Youth of the Beast

When a mysterious stranger muscles into two rival yakuza gangs, Tokyo's underworld explodes with violence. Youth of the Beast (Yaju no Seishun) was a breakthrough for director Seijun Suzuki, introducing the flamboyant colors, hallucinatory images, and striking compositions that would become his trademark. The Criterion Collection proudly presents the film that revitalized the yakuza genre and helped define the inimitable style of a legendary cinematic renegade.

Japan
1963
92 minutes
Color
2.35:1
Japanese
Spine #268

Special Features

High-definition digital transfer
Interviews with director Seijun Suzuki and actor Joe Shishido, made by Nikkatsu in 2001
Original theatrical trailer
New and improved English subtitle translation
PLUS: A new essay by film critic Howard Hampton

New cover by Lucien S. Y. Yang

DVD 1 Disc $23.96 SRP: $29.95

Special Features

High-definition digital transfer
Interviews with director Seijun Suzuki and actor Joe Shishido, made by Nikkatsu in 2001
Original theatrical trailer
New and improved English subtitle translation
PLUS: A new essay by film critic Howard Hampton

New cover by Lucien S. Y. Yang

Cast & Credits

Cast

Joe Shishido: Joji Mizuno
Misako Watanabe: Kumiko
Tamio Kawaji: Hideo Nomoto
Ichiro Kijima: Koichi Takeshita
Mizuho Suzuki: Hirokawa
Shoji Kobayashi: Tatsuo Nomoto
Kinzo Shin: Shinsuke Onodera
Eiji Go: Shigeru Takechi

Credits

Director: Seijun Suzuki
Cinematography: Kazue Nagatsuka
Production design: Yoshinaga Yokoo
Screenplay: Ichiro Ikeda
Screenplay: Tadaaki Yamazaki
Based on a novel by: Haruhiko Oyabu
Music: Hajime Okumura
Producer: Keinosuke Kubo

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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.