I like the storyline of this show,it attract me so much

Simple and well acted, it has tension enough to knot the stomach.

The film was still a fun one that will make you laugh and have you leaving the theater feeling like you just stole something valuable and got away with it.

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

This is the first movie I've seen starring Yujiro Ishihara. I've heard something about the culture him and his brother Shintaro represented in the '50s, but it was way before my time, and I had no idea what this cultural phenomena was about in the '50s Japan. It's nice to find that Criterion Collection have revived this masterpiece.Writer of this movie - Shintaro Ishihara made his debut as a writer with the novel "Season of the Sun" which described the decadent lifestyle of the affluent youth of Japan a year before this movie was made. The youth culture depicted in this novel was called "Sun Tribe", and in this movie Haruji (Masahiko Tsugawa) has a line where he describes his older brother and friends "They call folks like you the Sun Tribe.". Shintaro's younger brother Yujiro Ishihara plays the role of Haruji's elder brother Natsuhisa in this movie.Basically, it's about the culture of the affluent set in Japan, but the genius of Shintaro Ishihara was that he already saw through the facade of shallow life style such living can bring and put it down in a novel which was both entertaining, and with style no one had written previously. Such an awesome insight from a person who is still in his early 20s.The casting of this movie reads like who's who of young actors who went on to support mainstream Japanese cinema, and TV dramas for the next 20 years. This movie is also the debut movie for actor Masahiko Tsugawa who we see frequently in today's movie from Japan. He was called in by Shintaro after Shintaro spotted him at a wedding. Shintaro described that Tsugawa left an indelible impression on him when he first saw him.Not too many people can stay in forefront of society for over 50 years influencing the course of that society, but Shintaro Ishihara has done just that as he is the present mayor of Tokyo.Actress Mie Kitahara who played Eri, and Yujiro Ishihara marries four years later, this movie bringing the two together.I've heard that Shintaro was abolished for writing decadent lifestyle of youth when his first novel Taiyo no Kisetsu (also made into movie in '56) came out, but actually I think this is a movie all youth should see as a warning not to indulge in this type of behavior, as it was the point with Shintaro's writing as well. This movie is written masterfully with all the critical points placed in its right place.If you watch this movie without the background information of Japan in the '50s, it may appear as few spoiled kids having a wild time, but the true insight of this movie goes much deeper than that. Highly recommended.

Arguably, all Japanese film has been about the struggles between modernism and traditionalism in Japanese culture, an ambivalent struggle which subsists to this day and is a huge influence on Western ideas of postmodernism. Crazed Fruit sticks out because it's one of the most "Westernized" of them, to the point of questioning Japanese youth's forgetfulness of traditional values. In Crazed Fruit, the "traditional" only exists in parents houses... the rest of the sets, the costuming, the cars, the activities, the dialog, and the characters are very into American trends in a movie made during American occupation. The movie is stylized around the beach party movies of the 50s Americana and the existential thrillers of the French.Two brothers are vacationing on a beach side ('vacationing' is pretty much all they do throughout the grand majority of this movie) when the younger, more innocent one, Haruji, falls for a beautiful young woman he keeps running across. Everything seems to be turning out swell for young Haruji and Eri, until his brother discovers that Eri is actually married to an Americanized businessmen. Instead of going the honorable route and telling Haruji about this fact, his brother decides to use the information as lateral to get Eri for himself. Thus starts a morbid love triangle as Eri is torn between a naive younger brother and a womanizer older brother all while hiding it from a mostly absent husband. Tragedy ensues.It's a really well-made film, but it has its problems. Its biggest one is that none of the characters are very likable. It's really hard to want any of them to succeed, really, which takes a lot of drama out of what is an otherwise extremely effective ending. Also, the relationship itself is a little over-dramatic, the type of story that reminds today's audiences of the type of people who would appear on Jerry Springer than anything else. It's morbid ending goes a little unearned when it comes down to a jerk older brother and whiny younger fighting over a woman who can't stand up for herself.That's not to say that it doesn't have its qualities. The music is a highlight, plus some very amazing imagery, especially beach-side. A montage of close-ups as young characters discuss the state of Japan is one of the movie's most brilliant sequences, not to mention the build-up of tension at the end.The thing is, it's quite clear to see that at the time this came out, it would have been a shocking and unique movie for Japanese audiences. The way it portrays sexuality, the existential ending, and the break-down of family values in the older brothers' sleaze and Eri's infidelity was very unique to that time, moreso in Japan than in America. Today, however, Japanese cinema has more than moved on, and this type of story is too familiar to Western audiences. It's not too often that a foreign film feels "dated" because of the fact that they come from a different culture that has a different historical and sociological perspective. However, Crazed Fruit is, indeed, dated. It still serves as a commentary motivated through melodrama, but it's mostly interesting today for providing a useful link between the very different post-war Japanese cinema and the Japanese cinema of today; for non-Japanese cinema history people, I'm not too sure it has much to offer.--PolarisDiB

