Tokyo Drifter

A cover of Tokyo Drifter, the theme song of the 1966 movie of the same name, originally sung by its lead actor and pop singer Tetsuya Watari.

Despite the saturated colours and stylized framing and settings, this is not a music video, and everything that you see is from the actual movie.

Tokyo Drifter follows the life of Tetsuya Hondo, an overly loyal member of a reformed yakuza clan who, to protect his boss and curtail an ongoing gang war, accepts to leave Tokyo. As he drifts through Japan, he quickly realizes his enemies have not given up and have sent a hit squad after him. With its excessive depiction of gangster themes, Tokyo Drifter is seen as a parody of the yakuza movies of the era.

During the late 50s and most of the 60s, Seijun Suzuki was a B-movie director for the Nikkatsu studio (quite literally: he had a B-class contract for small-to-medium budget movies) who took advantage of the low profile, limited oversight of the projects he was assigned to, to take liberties with their direction and scenario, creating more and more over-the-top visuals with each new film. Tokyo Drifter was, with Branded To Kill, his penultimate Nikkatsu movies and the ones that got him dismissed and, eventually, blacklisted from the industry.
He would return years later, and his independent film Zigeunerweisen (1980) is now considered one of the most important Japanese movie of the 80s.

As an aside: I don't know if I should put that in either Cult or Obscure, but I do know we're missing a 60s channel.

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