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.

Takumi Furukawa's movies are really obscure, ranging from noir productions to a 1956 sun tribe film Season of the Sun, one of the prime examples of the genre. In the late '60s, he made two films in Hong Kong under the name Tai Ko Mei. And that's pretty much all the available information on him. Seeing how the director isn't really a known figure, the main reason to watch his film Cruel Gun Story is for the lead actor Joe Shishido - the legendary actor in gangster films who had a cheek implantation surgery to look more suitable to his roles (dafuq was he thinking?). He's the best leading actor in the entire Nikkatsu Noir set, with a cool screen presence. Plotwise, the movie is a racetrack money heist film, so I guess it was inspired by Stanley Kubrick's The Killing. Interestingly enough, both films have incredibly generic titles that could fit every crime movie ever made, with Cruel Gun Story being similar to films like Oshima's Cruel Story of Youth or Imai's Cruel Tales of Bushido. The film is very dark and, well, cruel, with ironic twists of fate, double-crossings at every corner, and ending, that, although predictable, still gets its job done. The flow is ruined by the absurdly stupid twist end coming in at the last minute and some issues I have with the heist plan, but maybe the guys are just bad planners. The film's bleakness kinda comes from the social context, with the crooks' criminal choice is due to them being in a socio-economic post-war gutter, and as such, their hideout is a place ruined by U.S. troops. I guess the economic miracle hadn't yet started being felt at the time of the movie's production.The protagonist is somewhat more honorable than his enemies and has a paralyzed sister to take care of, intending to pay her an operation if the scheme goes well. If mishandled, this plot point could easily become a lazy melodramatic device, but the movie handles it very well and Furukawa gives it another dark little twist; in the sense that although the doctors say no operation can fix the sister's legs, Shishido's character still wants it to be true, in the end, making the film's enormous body count revolve around nothing.This movie has some flaws, particularly the absurd final two minutes, but overall it's the most entertaining film from the set so far, has Joe Shishido, a huge body count and cool noir aesthetics. It's a wonderful example of by-the-books studio filmmaking - short runtime, easy plot, a pointless romance sub-plot, and not a single minute wasted. Perfect for quick entertainment. It doesn't hurt that one of the villains resembles Groucho Marx in his autumn years.

"Cruel Gun Story" stars one of the weirder actors of his era, Jô Shishido. I say weird because Shishido actually paid to have surgery to give him bizarre cheeks--making him appear, somewhat, like a human chipmunk! This apparently made him quite popular in Japanese crime films (I didn't realize that Japanese criminals were cursed with this odd facial characteristic!). I've seen him in quite a few films including: "Branded to Kill", "Youth of the Beast", "Detective bureau 2-3" and "Gate of Flesh" and he is the epitome of Japanese cool.When the story begins, you learn that Shishido's been in prison for killing a man who ran over Sashido's sister. As a result, the sister is wheelchair-bound, so Shishido felt compelled to kill the guy. Now, he's been sprung from prison early--apparently some mob boss wants him lead a team in an armored car robbery. Shishido agrees--as he hopes that the money can pay for some miracle surgery to heal her. Unfortunately, there's more to the plan than Shishido is aware of and perhaps this is NOT a good way to make a fast buck. Can our anti-hero somehow survive this bold caper? I could say more, but it would spoil the film.This is a very taut and exciting crime film thanks to a great plot, good acting and Shishido's character--a nice mixture of coolness, machismo and, in an odd way, honor. Plus, I sure liked the very dark ending--what a finale. Overall, I'd say this is one of the best examples of Japanese noir I have seen and it's well worth seeing--whether or not you are a fan of the genre.

If you came to the movies in the Eclipse Nikkatsu Noir boxset expecting something like Seijun Suzuki, you will be disappointed. There's a reason Seijun Suzuki has a reputation like he has and there's a reason Nikkatsu fretted with every movie he made and eventually fired him. Suzuki saw Nikkatsu's formula for crime potboilers for what it was and reduced it to the casual. He attacked it. He was the bright exception, and a film like Cruel Gun Story is the formula, the beaten path, and now that the Eclipse box set allows us immediate context, Suzuki seems that much more daring. He was eventually blacklisted for his transgressions for a decade and Nikkatsu staved off bankruptcy until the early 70's, so that's how that cruel story goes.This is the heist film where a crew of low-entry criminals get together for a big job, in this case to rob an armoured car carrying racetrack money. If nothing else, at least the plans in these films are usually elaborate enough to be fun to watch them being hatched, carried out in anxiety, and fail with disastrous consequences. Not so in this case. If a non-writer was given 10 minutes and a napkin to write it down, he could have probably come up with something more plausible/intriguing than this: force armoured car with bulletproof windows to detour into dirt road, ambush, fire at the escorting police motorcycles, then hope the driver and escort inside the car will be stupid enough to run out of the safety of their bulletproof vehicle into the open to be killed and conveniently provide the safe key to the robbers. Mercifully it doesn't work that way; yet to have us a believe the robbers would stage a heist and base it on that improbable chance firmly places Cruel Gun Story in Tintin territory.The only interesting aspect of this is that the robbers are forced to take the van to their hideout with the driver and police escort still inside. A gunfight takes place there, there's a lot of gunsmoke and sparks fly, but that semi-interesting set piece is brought to a screeching halt when someone lights dynamite and throws it inside the warehouse. Of course someone picks it up and throws it back out. It's a like a gagman from the 1920's dropped by the studio the day of shooting the scene and improvised something on the spot.Despite what it says on the tin, these are not noir films. The Japanese did a lot of great things in their postwar cinema, but they didn't understand noir. We get a 'crime doesn't pay' finale to be sure, and if you thought Casablanca was too literal in saying the same thing in its own finale, you have to see the protagonist lying dead on a pile of money catching on fire to realize Michael Curtiz was only too subtle by comparison, but that's not what noir is about. Cruel Gun Story is basically a b/w crime flick where Jo Shishido yells and punches people randomly, someone is betrayed and comes back for revenge, yet there's no fatalism and the noir God who indifferently pulls the strings in a cold yawning universe is conspicuously absent.