The Age of Assassins (1967)

directed by Kihachi Okamoto

Japan

99 minutes

4.5 stars out of 5

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Kihachi Okamoto is one of my favorite directors. His filmography is a bit unusual because each of what I would consider his "great films" (or even good films) are very distinctive from each other. While he certainly does have a trademark style that's present even in the late-'50s work he considered "just doing a job", it's hard to imagine the same person who made The Age of Assassins made Sword of Doom and by that token it's hard to imagine the same person who made Sword of Doom also made University Bandits. But the majority of his films seem to be united by a philosophy that is as nihilistic as it is absurdist: in movies like Age of Assassins and to an extent many of his more socially critical war films, there's something deeply wrong with the world, something rotten that is inherent in the way society functions, and the only way to really deal with it is to just be insane, because the world itself is insane, corrupt, and morally bankrupt, and we're all going to die eventually, probably at the hands of our fellow human beings in some way or another. I think it's impossible to separate this common thread running through all of Okamoto's films from the fact that he himself had seen active combat during the war - something that you feel more than anything in the way he shoots his action sequences.

At least, that's what I get out of it.

The Age of Assassins is one of his most boundary-pushing films, at times feeling like it has a vague notion of being film noir but too fond of the '60s avant-garde movement within Japanese cinema to really push in that direction. It's a hard movie to write about because it gives you almost nothing. Upon first watch, it can feel almost plotless; events happen according to a logic that is known only to the characters within the film. I think this is, in large part, because the protagonist of the movie spends the entire thing knowing exactly what's going on but not letting on to either the viewer or anybody around him that he knows what's going on.

Tatsuya Nakadai plays Shinji Kikyo, outwardly a scruffy, scatterbrained college professor but internally an enigma. He is targeted by a murder association in league with the Nazi Party for reasons that remain fairly murky throughout the entire film. At first he seems to just be an unfortunate bystander, the third in a line of random killings that the Nazis demand the murder association commit to prove the viability of their plan to train residents of an insane asylum to be professional killers (or maybe just killers). But then it starts to seem like that might have been a ruse when it's revealed that he was injured in Nazi Germany as a young boy and a Nazi surgeon took the opportunity to hide a precious diamond within his body. For anyone in this film to have a motivation so clear and comprehensible as wanting to steal a diamond is almost laughable, though - whatever is going on with Kikyo and why everybody wants to kill him is still something that, three rewatches later, I have trouble straightening out in my head.

The strength of this movie comes largely from the performances of Nakadai as Kikyo and also of Hideyo Amamoto as Shogo Mizorogi, mastermind of the murder association and the primary villain of the film. Nakadai does this thing throughout the movie where he very slowly sheds his nerdy professor disguise with such subtlety that halfway through the film you start thinking "wait a minute, is this still that weird guy we saw at the beginning?" Kikyo is a master of the long game, and it's only after we've watched the movie (preferably more than once) that we can see several moments where it's obvious that he's far more aware of what he's involved in than he lets on. Seeing Hideyo Amamoto play a villain is nothing unusual (in fact it's more unusual when he's not the villain in whatever movie he's in) but as Mizorogi he's got an edge that his villain performances don't typically have. While Kikyo's motivations remain largely personal for the entire film, Mizorogi is very open and philosophical about his beliefs about mass murder; it's a bit of a reverse-card version of the usual good vs. bad format, where the hero is plain-spoken and relatable and the villain remains a spooky unknown.

I don't think Toho was entirely comfortable with how out there this movie was, and for that matter I don't think any other studio was, either. Even Nikkatsu apparently decided to pass on it, and Toho shelved it for a while before finally releasing it very quietly in 1967. It was not promoted, was released along with a racing documentary that was not expected to draw high viewership, and was scheduled for release in February, the month with the lowest theater attendance. From its birth it seems like Age of Assassins was destined to be a cult classic only, and that makes sense; there's something too vicious about it for polite society, something a little too incisive and nasty, presented in a way that makes a lot of people uncomfortable. But it is one of my favorite Okamoto movies, and one of my favorite movies in general, because it is all of those things and it's also really fun. It wants you to have fun with murder. It's gleeful in its depiction of madness and death. It's an Okamoto movie to the core, made great by its cast and cinematography, and it's something that benefits greatly from more than one viewing.