Capone Cries a Lot
‘Kapone oi ni naku’
Director: Seijun Suzuki
Cast: Ken'ichi Hagiwara, Yűko Tanaka, Kenji Sawada
A naniwa bushi singer moves from japan to '20s san francisco with his beautiful wife; he becomes embroiled in prohibition era sake brewing, she is swept up into prostitution. their lives move forward through the 20s and 30s, they encounter racism and poverty and organized crime, the film keeps going through the 40s and the Japanese internment camps.
Whole thing is shot in an abandoned Japanese amusement park, and Suzuki's focus on American iconography (cowboy hats, blackface, dixieland, popcorn, neon) places this film in an
entirely different register than the rest of his Taisho era films. like those though it all ends up with images of death, failure, and senseless loss. the peculiar decoupage style Suzuki
cultivated in the '60s is in full force here - there are several series of simple cuts in the early going that were so forceful and peculiar that i could barely believe the sequence of images -
and always most moving when he manages to bridge the gap between life and death in simple cuts. maybe a major film or something.
Remastered Print
1985 Color Widescreen 130 Mins.
Japanese with Optional English Subtitles.
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