Detective Bureau 2-3: Go to Hell Bastards! (1963)

In the 1950s and 1960s the Japanese film studio Nikkatsu managed to find itself a profitable niche with a string of pulp action flicks, boasting energetic jazz scores, police and private detectives, yakuza and other mobsters, and a lot of shootouts, punch-ups and chases. Rather than spend money hiring movie stars, Nikkatsu made stars of their own contract players. Their films form one of the more interesting parts of Japanese film history, and thanks to a number of American and British DVD distributors they are finally getting the international exposure and recognition that they deserve.

Among Nikkatsu's directors, the one most widely celebrate today is Seijun Suzuki. He was ultimately fired from the studio after his artful and surreal thriller Branded to Kill upset studio management, and after he sued for wrongful dismissal he found himself blacklisted from the industry for about a decade, Thankfully he was still alive when his works were re-evaluated and widely celebrated, and today a string of his films are noted as genre classics: not just Branded to Kill but A Tattooed Life, Tokyo Drifter, Youth of the Beast and several others.

Detective Bureau 2-3: Go to Hell Bastards! is not one of Suzuki's better-known films for Nikkatsu, but it remains an impressively energetic, morally ambiguous and enormously stylish crime-based thriller. It's simply tremendous fun.