Capone Cries a Lot

Named after Yasujiro Ozu’s custom-made, tatami-level, crab-like tripod, Kani is a new home video label dedicated to leveling the gaze and furthering the understanding of Asian cinema in North America. Focused on genre-defying films, Kani aims to expand the canon, bolster up-and-coming filmmakers and reintroduce repertory classics in context. Vinegar Syndrome’s sister company, OCN Distribution, is thrilled to be representing this diverse and unique home video line!

In this underseen late-career masterwork from Seijun Suzuki (Branded to Kill, Tokyo Drifter), Kaeimon (Kenichi Hagiwara), a naniwa-bushi performer, travels to Prohibition-era San Francisco in search of prosperity. Convinced that Al Capone is President of the United States and that he may impress him with his old-fashioned singing, he instead falls in with unsavory Japanese hoteliers, Chinese moneylenders and bootleggin’ Italian-American mafiosos. As surrealistic and elliptical as ever, Suzuki packages his career-long obsessions and slingshots them back towards the USA. Capone Cries a Lot is a boyish gangster film in air quotes: a parodic carnival reflecting on the intersection between American and Japanese imperialism, iconography and power. Shot in Japan, around an abandoned amusement park, Suzuki’s collage-like transplantation of American culture is at once uncomfortable (racist minstrel bands in blackface, the Ku Klux Klan and anti-Japanese sentiment reflect Suzuki's understanding of US politics) and reverential (folding jazz, blues, traditional Japanese performing arts and Charlie Chaplinesque slapstick into one aesthetic continuum). All in, it brings Seijun Suzuki’s “borderless” aesthetic project full circle.

directed by: Seijun Suzuki
starring: Kenichi Hagiwara, Yuko Tanaka, Kenji Sawada, Akira Emoto, Kai Ato, Bengal Hachiro Tako, Mitsuru Hirata, Haruko Kato, Kirin Kiki, Shinji Maki, Toru Minegishi, Nicolo Scorza, Miki Takakura, Fujio Tokita, Tatsuo Umemiya, Chuck Wilson, Shunsuke Kariya, Randy Reyes
1985 / 128 min / 1.85:1 / Japanese DTS-HD MA 2.0

Additional info:

• Region A Blu-ray
• Commentary by William Carroll (author of Suzuki Seijun and Postwar Japanese Cinema)
• Booklet with new writing by Filipe Furtado
• English subtitles