Trailers, Clips & Shorts
Plus Two Movies & A Show:
19600132 The Shakedown
Models are A Front for a Blackmailing Ring.
19600132 Pretty Boy Floyd
Fictional Biography About Gangster Pretty Boy Floyd.
19600110 Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood
Gossip Columnist Hedda Hopper Takes a Look Back At Hollywood’s
Sorted Past in this TV special.
#
Sit Back, Relax, & Hit Play All for The Full Fiesta 13 for January 1960:
Skip to Taste
These Movies Are at The End of Today’s Trailer Reel
19600127 Take Aim at The Police Van (Criterion)
(A Fiesta 11/13)
Pity the Poor Life of The Movie Prison Van Driver. They’re generally only in the first act and usually killed. Never to be seen again. Always a side, usually an unnamed character. Stock.
In TAatPV, prison van driver Tamon centers this snappy, crackerjack story. In the first few minutes, Tamon’s van is attacked by a mysterious sniper in a thrilling, sudden opening sequence. The targets weren’t the prison staff, but the prisoners. No one escaped. Why?
On suspension or as Tamon calls it, vacation, Tamon uses his time to solve why the van was attacked and find the mysterious sniper.
Who is Akiba?
Tamon isn’t some hard-ass prison guard, a stereotype. He’s a gentlemen, as one prisoner calls him. He thinks of prisoners as people. He doesn’t call the nice & lovely naked ladies sent out to hotel rooms across Tokyo for nice & lovely naked paid fun “Merchandise” as their bosses at The Agency call them. Low-key, friendly and serious in his pursuit, Tamon single-handedly pushes his way into some very dangerous situations in his quest.
One of director Seijun Suzuki’s early films, TAatPV’s tightly-paced, twisty, complex plot has zero fat and a real air of menace. The constant threat of unknown violence creeps into the edges of the movie and burst out suddenly. There’s a sense that anything could happen. And sometimes does.
Suzuki’s Yakuza Noirs of the 1960’s, like Branded to Kill and Tokyo Drifter, are New Wave, Pop Art treats, Primary Chroma-Colored Delights. See all of them. TAatPV, although in Black & White, is no exception. The Cha-Cha Jazz score and interesting, blurred-edged visuals, Suzuki doesn’t over power the storytelling the way some of The 1960’s more excessive movie style exercises can. Less assured Avant Garde directors, drunk on this new cinema esthetic and movement can often ruin or muddle a movie’s entertainment through pretension.
Not TAatPV. Pay attention and you will be rewarded with an interesting, shifting story that searches for the humanity in bad people, giving some a chance at redemption. The quick-love relationship between Tamon and Yuki, the new, temporary head of a prostitution ring could use a little fleshing out. But, the movie moves so quickly and Yuki’s slowly changing worldview happens so organically, the acting’s so precise, you believe Yuki’s yearn to be better, even as a suspect. Even the little scenes, like flashbacks to earlier scenes that show Tamon’s thinking at work, are not just an idiot recap, but a worldview at work.
There’s more going on and even more implied by what’s not shown. Characters aren’t stereotype, stock plot devices.
See it on The Criterion Channel.
Does Take Aim at the Police Van go to CrazyTown? Yes. Yes, it does.
As the old saying goes, “Once you’ve shot a nice & lovely naked lady in the boob with an arrow THROUGH closed blinds, next stop CrazyTown.”
Plus, the gasoline truck sequence, implausible in thought, is balls-out tense. Ba-Nan-As.
Take Aim at the Police Van (A Fiesta 11).
###
