A Colt Is My Passport

Cold Colt Ground

A Colt Is My Passport 
1967 Japan
Directed by Takashi Nomura
Nikkatsu/Criterion Eclipse DVD Region 1 
(as part of the Nikkatsu Noir boxed edition). 

Warning: Reading this review is a passport to very slight spoilers.

The last in Criterion Eclipse’s astonishing collection of Nikkatsu thrillers, A Colt Is My Passport maybe lacks the shot compositional flair of most of the other movies in this boxed set (apart from one amazingly framed sequence where the main protagonist is waiting, sniper’s rifle in hand, to make ‘the kill’) but it more than makes up for it with the style of the camerawork in certain sections and, very much so, in the way the footage is edited.

The opening, for example, is a tour de force of style over substance. Following a credit sequence which utlilises a brilliant pseudo-Morricone spaghetti western scoring style of sound to great effect, we go through a scene where the main protagonist, hitman Shuji played by Nikkatsu superstar Jô Shishido, is being briefed and shown the details of his new target. The man hiring him provides a steady stream of narrative for the first few minutes over shots of him and Shuji following the target and being shown and told where the target will be over the course of the next few days (it is up to Shuji how and when he completes his mission for hire).

During this sequence the camera is not the steady glide or mesmeric static shot of many a NIkkatsu crime flick. Instead we have something which seems far ahead of its time, as I watch it now. The camera does all kinds of acrobatics to catch things and people as they are pinpointed by the voice over instructions to Shuji. It’s like the camera is looking around and then stops and concentrates on parts of the shot when it stumbles upon the correct piece of visual information. Normally, this is not the kind of shot sequence a studio of that period would have indulged their directors in, I would have thought. It’s very much a sequence of fast paced POV ‘camera reactions’ edited together in one big, narrative scoop.

This is something which I’ve noticed modern TV shows, especially in the science fiction genre, using to great effect nowadays (to the point where it’s become a cliché almost) but I can’t imagine the creative freedom to throw out the prescribed way of shooting these things could have come easy back in the late sixties in an environment like Nikkatsu. Shows like Firefly and the rebooted Battlestar Galactica tend to use this “taking you unawares” style of catching things out of the corner of the camera eye before swivelling around and focussing, quite frequently to help push the credibility of shots set within a fantastic universe, which would be less easy to buy into without this style of camera work. Artificial lens flares on the model and CGI shots seem to be another favourite nowadays. I find the fact that Takashi Nomura was able to get away with a similar sensibility in the first 5 or 10 minutes of A Colt Is My Passport very interesting. He must have been either a very confident director or pulled a lot of weight at the studio, is my guess.

This is one of the films where Jô Shishido’s star presence really comes through and helps to carry the movie... in as much as he is the main focus of the narrative and he manages to hold your interest by, for the most part, not doing very much. Shishido is extremely low key in this, showing neither emotion or interest for a great deal of the running time... although it does transpire that he is a big softie where friends and family are concerned (as these kinds of characters usually are).

Even though he doesn’t seem like he’s emotionally available for most of the film, it’s probably this kind of cooler than ice attitude which makes him stand out more against the other actors, even though there’s not a bad performance in this film. It’s an interesting contrast between his indifference and the emotional investment of some of the other characters in this.

The one thing which will make you sit straight up in your chair is the opening musical notes on the credits, followed by a string of gunshots, followed by a main theme tune which, as I noted earlier, sounds like it was torn straight from the score a spaghetti western. I mention this again because all the way through the movie,  there’s not a heck of a lot of music (at least not by modern, wall-to-wall standards) but when the music does come in it’s usually this bold Morricone-esque, ride-your-horse-to-death-and-beyond, wild spaghetti western style scoring. And it makes sense because Japan has always been a country where spaghetti westerns have been extremely popular (more so than America and the UK I suspect) and treated with a certain amount of respect where they wouldn’t be as well recieved in other countries. This movie seems particularly influenced by the genre... what with Shishido’s distanced and iconic anti-hero characterisation and the climax of the movie which basically ends in a many against one duel in a wasteland of dust, doubling for a western desert. Even the title, A Colt Is My Passport, is quite similar to the English translations of some of those movies.

This is a great piece and it’s a film full of details. Shishido lighting a cigarette, for example, purely so he can judge the speed and direction of the wind before he settles down to make his killing is particularly spell-binding. Another thing the director goes out of his way to do is have the various weapons’ audio signatures different to the others in the film... so the sound of bullet shots pitched against each other gives a more interesting sound dialogue than it would in a movie where the same kinds of gun shot sounds are used for all the weapons. This is a tactic Spielberg used for absolute realism on Saving Private Ryan and, more artificially and artistically, in the Indiana Jones films... where Indy’s revolver actually utilises the sound of a shotgun on the soundtrack. Shishido even digs a trench and makes his own version of a sticky bomb at one point in the proceedings.

