny might be, — [beat and:] — voilà, that's why these Suzuki/Nikkatsu movies exist.
Why should one want to watch this? The lead is unsympathetic when he meets a friend on a Ferris wheel; we are condemned to "visual flair," to a shot set-up where the two raising and lowering reminisce in dialogue about high-school events, — events I'd rather see. And yet I have more respect for Suzuki for bullying on with this and not "fleshing it out." Who cares? Let's get in and out. The script is Sun-Tribe trash.
Toshimi (Yoshiko Nezu), with her butchy voice sprouting from capri pants, and her ruinous chewing-gum smack, is the most powerful Suzuki star up to this point, without question.
Rock-and-Roll: Masayo (Tomoko Naraoka).
Jirô's mother's gentleman-interest, Nanbara-san: Jirô has a dead father — Jirô has a restaurant...........
Nanbara financially supported Jirô and Mom for 10 years — "Hookers take money," Jirô tells his mother. "Our home isn't a sex hotel. Dad was run over by a tank in the war. Nanbara builds those tanks. So it's like Nanbara killed Dad!"
I suppose it is. Koichi is the boisterous friend.
Coleman Hawkins posters go up not only to take us out of the stupidity of the scenario and experience of the movie, by image and by sound of the music track, but also to close us out when the movie's over.
Patron: "What did you do at their age?"
Bartender: "I was put to work in wartime labor."
Jirô throws the coins post-coitally at Toshimi — "Women take money!"
Etsuko swindles Nanbara (looking for Jirô at their local) to travel to a beach and pleads "I want you to buy me!" — he just gives her the money. In the meantime Jirô has told his mother Nanbara's gone on a tryst — Jirô and the mother walk in on Nanbara just as Etsuko, in her negligé, is trying to return his cash.
Masayo: "We don't live as freely as young people do today." — CUT TO: Waves breaking with force on rocks.
We don't discover Nanbara is married till 10 minutes before the end.
Ono: "We don't interfere with one another; we're independent."
Jirô wrenches Nanbara and flees; Etsuko in a fit falls down a subway entrance and miscarries.
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