Golgo 13

Golgo 13: Queen Bee

golgo 13 aka The Professional: Golgo 13. 1983. Movie. 94 min. Action. org Takao Saito (manga). dir Osamu Dezaki. des Akio Sugino, Shichiro Kobayashi.

golgo 13: queen bee 1998. OAV. 60 min. dir Osamu Dezaki. des Akio Sugino, others. -bc

The Professional: Golgo 13 and its fifteen-year-later sequel are stylish crime thrillers based on the long-running manga by Takao Saito about a rock-hard Japanese hired assassin known as Golgo 13, who never fails on a job. Graphic comic-book-style imagery is devoted to a steady torrent of sex, nudity, gun battles, martial arts, bloodshed, and chase scenes, putting to shame even the most over-the-top live-action yakuza outings.

In the movie, high-paid hit man Duke Togo, aka Golgo 13, performs a hit as assigned and arouses the vengeful wrath of the victim’s father, American oil billionaire Leonard Dawson, who calls on officials at the Pentagon, the CIA, and the FBI to create a team to put an end to Golgo 13. After two more jobs, Togo finds himself increasingly under attack and sets out to turn the tables on Dawson.

In Queen Bee, Togo is hired to assassinate Sonia, the “Queen Bee” of the Camnero Liberation Army, an American girl who runs rebel activity in a tiny Central American country while also masterminding a sprawling cocaine racket in the U.S. A voluptuous redhead, Sonia is also the abandoned illegitimate child of the Democratic candidate in the 2000 United States presidential election. Out for revenge, she tracks down Duke Togo and hires him for the job of killing her father’s running
mate. After learning she is Togo’s next target, she encounters him in Central America and the two become temporary allies as a squad of covert troops sent by the U.S. destroy her camp in a vain attempt to kill her. The stage is set for a final confrontation during the Democratic Convention back in the U.S.

Dezaki and Sugino have as distinct a visual style as any creative team in anime, but it is Golgo 13 that catches them at their most delirious. The Professional is filled with extremely arty touches that give it a surreal, stylized flavor that softens the more far-fetched moments in the action. There are lots of close-ups, split screens, and iris shots. Hallucinatory plays with light yield frequent subjective cutaways. The bright primary colors and sharp details of the faces, bodies, and objects give many of the images the eye-catching lurid veneer of 1950s men’s pulp magazine covers. The extreme angles and unusual compositions, with occasional abstract touches, recall the comic book art of Marvel Comics innovator Jim Steranko (Nick Fury Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.). It’s as if a 1950s crime novel was filled with Playboy playmates and turned into a James Bond film by a European arthouse film director under the influence of psychotropic drugs.

While there is a lot of style for its own sake in the movie, the animators tightened things up for the OAV. In Queen Bee, every scene is immaculately worked out in terms of design, camera movement, and texture. The editing is particularly masterful. Dezaki likes to cut to close-ups of telling details in each scene, whether a letter or photograph received by a character, an icepick chopping at a block of ice in a bar, facial close-ups, a musical locket playing its tune as it hangs from a corpse’s neck, weaponry, or birds flying away. In addition, there are masterful long shots seen through telescopic lenses, night-vision goggles, and radar screens monitoring activity from miles up in the sky.

One glaring flaw in the movie is the inclusion of a jarringly crude early CGI sequence showing helicopters flying over lower Manhattan preparing to attack Togo as he invades Dawson’s skyscraper HQ. It has the look of a failed test reel that was accidentally inserted into the finished film and never replaced or cut out.

Director Osamu Dezaki’s chief collaborator is character designer and animation director Akio Sugino, who performed these duties on Golgo 13 and numerous other Dezaki works, including Ashita no Joe, Ace o Nerae!, Space Adventure Cobra, Sword for Truth, Black Jack, The Snow Queen, and the American cartoon series The Mighty Orbots. The movie is based on the manga by Takao Saito, which debuted in the January 1969 issue of Big Comic and is still running, at 144 volumes (as of this writing) and counting.

