断崖の決闘 / Dangai no ketto / Duel at the Precipice (aka Kill the Killer!) [1961]

Release date: June 27th, 1961

Director: Kozo Saeki
Studio: Takarazuka Motion Picture Co., distributed by Toho
Cast: Yosuke Natsuki, Tadao Nakamaru, Kumi Mizuno, Tatsuya Mihashi, Keiko Awaji, Akihiko Hirata, Michiyo Tamaki, Tetsuro Tamba et al.
Availability: No home media or streaming release.

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The film we're looking at today was included in the 1962 edition of Toho Films, Toho's catalogue of releases that were available for licensing and distribution to international markets. Something interesting to point out is that while international cuts of Japanese films often shave down the run time, whatever Toho did to the English version of this film actually extended it - the original was 77 minutes, the version distributed by Toho International was 85. Added B-roll, perhaps? Unfortunately, we probably won't ever know.

The production crew of this film is largely unknown to us Toho fans, since this was produced by Takarazuka (even though the catalogue says "Produced by Toho Co., Ltd"... hmmm). Director Kozo Saeki helmed a lot of the very popular Ekimae films that ran alongside the President series for a number of years throughout the 1960s, but he actually got his start as a director during the silent film era, and was never exclusive to Toho, working for many different studios throughout his ultimately quite short life (he died in 1972 at the age of 60). In fact, the Ekimae series were not technically Toho productions: they were produced by Tokyo Eiga, a subsidiary of Toho. They certainly earned Toho a good deal of cash, though.

If we're familiar with anybody on the production side of this film, it would probably be Riichirō Manabe, a prolific composer who did the soundtrack for - among other things, but most notable to us - Godzilla vs. Hedorah and Godzilla vs. Megalon.

Now, let's look at how Toho sold the film to English-speaking markets.

Hirata's character is named Otaki but the copy-writer for the catalogue seems to have mis-transliterated it as "Otake". Otaki is the boss of a drug ring and sounds like a generally nefarious person according to other synopses, but was not the main villain and eventually had a change of heart, handing over a list of the drug dealers he worked with to one of the good guys just before dying.

long poster is long

Now, just because a movie was included in that Toho Films catalogue doesn't necessarily mean that it was picked up for distribution. In fact, I can't find any record of Kill the Killer! playing in U.S. theaters, nor any stateside mention of the film under any other name. (I did find out during my research that Dobunezumi Sakusen got a U.S. release, which is kind of insane.)

So, unfortunately I don't have any English-language newspaper blurbs to show. Japanese reviewers imply that Saeki, who worked primarily in comedies, may not have been the ideal director for the film - adding in comical touches that didn't fit the storyline - and that perhaps Senkichi Taniguchi would have been better (give the man a break, though, he was already directing about a bazillion movies for Toho per year). Read a more extensive review from my friend (not really my friend, but I like their reviews and they always put "-sama" after Hirata's name) over here.

As for screenings within Japan, the film played in theaters in 2019 and was broadcast on television in 2021. So not terribly obscure, but definitely not available for anybody to watch any time they want. It's a shame that this never got picked up for stateside distribution, because a lot of Toho's early '60s crime films did manage to stick around after being exported and are readily obtainable today - The Last Gunfight, Merciless Trap, Big Shots Die at Dawn, et cetera. This could have been one of them if only a few theater owners had been interested enough to license it.