Putting Nikkatsu back on the map

Series rediscovers a forgotten peak

"The Warped Ones" is a little-seen, 1960 classic of angry young men from director Koreyoshi Kurahara. (Courtesy of the Brattle Film Foundation)

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, if the movies were a kind of mountain range with a lot of the world's great directors at their creative and commercial peaks, the Nikkatsu film studio of Japan represented a summit you couldn't see. Nikkatsu had been around since the silent era, but postwar pop and a Western influence kicked things up a notch. The movies that came out of the studio during this period were invigorating acts of social and artistic rebellion.

A Nikkatsu sampler is the subject of "No Borders, No Limits: Nikkatsu Action & '60s Japan," a weeklong series that the Brattle began yesterday. The series mixes five Nikkatsus with a few Japanese classics, covering both ends of the entertainment spectrum ("Mothra" screens tonight; the erotic drama "Woman in the Dunes" on Thursday). You can always see Kurosawa's "High and Low" (Wednesday). But Koreyoshi Kurahara's "The Warped Ones" (today) is almost a now-or-never situation. The Nikkatsus aren't on video - yet - so tonight could be your only chance.

Kurahara was the most brutally talented of the Nikkatsu crew. He was 33 when he made "Warped Ones" in 1960, and the plot, such as it is, gives us two bad boys - Akira (Tamio Kawachi) and Masura (Eiji Go) - freshly sprung from a reformatory, the crazy hooker (Noriko Matsumoto) they pick up, and the minor hell they break loose. The picture rumbles with verve; the bebop on the soundtrack may as well be rock 'n' roll. Some exchanges are spoken - "I need some black music!" "Well, I'm dying for a woman!" - and sometimes Masura, who's nuts, communicates in deranged scats: "At-tatatatatataaaaa!"

Kurahara takes the movie to extremes of behavior and style, merging the two until the form seems as violently unstable as the characters. He makes a wave that in Europe was called "French" and "new." But with all due respect to Jean-Luc Godard, this is breathless - and more interesting, too. Godard was reorienting the ontology of cinema - he was tinkering with what else movies, as we knew them, could be. The pleasure you take in "Breathless" feels academic now. The amazing thing about Kurahara's movie is how little time for thinking there appears to be. The whole thing feels spontaneous and transparent - a runaway documentary of delinquents on the loose.

The films they put out were under the Nikkatsu akushon label - but the "action" wasn't a genre so much as a feeling. Its directors were doing to film what Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline were doing to painting.

Nikkatsu in this era was basically turning out cruel-youth pictures: dirty, angry, confused, horny, vulgar, and assaulting movies that were also fun and astoundingly formally assured. The studio was making punk rock for the eye. In embracing noir, jazz, and the filthy, vital city, they rejected the golden age of Ozu, Mizoguchi, and, to some extent, Kurosawa, shattering the masters' stoicism with visceral depravity and dysfunction, but without rejecting the masters themselves. If anything, Nikkatsu dragged those directors' themes and subtexts into the nasty light.

You watch these films and weep for subsequent generations of the young and artistic, who infrequently made rebellion this exciting to look at. It's hilarious and bewildering, in fact, to realize that these movies - with their freeze-frames, hand-held photography, wild acting, and stuttered jump-cutting - were written off as hackwork. This is cinema. And it should have conquered the world.

Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com. For more on movies, go to boston.com/ae/movies/blog.