DIRECTOR: Takashi NomuraWhen Quentin Tarantino fused the samurai movie and the spaghetti western in "Kill Bill" in 2003, he was carrying on a great cinematic tradition that reached its apex with Akira Kurosawa's "Yojimbo" in 1961, a samurai movie patterned after the western, film noir and a Dashiell Hammett detective novel and, in turn, the blueprint for the breakout spaghetti western "Fistful of Dollars." Similar cross-pollination shaped "A Colt Is My Passport," a Japanese gangster film indebted to noir, with a spaghetti-western-style soundtrack as vital to the story as Ennio Morricone's scores were to Sergio Leone's films, infusing scenes with the emotion absent from hardboiled faces.
WRITERS: Shuichi Nagahara, Nobuo Yamada, Shinji Fujiwara
CAST: Jo Shishido, Jerry Fujio, Chitose Kobayashi
MUSIC: Harumi Ibe
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Shigeyoshi Mine
COUNTRY: Japan
GENRE: Noir, Action, Crime
MISCELLANY: 84m; with subtitles; on DVD
One of those hardboiled faces belongs to Jo Shishido, whose chipmunk-cheeked mug might be as emblematic of gangster cinema as the jowls of Edward G. Robinson. Here, the actor famous for his outsider Yakuza roles plays a double-crossed killer named Kamimura, hired by a gang to assassinate a rival. It is thrilling to watch the ever-cool Shishido take on the Yakuza system, and easy to forget that Kamimura is a cold-blooded killer himself as we become invested in his struggle to reach air or sea, beyond the gang's reach. This free agent is at least preferable to the detestable, entrenched Yakuza leaders, who are relentless in their pursuit of power.
The film's east-west dichotomy runs frequently into a philosophical clash between Fate and Free Will, and the schizophrenia is particularly sharp in the scene in which two characters taken hostage at an airport watch their plane lift off in one direction as their captors drive them off in another, but soon recoup the car using the second brake they had the foresight to install.
Perhaps the most traditionally noirish setting is a seaside hotel, where Mina, a sad-eyed maid, wards off the groping hands of the trucker and sailor lodgers. She feels stuck in Yokohama because her gangster ex-boyfriend will not permit her to leave. Mina introduces Kamimura to the barge crews, whose docks are the only place where the Yakuza cannot gain solid footing. As Kamimura and a gangster stand on a barge and make a deal in which it is unclear who has the advantage, the men rock with the waves.
This all leads to a stunning showdown in a dusty landfill evocative of westerns, where Kamimura seeks to foil Fate by manipulating time itself. He uses a few guns, too.
Kamimura tells Mina that as a child he would have starved had he not learned to fight. He's still fighting to survive, but the cynicism that keeps him alive coexists with a childlike wonder, in the way the flight of a bird or an insect holds his attention and coaxes the shadow of a smile just before he is about to kill, or be killed.
— Becky
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