The Golgo 13 films come as close as anime ever has to capturing the pulp aesthetic of American crime thrillers and their atmospherics of hard-boiled heroes, shapely femmes fatales, gritty urban textures, illicit sex, violence, murder, and political corruption, as found in film noir and the crime paperback genre exemplified by the Mike Hammer private eye novels of Mickey Spillane. Of course, the Golgo 13 films are much more explicit, featuring abundant violence and bloodshed, frequent female nudity, and frenetic sexual activity. Like their inspirations, these films are informed by persistent undertones of cynicism, misanthropy, and misogyny, although, to refute the latter charge, one could cite the powerful and endlessly fascinating title character in Queen Bee. Also, Togo never seems to get assignments to kill anyone who doesn’t deserve it or wasn’t asking for it in some way or other. There is a moral streak in there somewhere.

The Professional is filled with inspired set pieces as Duke undertakes three separate jobs, including one clever bit where, under the watchful eye of government agents in San Francisco, he pulls off what was thought to be an absolutely impossible rifle shot involving an office building between him and his target, an ex-Nazi in the middle of an orgy. The key to generating suspense in a story like this is to keep coming up with ever more formidable villains, and the writers oblige with three seemingly unkillable assassins sent after Duke, including the repulsive, aptly-named Snake, brought in by billionaire Dawson to avenge his son’s death. Dawson is so driven that he even gives in to Snake’s demand to have his way with the dead man’s attractive widow, Laura, in exchange for taking the job.

Queen Bee has the same baroque qualities as The Professional and the same excess of sex and violence, but the editing and imagery are cleaner, crisper, and more focused. The story covers a lot of ground and moves to each new facet without skipping a beat or spending any more time than it needs to. There are also more elements in play and less of a role for Golgo 13 himself. This means a larger role for Sonia, the Queen Bee of the title. She’s clearly a tough, hardened character like Duke and just as skilled at killing, escaping, and hiding in plain sight. One can question the psychological portrait of Sonia, who as a child was forcibly abducted (with her father’s consent), sold into slavery, and sexually abused, and then grew up to wield enormous sexual power over a wide range of men and acquire an insatiable taste for it herself. Certainly she would, at the very least, have “issues.” But nothing is allowed to get in the way of the animators’ appetite for the requisite amount of sex and violence and the need for a larger-than-life superwoman fantasy figure who befits the decadent, corrupt moral universe that only a man like Duke Togo can set right.

Interestingly, both pieces take place largely in the United States and involve deep-rooted corruption in the highest seats of power, and wide-ranging conspiracies that can call in lethal forces at a moment’s notice to swat an enemy in a major U.S. city or cross the border to do so somewhere else.

The aforementioned impossible shot involving a building and an ex-Nazi in The Professional is easily the crowning highlight of Duke Togo’s career as an assassin. He avoids police detection by firing a high-powered rifle from the other side of a building between him and his target, with the camera following the bullet on every inch of its speeding path through the empty corridors and offices of the intervening building, coming out the other side until its target comes into view and gets closer and closer and closer. . . .

In Queen Bee, there are many notable action sequences, including a dramatic Manchurian Candidate–style finale at the Democratic presidential convention of 2000 and a battle in the jungles of Central America as mercenary forces try to wipe out Sonia and her rebel army, with Duke intervening on Sonia’s behalf. However, the end sequence, in which various parties get their just rewards, deserves special note for the way it is played out under the end credits while a very smooth jazz song, “Turquoise Blue,” is performed on the soundtrack by Fujimaru Yoshino (who also wrote the music for the song) and Hitomi Ono.

Dezaki and Sugino did a story similar to Queen Bee in the earlier Black Jack OAV episode, “A Medal for Maria” (1993), which also involved a female revolutionary who goes nude and fights U.S. troops, and also included corrupt U.S. presidential politics and a raid by covert commandos on a camp of Latin American fugitives. Based on an Osamu Tezuka manga, the Black Jack series was decidedly more tasteful, so it couldn’t indulge in the excessive sex and violence of Golgo 13.

The manga was also adapted into a live-action Japanese film, Golgo 13: Kowloon Assignment (1977), starring Japanese martial arts star Sonny Chiba.

violence Lots of shooting, stabbing, and killing, with profuse bloodshed. nudity Frequent sexual activity with full nudity, involving several characters in each production. Not X-rated, but definitely a hard R. profanity Many expletives.