Killers on Parade / My Face Red in the Sunset / (1961)

Now and then you come across a movie that is so jaw-droppingly weird that you just don’t know where to even start a commentary.  Japan seems to have produced rather more than its share, though I suppose that depends on how you define weird. Certainly, Hausu, Branded to Kill, Princess Raccoon, Demon Pond, Ichi the Killer, or DOA would qualify, none of which can be blamed on the lack of skill of the makers. Killers on Parade, though less well known, fits right in with those. It is the kind of movie you ask yourself, “What were they on, and how did they manage to stay on it through the entire production cycle?”

The plot as such is simple. A corrupt building contractor (is there any other kind in the movies?) wants a journalist killed and puts out a contract on her. The hitman falls in love with her. But complications arise because he isn’t really a hitman, just a guy who somehow proves to be a better shot than anyone else in the Guild of Hitmen. The eight hitmen in the Guild (one is actually a woman, but for convenience we’ll use the standard movie term) decide they have to kill him as well as the woman, and while they’re at it, kill each other in order to prove who is really the No. 1 Hitman. In its rough outlines, this is Branded to Kill as well and Pistol Opera, and more “realistic” presentations can be found in movies as disparate as The Mechanic and Johnnie To’s flamboyant Fulltime Killer and probably dozens of others that I don’t recall at the moment. But Killers on Parade at times makes Branded to Kill look tame and unimaginative.

Each of the guild hitmen has a special look right out of the Batman villain book but five years before Batman took the TV world by storm. And the look seems to have little to do with their skill; that is, none has a particular superpower to match their get-up, except possibly the poet who wears kimono and sometimes throws a knife rather than shoots a pistol like all the others do. One carries a bag conveniently labelled “doctor” in English, but he doesn’t use poisons. One wears an American football uniform but isn’t a strong man. The woman has a pet goat (that’s right, a pet goat)) she calls The End. One wears a high school letter jacket. One dresses as an American movie gangster, black suit, white tie. All use pistols, though one occasionally strums on a rifle like a guitar. Why? Who knows. And they travel around in an American 1930s jalopy with cartoons of themselves  and the subtle “Murderers 8” painted on the side.

It is an absurdist send-up of the hitman genre, of course. But the hitman genre did not really exist yet; like Masumura in Afraid to Die, Masahiro Shinoda is subverting a kind of movie before anyone else had even thought to make it.*

Just in case it wasn’t odd enough yet, the hitmen break into song, sometimes alone, sometimes joining in with a ballad sung by someone else on the soundtrack. There’s a singing group at a club that suddenly shouts “Ole” in the middle of their Four Freshmen style jazz number. The unexpected musical outbursts, the cartoon colors, the mix of the real and the artificial, the absurd disguises remind us of Black Lizard, but that was made over a year later.

Scene after scene the visual style changes, and you find yourself asking, “Did I really just see what I think I saw?”

When I first saw it, I thought that Shinoda was pulling a Seijun Suzuki and rebelling against a cliched script by making it look as absurd as possible as well. But I realized that the music means it could not have been improvised on the set, or even in the set designer’s office. Then too, the screenplay is credited to Shuji Terayama, who within a few years would become Japan’s most (in)famous avant-garde/absurdist playwright. They intended it to look like this from the beginning.

Apparently, Japanese audiences were just as confused as we are today. The movie was reportedly a flop and, to save his career, Shinoda had to go back to directing more typical Shochiku product. But after only a few years, he was again on his way to being one of Japan’s most unpredictable movie-makers with the staggeringly imaginative Pale Flower, although it took the studio almost a year to get up the nerve to actually release that one as well. But no matter where his imagination led him in later years, he made nothing else like this.

As long as you don’t expect any semblance of reality, it is an absolute hoot to watch. But it is not an Ed Wood kind of movie where you laugh at the amateurishness. Whatever Shinoda and company put on the screen, they did so absolutely intentionally. It’s just that I have no idea what the intention might have been.

* There had of course been assassins in many Japanese period movies, and in some of the gangster films around 1960 there were hired guns brought in from out of town, but the only Japanese movie I have found with an assassin lead before this is The Beast Must Die, which I know only from plot summaries because I have yet to find a copy. Within a few years, hit men would be all over the place, but that came later. Even the first ninja film was not made until 1962. The first American film in the genre was apparently 1958’s Murder by Contract with Vince Edwards, forgotten almost before it was made, so it could hardly have been an inspiration.