Oddball early 60s B&W Japanese gangster gem with very odd structure and without straightforward narrative. Director Seijun Suzuki’s films for the Nikkatsu studio kept getting stranger and less commercial, so he was instructed to turn in something more conventional.
Instead, he made this decidedly non-traditional film and was promptly fired. “They told me my films didn’t make money and they didn’t make sense, so they fired me,” says Suzuki in an interview on the DVD. After firing, he successfully sued Nikkatsu, but was blacklisted and didn’t work for 10 years. 2001 brought a sequel of sorts called Pistol Opera.
Hamster-faced star Jo Shishido had collagen implants placed in his cheeks to boost his box office appeal, and it apparently worked, too, but it makes him look hella weird to these western eyes. He plays a hit man (ranked No. 
who
is talked out of retirement. Things go wrong, and a contract is taken out on him. His wife even tries to kill him! He meets a beautiful hit woman with dead butterflies on her walls—“Where can I pin you?” she asks.
Hanada loves the smell of boiling rice more than anything. It gets him sexually stimulated. After having lots of rough sex, his tired wife doesn’t want to put on any more rice.
The assassinations he is assigned are shot quite well, I particularly like when he unscrews a pipe and shoots an eye doctor up through the drain right in his face! Later, the assassin No. 2 is assigned to kill him. They are handcuffed together so they can keep an eye on each other, because No. 2 has said he could kill Hanada at anytime.
So it gets strange, as the connected assassins try to move around the house and do things while cuffed together, all the time watching for signs that the other is going for his gun.
Increasing gunplay and jarring edits build a swirling atmosphere of disorientation. The narrative is subordinated to form, so the set, cinematography and editing tell the story. The plot is simple and yet murky. 
The film stands up really well, considering Nikkatsu had a policy of only taking 28 days to shoot and edit a picture. The over-the-top style brings to mind Sam Fuller, but is truly original and outrageous.
Lot of facial close-ups and static shots. The non-linear jumps in time and space are bit confusing, and the story reveals itself more upon repeat viewing. It’s as if he’s purposely trying to break the “rules” of cinematic “language” that we’ve taken for granted all these years.
Worth a look. Maybe a little hard to follow at times, but lots of action, and beautiful shots by a director striving to innovate. Keep your eyes peeled for: guy running on fire, wife scraping her nails on window, rice cooker sniffing, butterfly landing on gunfight, wife saying “Beast needs beast” then shooting him, the big finale in a boxing ring. The DVD has an interview with the director and a gallery of cool posters from 60’s Yakuza films.
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