Thursday, January 5, 2023, 7:30 p.m., Dryden Theatre
Image
Branded to Kill (1967)
(Koroshi no rakuin, Seijun Suzuki, Japan 1967, 91 min., DCP, Japanese w/English subtitles)
Goro Hanada (Joe Shishido), the third-ranked assassin in Japan, lands in Tokyo with his wife, Mami (Mariko Ogawa). Dodging ambushes on his way to the job he was hired for, he manages to dispatch the fourth-ranked assassin along with many others. When he finally receives his assignment to kill four people, he misses the last one because a butterfly lands on his telescopic sight. A visually exhilarating thriller that radically deconstructs the themes and the rhetoric of the gangster genre, Branded to Kill ends up resembling Godard's almost contemporary Made in U.S.A.