Taking Aim at the Police Van DVD review
© The Criterion Collection
The Criterion Collection is a distribution company “dedicated to gathering the greatest films from around the world and publishing them in editions that offer the highest technical quality and award-winning, original supplements.”
Take Aim at the Police Van is part of the set Nikkatsu Noir set, available from Criterion’s Eclipse line. The company says: “Eclipse presents a selection of lost, forgotten, or overshadowed films in simple, affordable editions. Each series is a brief cinematheque retrospective for the adventurous home viewer.”
Seijun Suzuki’s Take Aim at the Police Van (1959), stars Michitaro Mizushima as the prison guard looking after a prison bus full of prisoners when it is attacked..
I should mention that this is a noir film and part of a noir series. Noir is harsh lighting, deep shadows, crisp dialog, and a dark or disturbing tone. It’s a personal favorite of mine because it is so conscientiously anti-anodyne; it is willing to take the easy-enough-to-learn, hard-enough-to-master form of storytelling and batter it around a bit with grim, smirking humor.
I wasn’t expecting the beginning to be as funny as it was. A lot of the humour was in the tempo: the slow beat of moving the camera from one fragment of a warning sign to the other, the hand of a gunman stroking his gun, stopping, acting embarrassed and caught, then reaffirming its original course of action, or when one man asks another if he thinks the boss will be paying them overtime for their work, and receiving the response: “We’re not company men!” before he pulls his handcuffs into view. It was a delight to see.
While it makes overtures to Chandler-like complexity (and while there are fairly oblique elements, raising questions like: “Why is Akiba who he is?”), the plot is fairly simple: in-fighting at a prostitution agency where someone wants to wrest control away from the daughter who runs the work in her incapacitated father’s stead.
The beauty of the film lies in its taut simplicity, which I liked. Suzuki is the master of identifying a subtle truth that only cinema can capture.
Director Seijun Suzuki
Starring Michitaro Mizushima, Mari Shiraki, Misako Watanabe
Take Aim at the Police Van is part of the Nikkatsu Noir set and is available from Criterion
For more on Evan Fleischer, please visit www.evanfleischer.com
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