Take Aim at the Police Van, Seijun Suzuki’s highly original 1960 neo-noir, is one helluva wild ride. It opens with a brazen crime, and spins from one action set piece to another, all embedded in a salacious underworld of strippers and prostitutes. To give you an idea, there’s a runaway gasoline truck, a stripper murdered by an arrow right into her nipple, and the whole thing ends in a gunfight in a nighttime train yard.
The protagonist is Tamon (the then 48 year old Michitaro Mizushima), a world-weary prison officer with a dogged adherence to his personal code. He’s transporting prisoners in a police van when it is ambushed and two of the prisoners are killed by a sniper. Because the prisoners were lost on his watch, Tamon is suspended for six months, which makes the crime much more important to Tamon than to the police. He sets out to solve the crime itself.
The murders were obviously a mob assassination, but of two very low-level thugs. The victims seem far too insignificant to justify such an elaborate hit. Tamon starts with their acquaintances and another goon who was in the van, and starts working backward. The trail leads to an employment agency that is the front for a criminal enterprise; its boss is in the hospital, and the interim leader is his daughter Yuko (Misako Watanabe). Yuko seems coldly calculating, but, as she warms to Tamon, it seems that she’s hiding a decent soul; as with many femme fatales, it’s unclear whether she is a Good Gil or a Bad Girl.
Suzuki was one wild ass director, with Sam Fuller’s sensibilities and Jean-luc Godard’s eagerness to explode cinematic conventions. Suzuki made Take Aim at the Police Van only four years into his directing career, in which he made 57 movies all the way through 2005. Two films from his oeuvre have reached cult status among American noiristas, Branded to Kill (starring Jo Shishido) and Tokyo Drifter. The studio bosses fired Suzuki after Branded to Kill, but he won a lawsuit and kept his career alive.
Take Aim at the Police Van can be streamed from Criterion and, occasionally, from Watch TCM.
