PASSPORT TO DARKNESS (aka ANKOKU NO RYOKEN, 1959) is a noir-style mystery about a jazz trombonist whose wife, a singer, disappears from the train on which they're embarking for their honeymoon and is soon found murdered in the couple's Tokyo apartment. While the police keep the musician under surveillance, he races around the city frantically pursuing leads on his own in order to identify the possible culprits and the motive for the crime. The whole thing plays like a Cornell Woolrich thriller from the 1940s (think PHANTOM LADY and THE BLACK ANGEL) transplanted to late 1950s Japan. If that idea intrigues you, then you'll find this movie as fascinating as I did. The plot gets increasingly convoluted and the cast of characters keeps growing, but the pace is fast, the direction is sharp and caustic and the film takes bold steps in portraying heroin addiction and a pronounced gay subculture, elements which would not have found their way into a Hollywood movie of this type from the 1940s or '50s. I'm also pretty certain they must have seemed quite provocative in 1959 Japan as well. That the studio, Nikkatsu, allowed director Seijun Suzuki to get away with this subject matter attests to his standing at the studio at the time, although his increasingly experimental approach in later genre exercises would eventually get him into trouble with the bosses.
Any further description of the plot would be superfluous. You need to just let it unfold in front of you as you would a Woolrich novel. I would just add that the location work around Tokyo, plus the visits to centers of nightlife, including the gay bar, is quite extensive and gives an evocative sense of the city in the years just before the massive rebuilding in preparation for the 1964 Summer Olympics. I also like the music in the film, as performed by its jazz musician characters and the murdered girl singer at the heart of the plot, who is seen at the very beginning performing a jazz number called "Honey Sweet" entirely in English. That song comes to play a significant role in the action later on. I wish I knew the name of the actress who plays the singer, but since IMDb doesn't list character names for this film, I can't identify her. Ryoji Hayama, the lead actor who plays the trombonist, is unfamiliar to me, but went on to star in numerous yakuza movies, two of which I have on DVD waiting to be viewed. The only actor in the cast I was familiar with is Masumi Okada, who plays another musician, the best friend of the hero. Okada was a half-European actor whom I've also seen in LATITUDE ZERO and the American TV miniseries, "Shogun." I reviewed one of his later films for IMDb, a musical entitled HIBARI, CHIEMI, IZUMI: SANNIN YOREBA (1964), in which he played a multilingual Eurasian aggressively courting one of the three pop stars headlining the film.
I saw PASSPORT TO DARKNESS in a 35mm print at a Seijun Suzuki retrospective held in November 2015 at the Walter Reade Theater (Film Society of Lincoln Center) in New York. The series was programmed by Tom Vick, author of "Time and Place Are Nonsense: The Films of Seijun Suzuki."
