The fourth film in the Seijun Suzuki The Early Years. Vol.1 The Youth Movies collection is The Incorrigible (1963) which is notable for being the first collaboration between Suzuki and set designer Takeo Kimura who would be a major influence on the visual style of later masterpieces such as Gate of Flesh and Tokyo Drifter among others. In this film Togo Konno (Ken Yamauchi) is sent to a small town, Toyooka in Hyogo prefecture to finish his schooling without the distractions of Kobe during the Taisho era leading up to WWII. He is an iconoclast besotted with modern literature and at odds with the student moral patrol. He falls in love with the local doctor's precocious daughter and is expelled from school for making a secret getaway with her to Kyoto. The location shots and traditional sets are filmed with great skill and what emerges is one of Suzuki's early masterpieces. This film is much like Fighting Elegy in that it prefigures and explains the mentality that led Japan to start a war of aggression in Asia and elsewhere.
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