suzuki underworld USA

The follow-up release to Arrow Video's voluminous collection of early films from Japanese genre director Seijun Suzuki is actually more entertaining and approachable than the first installment. Once again, the set contains five films that have never even premiered on DVD in their native country, let alone Blu-ray, marking Suzuki's transition into gangster / thriller program films designed to support higher-profile releases. Two titles - The Sleeping Beast Within and Smashing the O-Line - feature a pair of journalists determined to expose the drug and human trafficking business. Eight Hours of Terror uses a disaster-film story structure as bank robbers hijack a bus full of eclectic passengers. The Man with a Shotgun transposes the Hollywood western scenario with a remote logging camp as a lone wolf seeking his fiancée’s killers winds up hired as the local sheriff. While Tokyo Knights brings up the rear as the most unusual film of the lot, turning the story of a young upstart about to inherit the family crime syndicate into a quirky farce.

Unlike the first set, which, despite using Rebel Without A Cause as a jumping off point, felt undeniably foreign, the five films presented here (all produced between 1957 and 1961) are just a twist or two away from familiar U.S. cinema; but it's that twist that makes each of them so memorable. With a daughter discovering the secret life of her previously dutiful salaryman father, The Sleeping Beast Within almost feels like a companion piece to Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt. And The Man with a Shotgun reintroduces a wandering gunslinger who is every bit the match of his American counterparts. Even Tokyo Knights, which is the most uniquely Japanese of the group, credits it's hero's time spent in America as the explanation for his superior skills.

As pointed out in the 45-minute interview with film scholar Tony Rayns, none of these are a bonafide classic; they're designed to grab your attention and hold it for a riveting 80 minutes, which they do quite successfully. The video presentation is a bit rougher than the first set (particularly Shotgun), but easily on par with other Nikkatsu titles from the era. Extras, besides the aforementioned interview, include an audio commentary on Smashing the O-Line, trailers, stills and a 60-page illustrated booklet. For fans yearning for some undiscovered genre pleasure from abroad, this is an easy blind buy.

Despite a big push from critics during the French New Wave and modern-day cinema demigods like Martin Scorsese, the work of Samuel Fuller has never entered the public consciousness quite the way it should. Working on the fringes of the studio system, his films took chances that high profile pictures never even attempted, pushing back again a Production Code that threatened (but was never quite able) to neuter his rough and tumble style. And Underworld U.S.A. (1961) is among his best, a noir-ish gangster story that deprives its audience of anything resembling a hero until the very end.

Tolly Devlin is already a young punk when he's witness to his father's brutal murder in a back alley. Recognizing one of the assailants, Tolly intentionally sends himself to reform school, followed by stints in several prisons, in an attempt to get revenge...and get more names! With list in hand, Tolly is released from prison and promptly hatches another scheme - rescuing, seducing then emotionally abusing a prostitute with vital information - to join the organization and take his pound of flesh from the inside out.

Fuller's shocking scenes of gangland violence will be familiar to fans of Scorsese's mob pictures, none more so than the sequence where the daughter of a mob informant is mowed down while riding her bicycle. But it's doubly disturbing to see it take place in 1961, where Fuller so accurately predicts organized crime's attempt to legitimize itself in the new landscape of corporate America. But it's the transformative performance of Cliff Robertson as Tolly, whose single-minded quest for revenge destroys his own life and everyone around him, that lingers the longest. Underworld U.S.A. drags the audience into a psychology of crime and punishment so dark that it puts their own morality in question. It's a perfect example of Fuller's uncompromising style: one that's easy to admire but tough to stomach.

Twilight Time's 3000-copy limited edition Blu-ray looks gorgeous and is sure to be q quick sell out. Extras include an isolated music track, Scorsese interview, Sam Fuller profile, theatrical trailer and liner notes.