A COLT IS MY PASSPORT

Gotta confess, I'd never heard of A COLT IS MY PASSPORT until just a few days ago. TCM ran this gritty 1967 Japanese black and white crime thriller crime recently and, even though I knew nothing about it, the description sounded intriguing and I thought I'd take a chance on it.

Boy, am I glad I did. This is one helluva great film.

Shuji Kamimura (Joe Shishido, pictured above with the pistol and looking vaguely like Jack Webb), is a master assassin. His partner is Shun Shiozaki (Jerry Fujio, pictured above behind Shishido and looking vaguely like Tommy Lee Jones), are assigned to kill a Yakuza boss who has double crossed his partners. The hit goes off without a hitch but the conspiring crime lords (one of whom looks like legendary DC Comics artist Carmine Infantino while the other is a ringer for B-movie auteur Roger Corman) don't want to leave any loose ends and set out to kill the two killers. Every move the two men make seems to lead into a deadly trap but the killers are old hands in the art of survival and they're always thinking two moves ahead, managing to stay ahead of their pursuers while desperately trying to find a way out of Japan with the money they earned for the hit.

Their path leads to the Hotel Nagisakan, a coastal inn that specializes in putting up long haul truck drivers for the night. There, the two men meet Mina (Chitose Kobayashi, pictured above at far right), a hard working waitress who yearns to escape her dead-end job. When Shiozaki is captured and brutally beaten by Yakuza goons, Kamimura strikes a bargain with the mob bosses: Shiozaki and Mina go free in exchange for his surrender at dawn at a deserted land fill.

But Kamimura has a few more tricks up his sleeve, tricks he demonstrates in an astonishing showcase of go-for-broke action cinema that brings the film to an explosive climax. It's a bravura, audacious set piece that will make you want to rewind and watch again. A COLT IS MY PASSPORT had already earned a solid three stars in my book up to that point. The ending earned it an additional star.

With a score by Harumi Ibe that would be right at home in a Sergio Leone spaghetti Western (indeed, the final sequence is shot and staged like a Western showdown), and brilliant direction by Takashi Nomura, A COLT IS MY PASSPORT is a neo-noir masterpiece. Several other neo-noirs were produced at the Nikkatsu Corporation including I AM WAITING, RUSTY KNIFE, TAKE AIM AT THE POLICE VAN and CRUEL GUN STORY. They're all available in a Criterion Collection box set while CRUEL ran on TCM accompanying the broadcast of COLT. I've got that one recorded and ready to watch next.

I may have never heard of A COLT IS MY PASSPORT but I know about it now and I'm glad I do. Highest recommendation.