Few genres are as absorbent as film noir. Science fiction (Blade Runner), horror (Seven), and high school movies (Brick) have soaked up the world-weary, hard-boiled attitudes and atmospherics of Double Indemnity, The Big Heat, Kiss Me Deadly and all the rest. Steeped in French and German influences, American noir was this gun for hire further abroad as well. An excellent new set from Criterion, “Nikkatsu Noir,” shows how the darkness permeated the land of the Rising Sun.

Founded in 1912, Nikkatsu is the oldest of the country’s film studios, most noted by cinephiles for giving the great Shohei Imamura (Vengeance is Mine, The Ballad of Narayama) his start. By the mid-’50s, however, its output needed new blood, and with the success of 1956’s Crazed Fruit found it in ripped-from-the-headlines movies about the country’s causeless rebels. Nikkatsu’s answer to James Dean, Yujiro Ishihara, stars in the set’s first film, 1957’s I Am Waiting, playing a promising boxer who hung up his gloves after killing a man in a bar fight. A club owner who’s put a cabaret singer under his thumb forces Yujiro to put up his dukes as the movie reaches its punchy climax. (The content of these movies encourages you to write like this.) Mie Kitahara, Ishihara’s Crazed Fruit co-star, plays the singer. Atmospherically helmed by Koreyoshi Kurahara, the movie conveys postwar despondency with the country that extends far beyond its low-life waterfront setting; all Ishihara wants to do is leave for Brazil. (more…)