In one of several collaborations between the poet (and later filmmaker) Shuji Terayama, and the defiant young exponent of the Ofuna New Wave, Masahiro Shinoda, a mod-sixties Japan emerges on the screen in a visually exciting exercise in style. Killers on Parade is not realistic in any sense, but theatrical, a film in which the rituals of youthful Blues are played out on a grid of moody set-pieces and witty montages. It is a film noir of the younger set, telling of a gang of young killers-for-hire: a poet, a doctor, a soldier, a girl with a goat named The End. Their pride in work is played out in shooting contests and their private despair comes out, oddly, in song. A pastiche of The Three Penny Opera and Gun Crazy, of Pierrot le Fou and Kubrick's The Killing, it is an existential musical that epitomizes the era we call the New Wave. If, in The End, it will not be pronounced Shinoda and scriptwriter Terayama's most incisive comment on alienated youth (for that, see Tears on the Lion's Mane in August), Killers on Parade is by far the most spirited and engaging. We are sorry that the color has faded to red (in the sunset and elsewhere) in our print.