Apparently, Seijun Suzuki’s Underworld Beauty has a lot of tropes, but that comes as part of crime thriller cinema. Before we get too deep into the criticism, let’s go back enough to where the characters’ troubles begin. A handover of diamonds between Americans and Japanese goes wrong, including the death of Mihara (Tōru Abe) via gunshot. This forces his sister Akiko (Mari Shiraki) to come out of the woodwork, joining the Yakuza mourning rituals, etc. As it turns out, Akiko’s artist boyfriend Arita (Hiroshi Kondō) is the reason the handover goes awfully wrong. She, by herself, hides the diamonds but in comes Mihara’s Yakuza friend Miyamoto (Michitarō Mizushima), looking for said diamonds.

Suzuki came out with this film during his B-movie era, almost a decade before he directed more famous work. Yes, some of the compositions here are more mundane than the set pieces he gave during the 1960s. But, and I mean this as a compliment, I landed in the same place here with aforementioned later work. His influences in American cinema, particularly 1940s era Orson Welles, is personally apparent with some authentically shaky street scenes. I’m seeing a lot of drama techniques in genre work and vice versa in things I have been watching lately. Touch of Evil and Underworld Beauty coincidentally coming out during the same year makes me happy somehow.

Underworld Beauty is also, obviously, a snapshot of Japan and its contradictions during the 1950s, a country presenting a new modern version of the world for the second time. The film shows its share of Americans, both gangsters and GIs, a thorn on the Japanese people’s side. But eventually, those Americans fade into the background as these characters deal with their own problems in contained spaces. Akiko embodies that scrappy spirit as she hides the diamonds not for Arita – she doesn’t even tell him where. She does things for herself, biding her time, figuring things out despite her inexperience in a man’s world. She develops this ambiguous morality that reflects Miyamoto and is in between other characters who take sides between extremes.

One of the other tropes in Underworld Beauty is a Detective Watanabe (Hideaki Nitani), unable to figure things out. But again, the film gets rid of him, eventually leading up to quite a set piece of a shootout in a boiler room. I’m probably being too nice to this film because Suzuki will film better third acts than this one. However, the one viewers get here is just as entertaining and has dangerous, high enough stakes. Akiko gets her damsel-y moment as someone locks her in a massage room / sauna for a while. And Miyamoto gets a dagger in his shoulder, and one will have to watch this to see his chances.