So scrolling through hulu.com and fresh off my viewing of Tokyo Drifter, I decided to head back into the yakuza genre and stumbled upon this obscure little gem that I had never heard of, which was part of its appeal. I'd be like one of those old time baseball scouts travelling across the country searching for unknown talent. If the unknown movie turned out to be awesome, I could tell everybody that I discovered it and admonish them for having not seen it. "What? You've never heard of The Hidden Tears the 1956 classic directed by controversial transgender director Gregor Milanov? Well, I guess you don't like movies, huh." (totally made that up, but believable right?) And if the movie sucked, well, then there's a reason nobody has ever heard of it! Win-Win.
A Colt is My Passport, hereafter to be called ACIMP, is a black and white yakuza crime thriller starring 60's Japanese superstar Jo Shishido. What? You've never heard of him? I guess you don't like movies, huh. (See how superior I look now?) Shishido plays a hitman who is hired by a yakuza boss to take out a rival boss. He does the job but it's traced back to him and now the rival family wants his him dead. To make matters worse, the boss who hired Shishido in the first place betrays him and joins forces with the other guys to hunt him down. Out of all the older movies I've seen so far in this challenge, I think ACIMP is easily the most accessible to the general audience. Its plot is standard Hollywood stuff and there are no overly weird artsy moments or hidden themes you have to look out for. It's simply a good old fashioned crime drama.
That isn't to say that this film is lacking in artistic value, quite the contrary. While it's not as overt as Tokyo Drifter, ACIMP blends a couple genres together to make a product uniquely its own. One elements comes from film noir, being a classic hardboiled crime thriller set in black and white with cliche character archetypes: the brooding anti-hero hitman, the female lead that wants to escape, and the greasy gangsters. The other obvious influence comes from spaghetti westerns. The main score is grandiose, almost Ennio Morricone-esque, and look at the scene in the picture above set in a dusty desolate landfill reminiscent of the American wild west. What you end up getting is a fantastic combination of Japanese yakuza, Hollywood film noir and Italian spaghetti western all rolled into one.
Grade: B+
Nice. Sounds pretty cool.
ReplyDeleteACIMP is a cool word too... makes me think of pimps and gimps and shit...
The Picture up there is sick. James Bond-y.
The way you describe the plot kinda reminds me of CRANK... ha ha. That was a fun movie. The sequel much less so. Anyway...
Since you don't have enough on your plate... you should circle back at some point and let us loyal fans know what movies you recommend the most from the ones you've watched in this challenge!!!