Cruel Gun Story

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.