Tokyo Drifter

Seijun Suzuki, told to make a standard yakuza picture on a reduced budget, responded with pop-art abstraction that got him in serious trouble with his studio. A reformed gangster's loyalty to his retired boss sends him wandering, and Suzuki drains the sets to blocks of pure colour and stages the finale in a stark white nightclub.

The plot barely matters; the film is an exercise in style so extreme it stops looking like anything else from its era. The theme song recurs like a spell.

Gangster cinema as pure design. Ravishing and deliberately artificial.