Tokyo Drifter

I should stop writing posts last thing on a Sunday night. I'm not very eloquent at the moment. But I have got some beautiful screenshots to show!
Toby bought this movie, Tokyo Drifter, a while ago, and we got round to watching it the other night. I knew nothing about it, and I was massively impressed with its aesthetics and the impact it's clearly had on popular culture. Filmed in Japan in 1966, it's so understatedly 60s that it hurts sometimes - the houndstooth prints! the dancing teenagers! the powder blue suit! - in the best possible way. That is, in the pastel-bright, beautifully-framed, pseudo-comic gang-wars way. Obviously.

I don't think it would be unfair to say that without this movie Quentin Tarantino would never have made Kill Bill. He may not even exist as we know him. Its influence on him is blatantly obvious, almost painfully so, right down to the hopelessly-outnumbered comical Japanese gang fight (guns, not swords) in a big rectangular wooden building while it snows delicately outside. In Tokyo Drifter, however, these elements of the ridiculous serve only to keep the film grounded, make for some surprising laughs, and remind us not to take it all too seriously.

The design and stylistic elements were utterly superb - a large number of scenes take place in a nightclub whose walls and decor (all the furniture, including the piano and the bar) are pure white, and are lit with whatever colour suits the mood of the scene. A woman is accidentally shot, and the backlit walls behind her turn from red to white in a blink. The whole colour palette is a sort of comfortable, pastel neon, improbably bright colours on faded film with blank backgrounds. Chiharu's makeup glistens softly in a dewy, glowing manner. All of these things combined made it a truly gorgeous film to watch.
And of course, like all true gangster films, it's really a kind of noir, and a tragedy.