10 Gangster Movies That Mess With Your Brain
6. Branded To Kill (1967)
Seijun Suzuki's Branded to Kill is very obviously a product of the sixties: a surreal, sketchily plotted existential Yakuza noir that broke boundaries upon its release and has since, like Point Blank, become a cult sensation amongst film buffs. Hanada, the third best hitman in Japan and a man with very specific erotic fixations, chiefly the smell of cooking rice, is hired to perform four assassinations.
While falling in love with the woman who provided the last victim, Misako, he fails the assignment, and is then himself hunted by the Japanese underworld's almost mythical Number One Killer, a legend whose methods threaten to drive him mad.
Laying siege to the apartment Hanada is hiding in, Number One eventually just moves in, and the pair end up synchronising eating and sleeping, and wandering around together with arms linked, all up until the final scenes, in which its revealed that Number Ones assassination method is simply to exhaust the victim until they're an easy kill.
Suzuki employs weird time lapses and sudden grotesque close-up images to unsettle and disorient the viewer - all groundbreaking techniques in 1967.
Branded To Kill is an oddity, but a marvellous one, decades ahead of its time.