Branded To Kill and Pistol Opera

Japanese director Seijun Suzuki had been on my list to catch up on for some time now, long before his death in 2017. He's cited as an influence on Tarantino (but who isn't?), Jim Jarmusch, Wong Kar-wai, John Woo, Takeshi Kitano, and surely Takashi Miike, both in style and career arc. Suzuki started directing primarily B-movies that were, as I am led to understand, fairly formulaic gangster flicks for the most part, growing increasingly strange and iconoclastic up until the 1967 effort _Branded to Kill_, which we shall speak of today, which is now regarded as a cult classic but was such a financial disaster that the lawsuit laiden fallout saw Suzuki blackballed from the industry for 10 years. We'll go on to discuss the very loose sequel, released some 34 years later, _Pistol Opera_, his penultimate film.