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.

Take Aim At The Police Van

Aiming To Tease

Take Aim At The Police Van
1960 Japan
Directed by Seijun Suzuki
Nikkatsu/Criterion Eclipse DVD Region 1 
(as part of the Nikkatsu Noir boxed edition).

Warning: Yeah, this one’s going to have spoilers.

Wow. Another great Seijun Suzuki film.

Very much a man who I would call the Sam Fuller of Japan, with one big difference. Sam Fuller was a great American B-picture director who would churn out projects under a studio system. However, because he was working on lower budgets, he wasn’t attracting A-List attention too much... and that was the very reason Fuller could make films more or less the way he wanted... which was usually with a quirky and interesting artistic sensibility all of his own. Similarly, Suzuki was making films pretty much exclusively for Nikkatsu studios in, more or less, a similar kind of set up I would guess. This let him experiment in interesting ways with the art of film technique but, unlike Fuller, Suzuki began to attract too much interest with what he was doing and this ended up with his dismissal and blacklisting after his work on what is probably his most famous film in terms of broad recognition in the west, Branded To Kill. 

His works were getting more and more surreal and less comprehensible to a lot of audiences, although people of a certain sensibility cherished and loved them probably as much then as when they were rediscovered years later. It took around ten years for Suzuki to work on feature films again after he made the decision to sue Nikkatsu studios (rightly so, in my opinion... I’ll take art over the risk of offending people or financial concerns, any day thank you very much) and even then it was sporadically.

Take Aim At The Police Van comes from very early on in Suzuki’s career but, even so, he was so prolific that even though he made this at the start of the fifth year of his career, this was already his fourteenth feature film. And it’s a film I’m really glad to have added to my little library of Suzuki classics because it’s easily one of the better examples of his work I’ve seen.

Now I know, from doing  a quick little bit of research (no, honestly, very occasionally I do the odd five minutes or so of research before I write a review here, believe it or not) that this film is generally not thought to be as good as his mid to late sixties output but, frankly, I think that’s a bit of a wrong call and I’m here to tell you different. This is a nice little masterpiece... not exactly “noir” as the Criterion Eclipse box proclaims it to be (although you could argue that the plotting has a certain, noirish tendency, I suppose) and much more like the hip, action kind of movies that would make his work stand out against various other directors churning out similar films at the same time.

Even the story is a little bit unusual in that it deals with a middle aged hero and not a young teenager or 20 something protagonist. The character in question, Tamon (played very well by Michitaro Mizushima) is a likable prison guard who is transporting a load of prisoners in a van when a sniper crashes a driverless truck into the van and shoots two of the prisoners dead. Because Tamon is in charge of the prisoners at the time and is therefore technically responsible, he is suspended from his job for 6 months. However, he needs to know just why the events at the start of the film happened and so he does his own investigation into matters which, of course, mixes his character in with all sorts of underworld types and also the cops.

Right from the outset the film shows a visual flare which is typical of Suzuki’s work for Nikkatsu. The pre-credits shows an unknown sniper at night attaching a piece of chewing gum to the top of his sight before we are treated to a camera eye view of just what the sniper is seeing. He slowly pans down an empty road and focuses on a series of five or so signs which each make up part of a single message, warning about the danger of accidents in the area. It all looks very cool  (and is replayed but, I think, with slightly different footage, later on in the film) and it really sets up the whole “predator laying in wait” vibe which, quite recently, the opening sequence of Jack Reacher (reviewed here) also managed to do very well... but this movie does it in a fraction of the time. It then goes into the opening credits where a song plays against a view from the front of the titular police van’s windscreen, split into two by the vertical middle-section as credits play out against the beam of the headlights hitting the road while the van is in motion.

Suzuki really is on form with this one and although he didn’t write it, and it’s adapted from an existing novel, he really does let loose with what would become some of his very definitive stylistic traits later on in his career. Such as the way the screen can be split with verticals and horizontals to allow actors and actresses to be separated by those artificial planes, sometimes at a different size due to the way perspective seems almost flattened against the foreground elements. Or a flashback sequence where various incidents from the film (including a naked girl clutching her breast where she has been shot with an arrow) are replayed almost exactly as they were in the earlier sequences... but against a black backdrop and sometimes from a different angle. It’s almost like the early Soviet montage of Sergei Eisenstein where he would pull a person artifically from long shot and intercut a more perfectly composed version of that person in contrast, instead of dollying in on them. This gives the flashback sequence, as Tamon tries to piece together all the clues he is thinking of, a surreal and almost nightmarish quality which is a good way of expressing the world in which Tamon has accidentally landed, perhaps.

Another, surreal sequence is where Tamon and a woman who he is investigating are tied up in the front seats of an oil truck which is sent down a long slope with a blaze of fire chasing the leaking oil tap... it seems strange that a bunch of not very imaginative gangsters would be responsible for such a long, drawn out method of executing their enemies but then, hey... welcome to the world of Seijun Suzuki.

The performances are all really fine in this and the music by Koichi Kawabe is really energetic, jazzy and addictive. It’s the kind of thing I would love to turn up on CD one day, although I suspect I won’t be in luck. The photography, also, is of a particularly crisp black and white quality... almost but not quite foreshadowing Branded To Kill in its intensity and the compositions, as noted earlier, are all very interesting and ensure you won’t have a dull time as you wait for Tamon to survive various perils and gun battles in order to finally solve the problem of why two of his prisoners were targeted and how it affects everything else in the story. But then again, it’s a rare occasion when a Suzuki film is actually dull, to be sure.

Another winner, then, for the Criterion Eclipse Nikkatsu Noir set although, as I pointed out earlier, I wouldn’t say that labelling it as noir is really doing it much of a service. Definitely one to check out, though, if you’re a suzuki fan and, even if you’re not, there’s enough of his stylistic flourishes in this movie to make it a fair enough jumping on point if you’ve never seen one of his movies before... although I would probably point you in the direction of Youth Of The Beast or Branded To Kill if you wanted to hook yourself right from the first viewing.

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.