The Last Thing I Saw: Eight Hours of Terror

Director: Seijun Suzuki

1957 / 78min / DCP

For five years now, Nicolas Rapold—critic, former editor-in-chief of Film Comment, and the author of, most recently, The Worlds of Hayao Miyazaki—has been the host of The Last Thing I Saw, conversing about new discoveries in the cinema of yesterday and today with critics, filmmakers, programmers, and other movie lovers, welcoming a who’s who of guests whose numbers include Kelly Reichardt, Sean Baker, RaMell Ross, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Radu Jude, Janicza Bravo, and Abel Ferrara. To celebrate the pod’s fifth anniversary, Rapold joins us to present a screening of Suzuki’s Eight Hours of Terror, the kind of rare, rough-edged gem that the loyal The Last Thing I Saw listener has come to expect to be unearthed on the program regularly.

Their train brought to a halt by a raging typhoon, passengers are crowded into a cramped bus to continue their journey—and here things go from bad to worse, with the appearance of on-the-lam criminals determined to hijack the vehicle. One of Suzuki’s finest films of the 1950s, which shows both the influence of John Ford’s Stagecoach, a personal favorite of the director, and the stylistic dynamism that would soon make him (in)famous.

“Eight Hours of Terror is 78 minutes of Suzuki brilliance! Part thriller, part canny social drama, part master class in visual composition, it's a lovely sample of recent viewing from The Last Thing I Saw podcast—something you recently saw and have to talk about. With me, for some reason.” —Nicolas Rapold

Distributor: AGFA

Podcast recording hosted by Nicolas Rapold with film critic Mark Asch in conversation on Saturday, December 13th