The Rambling Guitarist (d. Buichi Saito) - The first thing one notices with this particular film, or among the first things, is how sharp the Blu-ray transfer is. It's in color, and pretty brightly in color at that. In fact, if I was pressured into singling out one great aspect of this somewhat wonkily clumsy film, it would be Kurataro Takamura's cinematography, which, quite frankly, looks terrific. This is a crime film that wants to be a Western, and if director Saito is confused as to what he's on about, at least Takamura knows what's what. The transition from the early scenes, which show the aforementioned rambling guitarist, named Taki (Akira Kobayashi), exiting the hay-truck from which he'd hitched a ride to find himself in a sleepy yet industrious fishing town and almost immediately embroiled in the ruthless (but, it seemed to me, rather small-time) criminal goings-on, these scenes, as I say, the transition from the sleepy Western vibe to a sleepy murderous vibe, is quite smooth. From a cinematographic point of view, anyway. Taki's life as a guitar-strumming balladeer doesn't hurt, nor does his evidently unstoppable fighting skills. A lot of Westerns are essentially crime films anyway.
But to be frank, The Rambling Guitarist is pretty stupid. It contains, in fact, one of the stupidest things I've ever seen in a film. You know that cliche, where you have two guys who are facing off against each other, and they're both deadly, and they both have guns, or knives, or whatever, and in the film, during the showdown, they each go for their weapon and the film cuts to something else. Then after a bit we see one of the guys enter the frame, walk into the room, whatever, and you're like "Oh he won I guess" but then blood starts to drip out of his mouth and he collapses, and you're like "Oh no, the other guy won, but the mortally wounded dude just walked out of the room first." You know that cliche? Well in The Rambling Guitarist, that showdown occurs on a boat which is at sea. Cut from two guys drawing guns to a nightclub on land, and one of the two guys, looking pretty sharp, walks in. Then the blood drips out of his mouth, etc. How many hours did he have to tamp down on that? "Okay, I've been shot, I'm going to die. Can we just get this boat back to land real quick? I want to die in a nightclub."
It's a fun movie, but stupid.
Voice Without a Shadow (d. Seijun Suzuki) - Suzuki is probably best known for Branded to Kill, a film the plot of which depends, at least at one point, on where a butterfly alights. The style of Branded to Kill supports this decision, and I do consider that 1967 movie to be pretty terrific. But it's a weird one, a near-Godardesque wallow in, homage to, and mockery of American film noir archetypes, plots, and so on. That was a Nikkatsu film too (as was Tokyo Drifter, also odd, but less odd) and the story goes that it's weirdness, and financial failure, ended up getting Suzuki fired. And while Branded to Kill is certainly a leap in strangeness from, say, Tokyo Drifter, I feel like you can start to map out where Suzuki was heading with this, with Voice Without a Shadow, which was his tenth film, after three years in the business.
The visual style of Voice Without a Shadow isn't especially crazy -- it is, in fact, fairly straightforward. What crazy is the narrative itself, and this is a plane of experimentation that clearly interested Suzuki,if not as much as the cinematic language of it all, then at least interested him on some significant level. The plot is, a switchboard operator (Yoko Minamida) accidentally overhears a murderers voice. Nothing comes of this at the time, but three years later, among the businessmen who play marathon rounds of mahjong with her husband, she hears the voice again. But here's what's strange: the stage has not been set for a Hitchcockian cat-and-mouse thriller. That this woman sort of has superhuman hearing is sort of the "hey I found some stolen money" plot device. In and of itself, it means nothing. In fact, the man whose voice she heard is soon murdered, and from their Voice Without a Shadow becomes a murder mystery, and Minamida's heroine takes second place to an intrepid reporter (Hideaki Nitani).
Red Pier (d. Toshio Masuda) - Which brings us to this, the best film in the collection. In a walk, I'm tempted to say, though my enthusiasm might well be explained entirely by the fact that Red Pier is by far the most noir film of the lot. But of course, its noirness would mean nothing if it was otherwise garbage, which it isn't. Director Masua is known best as the director, along with Kinji Fukasaku, of the Japanese sections of 1970's Tora! Tora! Tora! And that's all I knew of the man's work prior to watching Red Pier, which is as naturally and gracefully infused with the spirit of American noir as The Rambling Guitarist desperately insists it must be, but isn't.
As a story, it's classic: a dockworker is murdered, and the man behind it is a cool hitman named Jiro (Yujiro Ishihara) who we will come to regard as perhaps less evil than we'd thought. Which isn't to say he's justified in any crime we see him commit. He becomes romantically involved with the sister of the murdered dockworker (who was running drugs to support his family), and eventually finds the frail criminal code he'd clung to but probably couldn't logically explain, falling apart, leaving him exposed in almost every possible way. I'd say that Red Pier could be more passionate, and it's ending is certainly a bit soft, but it's quite beautifully shot, and entirely engaging in its main plot, and its variously organic subplots. There's real emotion here, and it's honestly about crime and criminals, which I'm not sure I can say about either The Rambling Guitarist or Voice Without a Shadow. It's the most genuine piece of genre art in the set.
