'Jûsangô taihisen' yori: Sono gosôsha o nerae

An exceptionally well-shot if bitterly average and utterly bewildering mystery, Take Aim at the Police Van marks the very early days for Seijun Suzuki, far less abstract than what I've heard about his more well-known works. He's shooting to a formula but delivering where it matters, be it the woman killed by an arrow to the boob or the faceless gunman who lovingly strokes his rifle's stock before sticking his bubblegum atop its scope. It's a film I wish was slightly more cohesive (and less jazzy) than it is but Police Van benefits from the endless swagger of its lead and fun filmmaking flourishes to stop it from being a frustrating or bad time. A testament to how artists pumping out quickie exploitation movies can often work in truths about their times that prestige filmmakers can't.

Suzuki would go on to do wonders with abstraction and suggestive atmosphere in his later films but this is mostly a compact potboiler that doesn't have any time to spare. In fact there's so much plot here we need to get inside the protagonist's head to hear him try and clear some of it out. Voice-over narration tells us that "Fuychita had a sister, she's my next lead" and we're immediately transported to a tavern where that sister may be spotted. The movie jumps like that from place to place and character to character, gathering very little as it does but a growing number of names and intertwining relationships which are only as meaningful as the next person or clue they lead us to, and then at some point a sharpshooter is shooting at the protagonist and an underground prostitution ring is revealed. This is the kind of movie where people are presumed dead only to reappear later, where the protagonist goes back to his place to find a key character waiting for him in his living room with no explanations given or asked, and where the bad guys stage an elaborate death for the protagonist and his girl to escape when two bullets would have sufficed. It's not film noir by the American standard of the term and it's not even film noir compared to some of the stuff Teruo Ishii was doing at the time in Shintoho studios. It's a comic-book murder mystery with onedimensional characters and convoluted plot (one to make up for the other), a couple of cool scenes, and a swinging jazzy score. Like a dimestore viper novel, it keeps you turning the page but you know you're reading something mostly cheap and disposable by the end of it.

(1960) Take Aim At The Police Van/ 'Jûsangô taihisen' yori: Sono gosôsha o nerae (In Japanese with English subtitles) CRIME DRAMA/ MYSTERY/ ACTION

The set up regards a prison guard, Daijirô Tamon (Michitarô Mizushima) getting suspended for six months as a result of failing to protect two prisoners. He then goes on an odyssey to find out why. First he would interview another former inmate prisoner who was also there by the name of Gorô Kashima (Shôichi Ozawa), as Tamon realizes he scribbled something onto the window on the bus they both riding on before the other two inmates were executed. And he tries to follow him after seeing the name Aki written on a piece of paper. Leading him to uncover two objectives which is to find out who was that lady he had seen on the fateful night during the bus ride and the identity of Aki who we find out is actually Akiba.

Despite it's short running time of less than a hour and a half, this was quite boring until it got to the very end with the gun shootings to be quite relative.

Great opening, but got messy quickly, and ultimately was an unsatisfying 79 minutes. The frumpled lead character (48 year old Michitaro Mizushima) reminded me a little of Glenn Ford in The Big Heat and the befuddling, often nonsensical plot reminded me of The Big Sleep, but Seijun Suzuki's work lacks the star power and atmosphere of those films. Questions piled up for me as I watched, and not just about the sequence of events from one scene to the next, but about basic character motivations for pretty much all of these people. The grand reveal of Akiba near the end was silly and a letdown too.

I never began actively disliking it though, because I never really knew what Suzuki was going to put on the screen next. There's a topless stripper shot in the chest with an arrow, and a James Bond like escape from an attempted execution (when of course a simple bullet would have made so much more sense). One of the mysterious young women being tracked down loves American rock 'n' roll, and has a gang of teenage friends pile out of car to protect her. There are several murders, but the main character believes in the goodness in people, and improbably the beautiful young femme fatale (Misako Watanabe) softens and falls in love with him. It's an absurdity set to a jazzy soundtrack and doesn't really work, but somehow held my interest. You can do better though.

This film begins with a bus carrying two convicts to prison being ambushed by a man with a rifle which results in both of the prisoners being killed. Outraged about this incident, the authorities quickly suspend the prison guard responsible for the prisoner transport by the name of "Daijiro Tamon" (Michitaro Mizushima). So, with nothing but time on his hands, Daijiro goes about investigating the ambush and what clues he finds eventually leads him to a company known as the Hamaju Agency which is being temporarily run by a young woman by the name of "Yuko Hamajima" (Misako Watanabe). What he doesn't realize, however, is that the closer his investigation gets to the culprit behind the murders, the more dangerous it becomes for him. Now, rather than reveal any more, I will just say that this turned out to be a decent film due in large part to the mystery involved along with some good suspense here and there as well. Admittedly, there are some parts of the plot that are a bit unrealistic, but even so, I enjoyed this movie for the most part and I have rated it accordingly. Slightly above average.