Underworld Beauty / Ankokugai no bijo (1958)

Mari Shiraki

If you expect to see Mari Shiraki in her underwear spraying submachine gun bullets everywhere as shown in the posters and on the DVD cover, you’ll be disappointed by Underworld Beauty. Japanese movie studios were no more honest in their advertising than were American ones.* But what you will find is a B-movie of the highest order.

Basically, it’s the old double/triple cross story involving some valuable diamonds, with  Michitaro Mizushima as the good bad guy released from prison and determined to share the loot with his old partners. There’s more plot here than I really need to go into, but along the way we find a man swallowing the diamonds and jumping off the roof, another sneaking into the morgue to cut him open, diamonds tucked into a clay statue a la “The Six Napoleons” and assorted shootouts.But the black and white movie looks great in the best noir tradition, full of shadowy street scenes, darkened room gun fights,  trips into sewers, down hallways, and onto roof tops, with an “artist’s” studio full of creepy white mannequins thrown in for good measure. Mizushima wears absolutely the coolest costume of any noir hero anywhere, while giving off the world-weary air of a man who has seen it all. Shiraki, our underworld beauty, looks almost as cool in her Juliette Greco black pants and sweater uniform of fifties cool women everywhere, picked out from the dark night by her white trench coat.

It is Suzuki’s first ‘scope movie, and from the first scenes it shows the absolute assurance he would exhibit in all his later films, without any of the over-the-top flamboyance now associated with his name. It is a superb illustration of what a skilled studio hand can do with third hand material, second-level cast, and no budget to speak of.

• * Shiraki had made her screen debut a year earlier in the equally deceptively titled Naked Woman with a Gun, also directed by Suzuki.