Film review: A Colt Is My Passport (1967)

This is a super-stylish black and white hitman-on-the-run film that I wouldn't be at all surprised was an influence on Le Samourai (or vice versa) were it not for the fact that they both came out the same year.  But this is definitely very influenced by Western (as in The West) films, given the mod suits and especially the fantastic soundtrack, which sounds very Spaghetti Western (the other one this time), with whistling a-plenty.  Our hero Shuji and his younger (very caucasian-looking) partner, Shun, definitely Robin to his Batman, are given a job to whack the head of a rival Yakusa firm.  Shun gets his nifty little roadster souped up, complete with "extra brake," while Shuji pretends to be apartment shopping long enough to shoot his mark out of the window.  Then they head to the airport.  But there is no getting out that easily.  They're being paged to come to the desk, and when they don't, they get picked up by goons with guns.  These goons, however, do not appear to have their own wheels, so they are driving our heroes to their reckoning when we find out that the "extra brake" is in the back and Shun pushes it and the goons smack into the windshield.  Our heroes contact their boss, a seedy older guy fond of getting "massages" if you know what I mean, and he directs them to hide out in a motel prior to getting a boat out.  But he is approached by the new leader of the rival Yakusa and quickly persuaded to give up our heroes in return for joining forces.  The rest of the film is our heroes avoiding getting killed while being thwarted in various attempts to catch boats out of there and while Shuji and the young woman who works with her grandmother to run the motel fall in love.  As I said, this movie has style to burn, and the final showdown where Shuji faces off with MORE hired goons and a bulletproof car full of the Yakusa bosses on a windswept wasteland is great, but there is a major distraction that I found very hard to get past.  And that is the amazing chipmunk cheeks of the lead actor, Jô Shishido:

I mean LOOK at him.  Serious case of the mumps, right?  Well, Jami did some googling and swears that he was a perfectly normal-looking actor who was getting nowhere when he went for the cheek implants and suddenly turned into Japan's version of Steve McQueen/Charles Bronson/Clint Eastwood.  He certainly goes for the "minimalist" muttering-and-moping style of acting (in stark contrast to Mifune's "big" acting) that one needs for the lone wolf (sorry Shun) kind of role.
Anyway, give it a go if you're a fan of sharp suits, sunglasses inside and a slightly less nihilistic variant on the French New Wave crime films.  (But be warned: he uses just about every firearm except a Colt (including James Bond's favored Beretta) and he actually has a perfectly good passport that we see in action.  So the title is purposefully misleading.)