Kenjû zankoku monogatari

CRUEL GUN STORY is very reminiscent of Kubrick's THE KILLING: a group of motley criminals plan to rob a horse race track (or in this case, a truck transporting money from one). They believe this will be an easy pay day, the perfect crime. Unfortunately, human folly and bad luck get in the way.

While this idea has been done before, CRUEL GUN STORY is a great take on the classic tropes with its very human characters and chilly style. The action scenes are thrilling and the undercurrent of weary humanity puts this among the best of late-stage classic noir.

This wonderful box-set from Radiance, World Noir Vol.2 with the German, Black Gravel (1961) and the French, Symphony for a Massacre (1963) were fine but this third one from Japan was not as good. Of course, Joe Shishido is great and all the actors fine but the story is just too simple and predictable. There is a lot of shouting and hitting each other for little reason and much double cross although there are some decent shoot-outs. Shishido was starring the same year with Youth of a Beast (1963) and later with Branded to Kill (1967) both fantastic and it is just a shame that this one just not good enough.

Film 4/5 in the Nikkatsu Noir series, and like Take Aim at the Police Van before it, Cruel Gun Story has a great title.

This one is less noir-ish and more of a straightforward heist film than any of the films in this boxset that came before, and I was perfectly okay with that. Heist movies are always satisfying when they get the basic components right, and all the stages are executed fairly well here- the planning, the heist itself, and then the inevitable fallout and consequences.

There's some good shootouts, and Jo Shishido makes for a good lead, as he always seems to do. I wish the aftermath of the heist had been a little more engaging, or at least on par with the first two chunks of the film, but it still had a decent conclusion overall.

Easy to recommend if you want something like Stanley Kubrick's The Killing, which is another tight and satisfying black & white heist movie that I should maybe revisit some day.

Perennial Nikkatsu Studios hard-case Joe Shishido plays 'Togawa', a recently released con who is convinced by a mob boss to plan and execute an armoured car robbery, targeting 120 million yen in race track proceeds. In a typical narrative trajectory for these types of stories, he assembles his team, plans the heist, does the job, deals with the unforeseen complications, and then is double crossed, leading to a third act of reprisal and vengeance. Togawa is an interesting, ambivalent character: he's initially portrayed in a sympathetic light as the orphaned son of parents murdered by the Chinese at the end of WW2 and loving brother of an invalid sister, yet his role in the heist is to ambush and gun down the two escorting police men in cold blood. In keeping with the film's cold, evocative title ("Cruel Gun Story"), the body count is high as 'Togawa' is forced to deal with treachery within his own team, betrayal by the mob boss who hired him, as well as a corrupt ex-lawyer trying to move up in the criminal ranks. The ending is bleak and grim, but satisfying in a noir way. Well worth watching by fans of crime melodramas.

A gritty Japanese film noir from 1964. Joe Shishido stars as a recently released thief who gets a job from a Yakuza boss to pull off an armored car heist. Accepting the job & picking out his own gang (even testing them by giving them a beating to see if they would hold up under police questioning), the team is set & the crime is pulled off nearly w/o a hitch but then the inevitable double cross comes down (both by the Yakuza & his own gang) but he manages to blast his way to freedom, gaining the aid of a rival Yakuza gang when they kidnap the Capo's son but then the right hand man of the Capo decides to double cross his boss during the exchange (the son's killed) which finds Shishido w/the upper hand (recovering the loot) until they find his hiding spot right before he sets sail to South America. Will Shushido make it to the bitter end? Knowing the genre in which this film resides should give you the answer as the shade wearing anti-hero is always all business from the film's start to finish w/Shushido (who according to Eddie Muller's Noir Alley intro/outro got cheek implants so that he would be taken seriously as a distinctive actor) meting out his own brand of justice to any & everyone.