Assalto al blindato

(1960) Take Aim At The Police Van/ 'Jûsangô taihisen' yori: Sono gosôsha o nerae (In Japanese with English subtitles) CRIME DRAMA/ MYSTERY/ ACTION

The set up regards a prison guard, Daijirô Tamon (Michitarô Mizushima) getting suspended for six months as a result of failing to protect two prisoners. He then goes on an odyssey to find out why. First he would interview another former inmate prisoner who was also there by the name of Gorô Kashima (Shôichi Ozawa), as Tamon realizes he scribbled something onto the window on the bus they both riding on before the other two inmates were executed. And he tries to follow him after seeing the name Aki written on a piece of paper. Leading him to uncover two objectives which is to find out who was that lady he had seen on the fateful night during the bus ride and the identity of Aki who we find out is actually Akiba.

Despite it's short running time of less than a hour and a half, this was quite boring until it got to the very end with the gun shootings to be quite relative.

A 1960 police actioner from writer/director Seijin Suzuki (Branded to Kill/Tokyo Drifter) about a disgraced prison guard, Michitaro Mizushima, who loses some of his charges during a shootout during a nighttime transfer. Taking the law into his own hands but also at some point in the story cops are brought in, Mizushima tracks down the players behind the act siding up to the moll of one of the crooks in the hopes of getting back some dignity he suffered from the escape. As per Noir Alley's host Eddie Muller, the film was a revelation to Japanese audiences, especially the younger sect, which embraced the film embarrassing the honchos at the film studio but now 64 years after the fact the film is fine but ultimately safe when a lot of the gunfights which may've lit a fire under the viewing public butts now feel like so much uncontrolled chaos but the throughline of the plot is solid enough though.

Suzuki would go on to do wonders with abstraction and suggestive atmosphere in his later films but this is mostly a compact potboiler that doesn't have any time to spare. In fact there's so much plot here we need to get inside the protagonist's head to hear him try and clear some of it out. Voice-over narration tells us that "Fuychita had a sister, she's my next lead" and we're immediately transported to a tavern where that sister may be spotted. The movie jumps like that from place to place and character to character, gathering very little as it does but a growing number of names and intertwining relationships which are only as meaningful as the next person or clue they lead us to, and then at some point a sharpshooter is shooting at the protagonist and an underground prostitution ring is revealed. This is the kind of movie where people are presumed dead only to reappear later, where the protagonist goes back to his place to find a key character waiting for him in his living room with no explanations given or asked, and where the bad guys stage an elaborate death for the protagonist and his girl to escape when two bullets would have sufficed. It's not film noir by the American standard of the term and it's not even film noir compared to some of the stuff Teruo Ishii was doing at the time in Shintoho studios. It's a comic-book murder mystery with onedimensional characters and convoluted plot (one to make up for the other), a couple of cool scenes, and a swinging jazzy score. Like a dimestore viper novel, it keeps you turning the page but you know you're reading something mostly cheap and disposable by the end of it.

Great opening, but got messy quickly, and ultimately was an unsatisfying 79 minutes. The frumpled lead character (48 year old Michitaro Mizushima) reminded me a little of Glenn Ford in The Big Heat and the befuddling, often nonsensical plot reminded me of The Big Sleep, but Seijun Suzuki's work lacks the star power and atmosphere of those films. Questions piled up for me as I watched, and not just about the sequence of events from one scene to the next, but about basic character motivations for pretty much all of these people. The grand reveal of Akiba near the end was silly and a letdown too.

I never began actively disliking it though, because I never really knew what Suzuki was going to put on the screen next. There's a topless stripper shot in the chest with an arrow, and a James Bond like escape from an attempted execution (when of course a simple bullet would have made so much more sense). One of the mysterious young women being tracked down loves American rock 'n' roll, and has a gang of teenage friends pile out of car to protect her. There are several murders, but the main character believes in the goodness in people, and improbably the beautiful young femme fatale (Misako Watanabe) softens and falls in love with him. It's an absurdity set to a jazzy soundtrack and doesn't really work, but somehow held my interest. You can do better though.

Take Aim at the Police Van is action-packed, fast-moving Japanese Noir. Perhaps though, it's a little too fast moving. And unfortunately employs some rather erratic editing.

The story itself has all the makings of a good noir-ish detective murder mystery. Daijirô Tamon (Michitarô Mizushima) is a prison guard who has convicts murdered during a prison transfer. Tamon decides to hunt down those responsible. He quickly stumbles upon an "agency" that supplies young women as "showgirls" and "masseuses". There is no need to read between the lines or even get metaphorical as the fact they are being used as call-girls is blatantly evident. However, Tamon begins to have feelings for the agency's madam, Yûko (Misako Watanabe).

Directed by Seijun Suzuki, Take Aim at the Police Van builds up a good mystery and adds in a number of chases and shooting sequences. Yet the speed of the story and the choppiness of the editing truly shows that this was simply another movie quickly being fed through the Nikkatsu Studios machine. As swiftly Tamon decides to solve the case, the source of all the woe is discovered (also, such identity is not a shock), and the credits roll.

Take Aim at the Police Van is faster than service at a ramen house. But also quite tasty.