Kenjû zankoku monogatari

Fairly mundane set up, criminal looking to do one last job, with fairly typical characters, but well done and with a Japanese outlook and form. Bleak and dark with some nice action and final act. Worth seeing for old Chipmunk Shishido who plays it cool as usual.

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.

As a heist film this one is a little by-the-numbers, but there is a certain cool and conflicted angst that Joe "the Ace" Shishido brings to the role, and you can certainly do worse. He's a criminal who lives by a moral code and is looking out for his sister who has a disability, a trope akin to the hooker with a heart of gold. Naturally things don't go completely as planned during the robbery, there are betrayals, and big shoot-out scenes, all leading to a wild ending. Not a bad way to spend 87 minutes.

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.

(1964) Cruel Gun Story/ Kenjû zankoku monogatari (In Japanese with English subtitles) CRIME DRAMA/ ACTION

The Japanese equivalent of "The Killing", "Riffifi" and "The Asphalt Jungle" to name a few ...starring Joe Shishido as Togawa experiencing his early release set up by the syndicate, instructs him to rob the Japanese derby, only to find out later that he and his partner were tricked and double crossed. The fourth of five movies of the Nakkatsu Noir Criterion.

I was like, kind of hoping that this Japanese heist equivalent of both American and UK movies was not going to end in the same manner as the other heist movies, if one were to watch enough of them made during that era may define it as cliche at this point.