It’s either a western that looks like a hard-boiled yakuza movie or vice versa, but whatever it is 1967’s A Colt Is My Passport is a fantastically stylish affair. In pin-sharp monochrome it borrows from manga, Sergio Leone, Robert Bresson and Jean-Pierre Melville and it made enough of a mark on the young Denis Villeneuve for him borrow chunks of its look for his debut, August 32nd on Earth.
As it opens the western and the crime thriller are already in contention. To a Morricone-esque score of whistles and twangy guitar we follow a hitman on a precise, methodical loner-hitman job – the high vantage point, the weapon screwed together from parts, a lit cigarette held out the window to determine wind strength and direction (nice touch). Then, hit completed, the unrushed exit from the scene of the crime, to a waiting car.
For the rest of the film hitman Kamimura (Jô Shishido) and his accomplice Shiozaki (Jerry Fujio) will be running from the consequences of that hit, first to a flophouse near the port, where they hope a boat will soon spirit them away. Then, as the gang of the dead man find out where they are – from the leader of the rival gang who ordered the hit, no less – a full-bore cat-and-mouse chase develops.
Kamimura and Shiozaki both wear a suit, white shirt, straight tie. They have neat hair. Director Takashi Nomura wants us to notice this. Also the cars everyone drives, all precisely calibrated according to status – an old Datsun Bluebird, an MGB, a Hillman Minx, a Dodge Dart. Everything has been chosen with an eye on style.
Melville’s Le Deuxième Souffle had come out the year before. Also a story of an assassin on the run, it majored in codes of masculine honour. Similarly, Kamimura and Shiozaki’s relationship relies on total mutual trust. At one point, Mina, a goodtime girl at the flophouse where they are hiding, tells Kamimura that she envies the bond men can have as friends, as if it were the highest state of humanity. Women in this world are facilitators, men are the actors.
Though it’s not so much a story as a series of hyperstylish set pieces, Mina does play a significant role, helping to advance the action out of its middle section (cat and mouse) to its endgame (showdown) – she once had a thing with a gangster called Senzaki (Hideaki Esumi), and her connection to him will be pivotal.
This was the first of a run of movies starring Shishido as a tough nut of some sort or other, and it was his favourite. You can see why. The film glorifies him, revels in the superchilled performative non-performativeness of his acting. With his pouchy cheeks he’s an odd-looking hero, but he has the stillness and watchful eye of the classic movie assassin and knows how to play it.
When Harum Ibe’s score is not twanging away as a one-man appreciation of Sergio Leone, he gives us slinky jazz of flutes and muted trumpets. Cool jazz for cool cats. Nomura positions his characters so they’re often in frames within frames, in confined spaces, telling us they’re trapped before they realise it themselves. As the plot advances, Kamimura and Shiozaki’s options diminish.
Eventually, Nomura gives us what he’s been teasing us with all along – a Sergio Leone finale of very tight close-ups and badass attitudes. And as we leave his film that opening question still remains – was that a western, really, beneath the shirts and ties? Whatever it is, it’s a fine, fine film, and if you don’t know Nomura already (as I didn’t), it’s as if a portal to another realm of archaeological movie-watching suddenly opened. More Nomura! More Shishido!
A Colt Is My Passport (as part of the Nikkatsu Noir series) – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
