Branded to Kill

When Japanese New Wave bad boy Seijun Suzuki delivered this brutal, hilarious, and visually inspired masterpiece to the executives at his studio, he was promptly fired. Branded to Kill (Koroshi no rakuin) tells the ecstatically bent story of a yakuza assassin with a fetish for sniffing steamed rice (the chipmunk-cheeked superstar Joe Shishido) who botches a job and ends up a target himself. This is Suzuki at his most extreme—the flabbergasting pinnacle of his sixties pop-art aesthetic.

Japan
1967
91 minutes
Black & White
2.39:1
Japanese
Spine #38

Special Features

4K UHD + Blu-ray Special Edition Features

New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
One 4K UHD disc of the film and one Blu-ray with the film and special features
Interviews with director Seijun Suzuki and assistant director Masami Kuzuu
Interview with Suzuki from 1997
Interview with actor Joe Shishido
Trailer
PLUS: An essay by critic and historian Tony Rayns

Cover by Eric Skillman

4K+Blu-ray 2 Discs $39.96 SRP: $49.95

Blu‑ray 1 Disc $31.96 SRP: $39.95

DVD 1 Disc $23.96 SRP: $29.95

Digital Options

Watch Now On

4K UHD + Blu-ray Special Edition Features

New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
One 4K UHD disc of the film and one Blu-ray with the film and special features
Interviews with director Seijun Suzuki and assistant director Masami Kuzuu
Interview with Suzuki from 1997
Interview with actor Joe Shishido
Trailer
PLUS: An essay by critic and historian Tony Rayns

Cover by Eric Skillman

Cast & Credits

Cast

Joe Shishido: Goro Hanada
Koji Nanbara: Number 1
Isao Tamagawa: Michihiko Yabuhara
Annu Mari: Misako Nakajo
Mariko Ogawa: Mami Hanada
Hiroshi Minami: Gihei Kasuga

Credits

Director: Seijun Suzuki
Producer: Kaneo Iwai
Assistant director: Masami Kuzuu
Screenplay by: Hachiro Guryu
Cinematography by: Kazue Nagatsuka
Editor: Matsuo Tanji
Production design by: Sukezo Kawahara
Music by: Naozumi Yamamoto

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Trailer for Branded to Kill

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Current

Branded to Kill: Reductio Ad Absurdum

Seijun Suzuki’s delirious, absurdist deconstruction of the crime genre is the strangest film the director made at Nikkatsu, Japan’s oldest film company.

By Tony Rayns

Essays — Dec 13, 2011

Branded to Kill

Flipping around the channels of late-night TV in my Tokyo apartment in 1984 I came across what seemed like a B movie from the ’60s. The studio: Nikkatsu. The star: Joe Shishido. The director: Seijun Suzuki. I was not at all prepared for what I was …

By John Zorn

Essays — Feb 23, 1999

A Salute to Seijun Suzuki

Cinema lost one of its most venerated maestros of excess last week with the passing of director Seijun Suzuki, whose signature films from the 1960s exploded the conventions of the Japanese studio system. While honing his craft in dozens of films cran…

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— Oct 25, 2011

Explore

Seijun Suzuki

Director

According to critic Manohla Dargis, “To experience a film by Japanese B-movie visionary Seijun Suzuki is to experience Japanese cinema in all its frenzied, voluptuous excess.” Suzuki played chaos like jazz in his movies, from the anything-goes yakuza thrillers Tokyo Drifter and Branded to Kill to the daring postwar dramas of human frailty Gate of Flesh and Story of a Prostitute to the twisted coming-of-age story Fighting Elegy; he never concerned himself with moderation, cramming boundless invention into his beautifully composed frames, both color and black-and-white. Suzuki first pursued film after returning home to Tokyo from service in the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II and failing university entrance exams. Following an unsatisfying stint as an assistant director at Shochiku, Suzuki was lured in 1954 to the recently reopened Nikkatsu studio, which was hiring fresh talent to appeal to a new kind of youth audience. He flourished there for years, with such films as Take Aim at the Police Van and especially Youth of the Beast, a commercial breakthrough for him. Yet his bosses became more and more opposed to his increasingly surreal visual stylings and lack of attention to narrative coherence, and after he made Branded to Kill, which a superior deemed “incomprehensible,” they unceremoniously (and illegally) revoked his contract. Of course, as any true Suzuki fan (and they are legion) knows, the incomprehensibility is part of the fun, and today his sixties works are considered some of the most essential of the Japanese New Wave.