The whole film felt to me like the adaptations of Yukio Mishima's fiction, in all their Brechtian phantasmagoria, within Paul Schrader's Mishima (genre differences aside, Tokyo Drifter must have been a huge influence on Schrader's film). The film's bright, assaultive colors contrast pretty sharply with the black and white of Branded to Kill, which came out three years later, and it's interesting, for me anyway, to consider Suzuki's relationship to the genre in these two films. In his essay for the Criterion re-release Howard Hampton ably notes how little care -- in the sense that it didn't matter to him, by which in turn I mean the absence of its mattering is what interested him, if you follow me -- Suzuki gives to Tokyo Drifter's coherence as a plot, crime or otherwise. But the story, which revolves around Tetsu (Tetsuya Watari), a former Yakuza who has left that world with his boss, Kurata (Ryuki Kita), to whom he is devoted, and Tetsu's legendary skills as a hitman, which trade he plies his trade in a way he believes is an honorable way to protect Kurata from encroaching Yakuza forces, brings to mind elements of the Coens' Miller's Crossing. Ultimately more bitter than that film -- or maybe clear-eyed, as another former Yakuza will eventually try to right Tetsu's naive ship -- Tokyo Drifter nevertheless almost hides that stuff, the criminal psychology, or pathology, or what have you, under some pretty crazy shit. The ending, a gunfight which takes place in a room of stark white, with maybe big yellow doughnut sculptures, is acrobatic -- that one gun-catching move of Tetsu's is pretty slick -- and bloody and more about all that whiteness and that one big spray of red than it is about much else. 
"So what?" you might argue, and fair enough. I'm not here to knock Tokyo Drifter. It's just that boy, did I love Branded to Kill, a film I did not remember as being quite this excellent. And it's interesting how much more reserved it is, visually, than Tokyo Drifter, coming in 1967 when the push for most would have been to pull out even those last few remaining stops and let the style all spill out. Instead, nutty as Branded to Kill is in a lot of ways, here Suzuki seems to find more interest in the actual genre, the trappings of which, like the women and the guns (especially the women, though Hanada's (Joe Shisido) machine pistol gets a fair amount of screen time), become more central to Suzuki's visual design. And the violence, too, which is typically more brutal and fast. It's true, though, that both films share a specific theme about the empty and destructive ambition of the Yakuza. In Tokyo Drifter, that particular absurdity is expressed through the notion of honor and loyalty even being possible (it's not, Suzuki says), and in Branded to Kill the question is, if you're in the Yakuza, what does it mean to be the best at what you do?
Joe Shisido's cold-blooded and efficient hitman is ranked as the Number 3 killer. Number 2 is pretty well know, but who is Number 1? He's never been seen, he's a rumor, you can't get to him. It's worth noting her that Patrick MacGoohan's TV series The Prisoner first hit TV screens in 1967, the same year Branded to Kill was released, and while Shisido's hitman may be Number 3, not Number 6, his quest is still for Number 1, the discovery and defeat of Number 1, and Suzuki, very much not a realist (the course of Hanada's life literally depends on the weight of a butterfly) also has voices blaring at Shisido from intercoms, giving him instructions, threatening him, pointing out the foolhardiness of his quest. Put everybody in funny clothes and throw in a giant menacing bubble, and Branded to Kill could almost be set in The Village. Here, what Suzuki hid, due to lack of interest, under layers of color and even slapstick, he plays up and makes the focus: the death-wish inherent in the criminal life. The mysterious and deeply seductive Misako (Annu Mari) even says she wants to die, almost before she's said anything else, and Hanada is almost willing to help her out with that. The sociopathic elements of this relationship are not entirely unlike those at the center of the, I guess, romance in Pale Flower, actually, but the drive for success is much more feverish in Branded to Kill, and more theatrically abstract. And in Pale Flower, at least you could put your finger on the goal -- it was repulsive, but it was concrete, anyway. In Branded to Kill, you can define it, but you couldn't say what achieving it would mean. Tokyo Drifter's brand of absurdity is all in its visuals; in Branded to Kill, the absurdity is in the motivations.
Tetsu in Tokyo Drifter and Hanada in Branded to Kill really are trying to do the same stupid thing, which is to seek worth, even redemption (however they might define that) through the Yakuza. Both men are also both trailed by a theme song, each sounding like the Japanese equivalent of the "lonely wanderer" brand of American folk ballads, except in this case shot through with the fatalism of gangster life. By the end, though, Tetsu keeps drifting, and Hanada has pulled the trigger again and again until he's hitting empty chambers.