The Age of Assassins

1967 Japanese film

Tatsuya Nakadai

CinematographyRokuro NishigakiEdited byYoshitami Kuroiwa

Production
company

Toho

Distributed byToho

Release date

4 February 1967 (1967-02-04)

Running time

99 minutesCountryJapanLanguageJapanese

The Age of Assassins (殺人狂時代, Satsujinkyō jidai) is a 1967 Japanese film directed by Kihachi Okamoto.

Plot

A nerdy young college instructor named Shinji Kikyo returns home one day to find himself the target of a mad assassin. Surviving somewhat miraculously, he fends off other assassins and, with the help of the reporter Keiko Tsurumaki and the car mechanic Bill Otomo, eventually discovers that a "population control" association is really an assassination squad led by Shogo Mizorogi, who has been training patients in a mental asylum to become killers. Along the way, it starts to appear that Shinji may not be the mild-mannered academic he seemed at first, but a well-trained secret agent.

Cast

Tatsuya Nakadai	Shinji Kikyo
Reiko Dan	Keiko Tsurumaki
Hideo Sunazuka	Bill Otomo
Hideyo Amamoto	Shogo Mizorogi
Keiichi Taki	Ikeno
Seishirô Kuno	Man with crutch
Tatsuyoshi Ehara	Aochi (as Tatsuya Ebara)
Yasuzō Ogawa	Mabuchi
Atsuko Kawaguchi	Yumie Komatsu
Wataru Ōmae	Oba-Q
Shin Ibuki	Atom
Hiroshi Hasegawa	Solan
Masaya Nihei	Pappy

Release

The Age of Assassins was released in Japan on February 4, 1967.^[1] The film was released in the United States by Toho International with an international title of Epoch of Murder Madness in 1967.^[2]

Reception

The critic Chris Desjardins has written that "Age of Assassins is another sharp-edged lampoon that works just as well as an action film, and compares favorably with such other brilliant, tongue-in-cheek mod sixties masterpieces as Elio Petri's The Tenth Victim and Seijun Suzuki's Branded to Kill."^[3]

References

Footnotes

^ Galbraith IV 2008, p. 236.
^ Galbraith IV 1996, p. 95.
^ Desjardins, Chris (27 May 2005). Outlaw Masters of Japanese Film. I.B.Tauris. p. 90. ISBN 9781845110901. Retrieved 6 November 2016.

Sources

Galbraith IV, Stuart (1996). The Japanese Filmography: 1900 through 1994. McFarland. ISBN 0-7864-0032-3.
Galbraith IV, Stuart (2008). The Toho Studios Story: A History and Complete Filmography. Scarecrow Press. ISBN 978-1461673743. Retrieved October 29, 2013.