A Colt is my Passport

A Colt is my Passport - Upscale Japanese films tend to be overly complicated. Just when the film should end, another subplot is inaugurated, more characters introduced, and the film goes on another twenty or thirty anticlimactic minutes. If nothing else, the Nikkatsu company noirs don’t have this defect. Clocking on average about 85 minutes, the films are lean, mean, and schematic. In general, Nikkatsu noirs don’t have a plot so much as a dramatic situation. In Tahashi Nomura’s A Colt is my Passport (1967), chubby-cheeked Joe Shishido is a Yakuza hit man on the lam after successfully murdering a mob boss. Unfortunately, the mob war is settled and the price of peace negotiated by the dead gangster’s son is Shishido’s head. The film is micro-budget but stylishly made and packs a considerable punch. Shishido and his buddy hide out at a sleazy motel on the waterfront, the Nagasakin, a place frequented by truck drivers. (The waterfront locations, dives and industrial wastelands, are an enormous asset to this film.) In many respects, the movie resembles Hemingway’s The Killers, as well as the several Hollywood pictures made from that story. Shishido and his friend are essentially waiting to be killed and the film’s tone of dread and tense anticipation is highly effective. Ultimately, there’s no place to hide and Shishido has to face-down the bad guys at an impressively desolate garbage dump. The final shoot-out is a bravura exercise in choreography and not so elaborate as to defy possibility. This is an excellent film of its kind, equipped with a fine Morricone-style score – a bit jarring since it obviously belongs in a Western – and well-acted. The Nikkatsu noir always privilege style over coherence. For instance, the final shoot-out is staged in a landscape that correlates improbably to Leone’s vast, barren Spanish steppes. Shishido is distracted by a fly creeping across the gravel; these close-ups are impressive and segue effectively into the big, vortex of the gun battle but… The reason Shishido has to spend a couple minutes looking at the fly is transparent: it’s a contrivance to explain why he doesn’t see the legion of gunmen approaching him across the desolate emptiness of the huge dump. With Nikkatsu, style always trumps narrative plausibility.