Having seen and enjoyed The Departed, and having seen No Country for Old Men and found it overrated, and who knows how many other recent films on similar themes, I was utterly delighted to have seen a screening of Crazed Fruit at a museum a few weeks ago. In terms of movies about revenge, Crazed Fruit is much more eloquent than any number of contemporary blockbusters. It probably doesn't say much in favor of my character to admit it (! nope !), but Crazed Fruit is the only film I can think of to have evoked a desire to stand up and cheer.Throughout the body of the film, I kept asking myself, "Okay, this is a little bit like a Japanese Rebel Without a Cause, which is great in itself, but where's the real craziness here (besides the fact that America had already influenced Japan by 1956 in ways that most American's were not aware of)?" The main characters might have had moral issues, but they were so darned *elegant* about it! Even though this (being spared from the usual stream of sanctimonious and in-immediate inner and narrative wrestling bouts of the conscience) was enough of a refreshing change from what I'd usually seen in the cinema, I still wanted to see something hardcore to justify the film's title, and I can say that the end of the film certainly did deliver on that score. No outrageous depictions of violence here, just a relentless and rather memorably nutty ending.I don't usually dare to write my own reviews on IMDb.com, but I couldn't contain myself this time. I really enjoyed Crazed Fruit. It was aesthetically appealing, it portrayed its characters as being dissatisfied in completely understandable ways (i.e., as being sympathetic), and I'm just really impressed with the way the film ended.Extra points for the weird musical score, which was a wild yet still somehow understated fusion of "La Dolce Vita"-type music and Hawiian-influenced ukulele and slide-guitar. A nice touch that added to rather than detracted from the story.Of course, times have changed drastically since this film was made. Part of what I enjoyed was temporarily returning to an era when problems were at least traceable to something gone wrong. It's a romantic film for sure.

It's ironic that this movie has an establishing scene in the Kamakura train station, the same locale used by master director Yasujiro Ozu in his classic home dramas, "Late Spring" and "Early Summer". But that's where the similarity ends, as this jazz-infused, troubled-youth 1956 film is truly the antithesis of Ozu - tawdry, explicit and in-your-face. If you were to watch this movie solely on the basis of the campy trailer that comes with the Criterion Collection DVD, you would think you were going to watch something quite cheesy and exploitative similar to the cheapjack American teenage rebellion films of the period like "High School Confidential" and "The Beat Generation" - all raging hormones, James Dean wannabes, pervasive use of back projection, deep shadows and saucy saxophone riffs. To some degree, you would be right, but first-time director Kô Nakahira seems more inspired by French New Wave in his use of jump cuts and hand-held camera shots. The stylistic touches and then-shocking sexual frankness do elevate this low-budget film but from my perspective, not really at the level that film scholar Donald Richie would have you believe in his informative commentary.The story revolves around two restless brothers - older, predatory Natsuhisa and virginal, self-righteous Haruji - who battle over a mysterious girl named Eri, seemingly innocent and ideal at first but a more decadent character emerges as the plot unfolds. There are lots of scenes of bored, immoral youth with cash to burn and no aspirations beyond water skiing and getting drunk and laid. The love triangle inevitably leads to tragic, almost Baroque consequences in its brief, 86-minute running time with some surprisingly effective camera angles tightening the vise of the characters' illicit behavior. The performances seem rather derivative of American icons like Clift and Dean though effective within this context - Masahiko Tsugawa effortlessly brings out the teen angst in Haruji, Yujirô Ishihara portrays the jaded horn dog that Natsuhisa has become with abandon and a certain élan, and pretty Mie Kitahara does manage to elicit sympathy to a character that seems to reveal one moral weakness after another. I have to admit the over-the-top elements are what makes this film memorable - the great title, the foreboding clarinet solos and twangy Hawaiian guitars of Masaru Sato's and Toru Takemitsu's insinuating score; Masumi Okada as Frank, a half-white, half-Japanese observer of the brotherly unraveling (and by default, the film's moral conscience); and the extended and truly suspenseful circling boat sequence at the end. Definitely take a look if you want a peek at the nihilistic youth culture of mid-1950's Japan, certainly a universal theme during that period.