It’s stuff like this, the cool music, the cool anti-hero and the little quirks and details that make A Colt Is My Passport another unmissable Nikkatsu treat and Criterion’s boxed set of five of these gems is definitely worth picking up if you’ve not seen them before. My only regret is that there aren’t more of these kinds of movies on the market right now. if you’re into the “cinema of cool” then this movie is not something you’re going to want to let get past you.

Cruel Gun Story

The Heist Is Right

Cruel Gun Story 
(Kenjû Zankoku Monogatari)
1964 Japan
Directed by Takumi Furukawa
Nikkatsu/Criterion Eclipse DVD Region 1 
(as part of the Nikkatsu Noir boxed edition). 

Warning: Cruel but minor spoilers within.

A darkened garage by night. An overturned car with a fountain of water from the burst hydrant it knocked over after ramming its way through the doors, hitting the car trying to break out of the garage going the other way. Shots ring out. Muzzle flashes flaring in the dark as the sound of hurtling bullets punctuate the pitched gun battle between one group of criminals and their former leg men.

This is the typical audio/visual currency of a mid to late sixties Nikkatsu crime picture but the fact that it’s not unique in the canon of this particular sub-genre of kinetic Japanese action cinema makes it no less special.

The film headlines Jô Shishido, known as “the chipmunk” due to the surgery he had to enhance his cheeks and perhaps best known to a Western audience for his association with master director Seijun Suzuki on a number of films, including Youth Of The Beast (filmed the year before this one), Gate Of Flesh (filmed the same year as this one) and, of course, the infamous Branded To Kill. In this movie Shishido is “retrieved” from jail two years early (he’s in there for crippling a guy who had crippled his sister in a hit and run road accident) by a gang of criminals who are recruiting him for a security van robbery as it leaves a racetrack. A team is put together for him and, after rejecting one guy after getting him to talk about the secret job, the film heads in the direction of a standard caper movie and, if anything, it conjures up images of Richard Stark’s character Parker more than anything else in tone and style.

And it’s a really great “caper gone bad” genre offering, as it happens.

Shishido plays a tough cookie, but one who agrees to do the job to be able to afford an operation to try to help his sister walk again... which at least gives the audience a sympathetic response to his character and leaves us no doubt as to who we’re supposed to be rooting for. As he runs down the specifics of the job, involving re-routed traffic, a tampered security radio, the death of four security guards, the disposal of the van and bodies etc, we see the job play out under his narration as it’s supposed to go... that is, according to plan.

But it doesn’t take much to figure out this kind of movie heist never goes to plan and it’s not long before the gang are back at a garage lair trying to pry two security guards from behind their bullet proof glass in their locked in van. While Shishido goes to report the limited success to his boss, he is double crossed and legs it back to find that his friend, one of the gang, has been nobbled and the rest of the gang trying to double cross him, to boot. It doesn’t take much to 'take care' of the two gang members but it also takes no time for the main gang, for whom the job is being carried out, to follow him back and get into the pitched gun battle I described in my opening paragraph.

From then on things get a little less typical since the gang recovers the money but not Shishido, who responds by working for a rival gang and kidnapping the former bosses son. Add in the seasoning of a few other characters... Shishido’s good hearted friend, Shishido’s new “gal” who also becomes an unofficial part of the gang, and Shishido’s direct controller on the job who is working both for and against the gang’s boss... and you have a bleak concoction shot in striking black and white which, by the final scene, turns into a bit of a bloodbath in that special kind of “nobody gets out of this job alive” kind of way. It’s no fun to be a character in this movie.

The writing is almost as crisp as the shots which are composed within a 2.45:1 (really?) aspect ratio and those compositions are pretty darned crispy. Beautiful designs flow across the screen using a trick I’ve seen used dozens of times in Japanese (and often Italian exploitation cinema) over the years, that of using vertical set decoration to chop the screen up into separate frames and use these frames to highlight the characters and sometimes pitch different spacial relations against each other. It’s good stuff and makes a cracking paced film even better.

The music by composer Masayoshi Ikeda is also quite brilliant and propulsive, using various sounds to punctuate accents of the on-screen action in the quieter scenes and just generally getting very loud and taking the lead whenever it really needs to comes out to play. The opening title music, for example, is big and audacious and, if I were listening to it without the context of knowing what the movie was about, I’d have to guess that it would be more appropriate for scoring a mid 60s Gojira/Godzilla monster mash up than a bleak crime drama.

It’s all pretty cool and the plot line goes the extra mile when it could have been wrapped up a little more quickly and takes you into a series of gun battles which almost leaves the film bereft of any characters... I can think of only one, but I’m not going to tell you who it is.

