Killers on Parade
Year: 1961
Director: Masahiro
Shinoda
Rating: 7.5
AKA - My Face Red in the Sunset
This was one of director Masahiro Shinoda's first films as part of the Japanese
New Wave and one might guess that it was to some degree influential on some
of the films of Seijun Suzuki such as Branded to Kill and Pistol Opera as
well as later films like Black Tight Killers. Vibrant colors, pop sensibilities,
absurd surrealism gives this film a very distinct off-beat personality. It
is as if Andy Warhol had made a Japanese film back in 1961 and just threw
colors at the canvass. All it needed was "bam", "wham" blazoned in text across
the screen to feel like a very cool Batman episode. As much as anything,
it is an exercise in style and comic parody that barely needs a plot and
there isn't much of one.
It is about professional killers. A group of them who all take great pride
in their skills and practice by shooting an apple off a little boy's head
at about 50 yards. They are more than a group - eight of them - more like
a fraternity as they have their own clubhouse and hang out talking about
their work just as we might in our jobs but it is about who they killed and
how they did it. They all have their own methods. They are rather an odd
ensemble - one a doctor, another wears a football helmet, there is a poet
who plays guitar, an old hand who prefers a knife, one who wants to unionize
and one of them is a female who takes her single sheep for walks. Every now
and then they break into song ("I'm a graveyard. Your lonely graveyard")
and a pop and jazz soundtrack inundate the film like an Annette Funicello
Beach movie. One of them so loves jazz that he is stuck at 99 kills - all
documented in his scrap book - because just as he was about to kill he heard
jazz and had to stop and snap his fingers. An eccentric group and on the
surface like kittens that haven't been housebroken. But they are killers.
The so-called plot kicks into gear when a construction owner hires them to
kill the secretary of a newspaper editor who has the goods on him. But through
a series of plot turns, the job is given to a new killer, an amateur who
is a dead shot. This is Haruhiko Ishida (Yusuke Kawazu) who takes one look
at the photo of the secretary Mana Arisaka (Shima Iwashita - who Masahiro
was later to marry and cast her in a number of his films) and falls in love.
So instead of killing her he decides to save her. The Eight Killers suddenly
turn out not to be so good at their job in their attempts to knock of Ishida
and Mana - and it gets downright silly. The action is staged in a way that
is intentionally very stilted and theatrical and as far from a tough hard
edged Yakuza film as you can get.
Much of the pleasure of the film are the oddities that Masahiro just throws
in for the heck of it - a bunch of children disguised all in black who look
more threatening than the killers, their club that has a big puddle in it
and parts of a mannequin strewn around, a giant fake moon, a nightclub's
weird décor, another female killer who is as sweet as pie and duels
the sheep walker killer, all of the killers riding around town in a jeep
like kids out on a lark and a bet to shoot the hat off the jockey of the
winning horse in full stride. It is all nonsense and quite frivolous but
feels very different from any Japanese film I have seen from this period.
Masahiro would go on of course to make a few classic films such as Pale Flower,
Samurai Spy, Silence (the original), Double Suicide and the Ballad of Orin.
