August 18: Take Aim at the Police Van/Sono gososha o nerea (1960 -- Seijun Suzuki)

★★★★

Director Seijun Suzuki  is known for outlandish visuals and hipness in his films, and if I hadn’t known that, I’d have gotten it very quickly in this movie.  Take Aim is one fabulous, outrageous visual after another.  It starts with the sharpshooter firing into a police van in a jump cut ambush that is as riveting as anything at the beginning of an Indiana Jones movie, and it concludes with a nighttime shootout in a rail yard as clouds of brightly-lit steam pour out of engines.  In between, the hero and heroine are tied in the cab of a gas truck that is pushed down a hill side after the bad guys have opened the gas valve on the back.  The gangsters light the trail of gasoline, and a line of fire follows the truck across the countryside, down the hill and over a bridge, releasing a wall of smoke as the protagonists struggle to free themselves.  Oh, and a stripper is shot through the breast with an arrow elsewhere.  I’d have to agree with the description of Suzuki as visually “delirious.”  Films like this give me some insight into what Tarantino sees in Asian film.

But like in the other two Nikkatsu Noir films, I see a lot of French sensibility here.  When the cool Shoko is standing by the juke box, jivin’ with her friends, I see Nana from Vivre Sa Vie and Marianne From Pierrot le Fou.  Yuko is even listening to French accordion music at one point when she tells her maid to turn it off.  Whatever vibe Godard was picking up on, Suzuki was in tune.

Take Aim’s editing, with its contrasts and gaps, harkens to the editing that is coming in French New Wave, too.  In fact, the story itself is densely convoluted, so much so that Suzuki resorts to a voice-over to keep the viewer somewhat on target with what’s going on and why.  Those moments are not Suzuki’s best cinema, but he’s more interested in smoking lines of flame going across the countryside than in his story anyway.  The story here is a thin excuse to get from one striking visual to the next.

You can already see Suzuki’s attraction to cool in this film, too.  His bad guy wears sunglasses at night, and his sharpshooter puts his gum on the spotter scope before he starts shooting.  Bad guys are dressed immaculately in fashionable clothes, and hipsters pack into cars in their hippest.  The only unfashionable people here are the hero and the police, who are very square.

Take Aim is still noir.  The black-and-white contrasts and conspicuously low camera angles point to the source for at least some of the filmmaking, and there is (finally) a femme fatale here.  But the femme fatale is an unintentional problem-maker, and like the other Nikkatsu noirs, this film is aiming not only at a police van but also at a social goal, to protect young women from prostitution.  The social message is not something I find in American noir, but it’s in these Nikkatsus a good deal.  Even though Suzuki gives it short shrift in his pursuit of the cool and of arresting images.