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.
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.