Cruel Gun Story is a film which has clearly defined heroes and villains... but none of them are really any good when it comes right down to it. Almost everybody is bad and the characters’ status as to which side of the light and dark they are on becomes more a question of which shade of grey they are at in their lives. A wildly entertaining movie and definitely another strong recommendation from me... this is part of Criterion Eclipse’s Nikkatsu Noir collection, which I would urge all lovers of cinematic brilliance to pick up. I’ve seen four out of five of the movies in this set now... and they’ve all been pretty amazing.

Rusty Knife

Big N’ Rusty

Rusty Knife (Sabita Naifu)
1958 Japan
Directed by Toshio Masuda
Nikkatsu/Criterion Eclipse DVD Region 1 
(as part of the Nikkatsu Noir boxed edition).

Warning: Light, rusty spoilers within.

Made the following year, after Kurahara’s I Am Waiting (reviewed here), Rusty Knife, the second in Criterion Eclipse’s excellent boxed edition Nikkatsu Noir, retains the same lead actor and actress from I Am Waiting but now I find myself in more familiar territory with Nikkatsu, in that this movie is shot in “Nikkatsuscope”, allowing this movie’s director more room to design some compelling compositions.

I’m not so sure, after having seen this film (another first time watch for me here) that I’d personally call Rusty Knife a film noir... maybe more of a crossbreed between a crime thriller and police procedural, I would say. The tone is quite dark but certainly the characters and atmospheres mostly don’t seem moody enough for what I am used to seeing in a noir and, to be honest, I would have said this is more like the later films I’ve seen in the Nikkatsu releases (the majority of which were directed by Seijun Suzuki... although I’m not sure how much he was influenced by his contemporaries at the studio or, indeed, whether his contemporaries were paying much attention to his particularly uncompromising style at the time).

What I do know is that the storyline is a little skewed again and doesn’t necessarily follow a simple narrative line as you might expect. Starting off as, like I said before, a police procedural movie, the lead detective arrests the mascot boss of a gang of criminals but, as often happens to him, has no proof that he has killed anyone, as they suspect. No witnesses will go against him in court. When the police are tipped off that the man in question has killed someone and it was witnessed by three people, the man who wrote the letter tells the police that he will be the one to finally testify against this small-time “kingpin”.

The man who prompts the reopening of the investigation is a trademark Suzuki actor in an early role, Jô Shishido... not two years after he had undergone the plastic surgery which made his cheeks more prominent and earned him the nickname, in some quarters, of “The Chipmunk” (he is perhaps best known to Western audiences as the anti-hero assassin of Suzuki’s Branded To Kill). It doesn’t take that many minutes before Jô is in trouble with the gang who have tailed him and when he thinks they are the police, he follows them aboard a train... only to be thrown from there into the path of another oncoming train in a brutal murder. It is his tip off letter which his girlfriend sends to the police when he doesn’t show up after a pre-arranged amount of time has passed, that allows the police to both identify his body and go off to find the other two men who witnessed the fake suicide.

Things get complicated as the two men are working in a diner they opened after the main protagonist, played by Yûjirô Ishihara, served some jail time for a crime which is revealed in its scope later. Now he just wants to stay straight and out of trouble with the law, while still keeping himself out of danger from the gang who know he and his friend were witnesses. Then things start to get ugly, as friend turns against friend, people are bought off and ultimately elected for disposal by the main antagonists.

Ugly for the main characters, at any rate. Quite beautiful for the audience, though, who are able to watch the action unfold in Masuda’s not too flashy but still quite beautiful shot compositions and it’s an especially good picture for those who require some action in their movies. There’s a great little high speed truck chase which leads to fisticuffs in one sequence and there’s also some betrayal and a quest for vengeance as Ishihara’s young friend finally turns up for the police, only to be taken out by a sniper while he’s left in one of their interview rooms. It’s at this point that we realise that a character at the police station is also corrupt and very much, on the take, as it were.

The film is nice to look at with some engaging cinematography, the editing is naturalistic and leading lady Mie Kitahara’s screen presence, while not nearly as “smouldering” as it was in I Am Waiting, is still something which is very much on the forefront of your mind as you watch the scenes with her in them. Godzilla and Kurosawa composer Masaru Satoh’s score is serviceable but doesn’t really stick in your mind after the film is done... but it does it’s job, to be sure, and so the viewer (or listener) should be happy.

There’s not a lot I can really say about this one since my knowledge of this particular part of Japanese cinema is not as great as some other areas but I will say the film lives up to the other 30 or 40 Nikkatsu branded movies I’ve seen by being slick and having a certain stylistic bent towards empty but beautiful posture and artifice within the shot. These Nikkatsu films really couldn’t look bad if they tried. Certainly another film I’ll be looking at again at some point in the future and absolutely a must see for fans of these kinds of features.