Cruel Gun Story

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.

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.

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.

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.

(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.