I Would Like to See It: A Colt Is My Passport (Patreon)

The double meaning in the title of Takashi Nomura’s 1967 Yakuza noir is plain from its opening moments. A gun opens any door for a man who knows how to use it, but death, in the end, is the only place that it can truly take him. In that light it’s remarkable how little action the film features; almost all of it restricted to a single assassination sequence, a murder by truck, and the jaw-dropping final gunfight. Instead it dwells mainly on travel, craft, and the consequences of its initial contract killing as brooding, pouchy-cheeked hitman Shuji’s (Joe Shishido) employers turn on him for the sake of convenience, forcing him and his earnest young partner Shun (Jerry Fujio) to flee from place to place in search of a way out of Japan. Along the way Nomura captures some of the most beautiful and captivating industrial footage I can recall seeing. A spitted car turning slowly in the maw of an incinerator. A bobbing plane of barges belching thick black smoke and knocking against the wooden pilings of the docks.

Nomura spends a great deal of time in the film’s comparatively brief span on simply observing the world around his characters. An elderly innkeeper labors in the kitchen. Long-haul truckers gamble and chat. A sly Yakuza boss plays footsie with his mistress, their faces unseen, their toes gently rubbing together, while debating whether to favor morality or money in his decision-making (no prizes for guessing how the scales tip). Nomura’s camera work is both restrained and weightless, never making a single superfluous move yet still erupting into breakneck motion when called for. The climactic running gunfight is almost balletic, Shuji racing over the flat, dusty expanse of a landfill while exchanging fire with Yakuza thugs who waver like wraiths in the light of the rising sun. The stunt work is unparalleled, a feast to watch.

The quiet tragedy of the film’s brief love story plays like something out of The Third Man, one of many seminal noir films from which A Colt Is My Passport draws inspiration. Shuji’s partner and love interest steam away aboard a nameless ship for an unknown destination, excised from the story because friendship and connection are just a single bittersweet note in a song of gunfire and screams. “I can never seem to leave this place,” says Mina (Chitose Kobayashi), Shuji’s flame, of the dingy seaside town where she waitresses at a dilapidated inn, unable to leave behind the memory of her long-dead lover. Shuji circles his violent way of life in the same fashion, choosing near-impossible contests of bloodshed over escape again and again. To paraphrase, when the only tool you have is a gun, every problem starts to look like a target.