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.

Cruel Gun Story (Takumi Furukawa, 1964)

Joe Shishido and Yuji Kodaka in Cruel Gun Story

Togawa: Joe Shishido
Rie: Chieko Matsubara
Takizawa: Tamio Kawaji
Shirai: Yuji Kodaka
Keiko: Minako Katsuki
Matsumoto: Hiroshi Nihon'yanagi
Kondo: Hiroshi Kondo
Okada: Shobun Inoue
Saeki: Saburo Hiromatsu
Yanagida: Junichi Yamanobe

Director: Takumi Furukawa
Screenplay: Hisatoshi Kai, Haruhiko Oyabu
Cinematography: Saburo Isayama
Art direction: Toshiyuki Matsui
Film editing: Masanori Tsujii
Music: Masayoshi Ikeda

My first impulse on watching Takumi Furukawa's Cruel Gun Story, with its whiplash double-crossings and piled-on violent deaths that reminded me of Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Pulp Fiction (1994), was to call it "Tarantino-esque." But that's getting it backward. Tarantino has said that he's "enamored with" the films of Nikkatsu, the studio that made Cruel Gun Story a good 30 years before Pulp Fiction, so by rights we should be calling his films "Nikkatsu-esque." Furukawa's film stars Joe Shishido, who was as essential to Japanese gangster films as James Cagney or Edward G. Robinson were to Warner Bros. gangster films of the 1930s. His glowering, jowly mug, usually with a cigarette plugged in its middle, is the essence of the tough guy. And like most tough guys, Shishido's Togawa has a heart of gold, devoted to his sister, crippled when she was struck by a car. She's the reason why, fresh out of prison, he signs on to a caper that involves the heist of an armored car. It's so elaborate a scheme, involving road detours and sabotaging the police radio and using a winch to pull the car onto a larger truck, that anyone who has ever seen a movie knows that it's going to go wrong. But even when it does, Togawa is able to come up with a Plan B, and then a Plan C, and so on, as double-crossers emerge from all corners. There's a sultry femme named Keiko to add a little sex to the plot, but not enough to deter Togawa from getting revenge on the big boss who got him into this mess. The whole thing ends with more corpses than the last act of Hamlet, but it's done with such stylish efficiency that if feels like a better film than it probably really is. Which, come to think of it, is also Tarantino-esque.