Studio Nikkatsu made Branded to Kill as a standard B-movie, expecting an off-the-rack Yakuza thriller that would do solid business. And yet, they hired firebrand director Seijun Suzuki onto the job, when for years Suzuki had already been playing around with the B-projects he was being assigned, against the studio’s pressure on him to keep it sensible. Nikkatsu did not like what they saw, and promptly fired him.

The film Suzuki turned in took the broad outline of the plot - a hitman botches a job and becomes next on the list - and gave the protagonist (Joe Shishido) a boiling rice fetish and the femme fatale (Annu Muri) an obsession with dead butterflies.

The result is an acid-inflected noir overloaded with berserk stylistic touches, aided by Suzuki’s anything-goes ethos which allowed him to elevate many a tired script into a timeless cult classic. With the director’s centenary this year, now is as good a time as any to discover his wild brand of filmmaking!

A 4K digital restoration by Imagica Entertainment Media Services, Inc. undertook the digital film restoration. With thanks to Nikkatsu and Arrow Films. The original negative film (35mm) preserved at Nikkatsu Corporation was the source material. Physical repairs, film cleaning, 4K overscan, and digital restoration were carried out, followed by screen grading to complete the 4K digital restoration process.

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