Hey, Toronto! Win Tickets To Catch BRANDED TO KILL On The Big Screen!

Hey, Toronto! Here's a rare treat! The ScreenAnarchy-curated Tokyo Drifters: 100 Years Of Nikkatsu series continues on Saturday with a rare big screen showing of Seijun Suzuki's Branded To Kill! Yep, it's the movie that got Suzuki fired from the studio as an unruly maverick and essentially saw him blackballed from the industry for a decade! And we've got it on 35mm!

Brought on late in the game to rewrite and direct a routine low-budget Nikkatsu gangster flick, the out-of-favour Seijun Suzuki took advantage of this last-minute for-hire job to cram seemingly every one of his anarchic impulses and far-out visual ideas into a single ninety-minute stretch -- which promptly got him fired for "making movies that make no sense and no money" and effectively blacklisted from feature-film work for the following decade. Ironically, of course, Branded to Kill is now celebrated as Suzuki's masterpiece and the unquestioned high point of Nikkatsu's entire sixties output. The great Joe Shishido stars as Goro Hanada, the third-ranked hitman in the country, who has a burning desire to be Number One. A cool and efficient killer whose only weakness is his uncontrollable excitement at the smell of boiling rice, Hanada is in high demand until he botches a job when a butterfly lands on the barrel of his rifle, forcing him to go on the run from his employers. The plot, as such, soon stops making any sense as Suzuki undertakes a madcap deconstruction/demolition of the entire gangster-movie genre, scrambling chronology, characters and action with wild abandon.

We've got two pairs of tickets to give away for the screening and all you need to do to have a chance at one is email me here and name three other films in which star Joe Shishido also plays a hit man. There are plenty to choose from. Heck, two of 'em also feature in this series! Check out all the series details and order tickets here.