Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 09/11/18

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Tuesday, September 11, 2018

A Colt Is My Passport (Takashi Nomura, 1967)

Joe Shishido in A Colt Is My Passport

Shuji Kamimura: Joe Shishido
Shun Shiozaki: Jerry Fujio
Mina: Chitose Kobayashi
Shimazu's Successor: Ryotaro Suji
Shimazu: Kanjuro Arashi
Funaki: Shoki Fukae
Senzaki: Eimei Esumi
Kaneko: Jun Hongo
Miyoshi: Akio Miyabe
Otatsu: Toyoko Takechi
Otawara: Takamaru Sasaki
Tsugawa: Asao Uchida
Apartment Receptionist: Zeko Nakamura
Hit Man: Kojiro Kusanagi
Barge Captain: Zenji Yamada

Director: Takashi Nomura
Screenplay: Hideichi Nagahara, Nobuo Yamada
Based on a novel by Shenji Fujiwara
Cinematography: Shigeyoshi Mine
Production design: Toshiyuki Matsui
Film editing: Akira Suzuki
Music: Harumi Ibe

I didn't see any Colts in A Colt Is My Passport, but there are several rifles, pistols, and shotguns, some dynamite, and the protagonist carries a Beretta, so I suspect the title is a bit of poetic license designed to make the Japanese gangster into the equivalent of the gunfighter of the American Wild West. Harumi Ibe's music score, with its guitar, harmonica, and whistler evoking Ennio Morricone's scores for Sergio Leone's spaghetti Westerns, seems designed for the same effect. But why court comparisons? The Japanese gangster movie is its own well-defined genre, and Joe Shishido is its superstar. In A Colt Is My Passport he's Shuji, a hit man hired to off a crooked businessman, which he does with cool efficiency. Unfortunately, the guys who hired him immediately turn against Shuji, so he's soon on the run, along with his sidekick, Shun, played by the Anglo-Japanese actor and singer Jerry Fujio. (Fujio even gets to croon a ballad at one point in the movie, slowing down the otherwise non-stop action.) The movie is filled with James Bond-like gadgets and car chases: At one point, Shuji and Sun find themselves kidnapped and thrown into the back seat of a car that they have had rigged with an extra braking system, apparently just in case they find themselves in such a predicament. Engaging the brake causes the car to skid, throwing the bad guys into the windshield and knocking them out. And so it goes until Shun is captured and beaten to a pulp, whereupon Shuji bargains with the bad guys, giving himself up to them so Shun and the pretty motel waitress Mina, who has helped them, can escape. Apparently the bad guys trust Shuji enough that he has time to work on a way of defeating them: He rigs up some booby traps for the showdown they have arranged on a landfill, and the movie ends with Shuji staggering away from the carnage. It's all great fun in that peculiarly heartless and mindless way that such thrillers have.