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.

This is just a 50s lame-o Hollywood crime caper with Japanese actors, most of whom can't act. It even has vehicles that spontaneously catch fire BEFORE they fall off the cliff. There is no structure to this movie. After the heist it plays like the writers were making it up as they went along. And the shootouts, goodness they're a bunch of baloney. I've seen more realistic gun battles on old episodes of S.W.A.T. If this were an American movie it would be watchable for camp value only.

Jô Shishido is fresh out of prison and is picked to lead a crew in an armored car robbery. He needs the money for an operation for his sister, so he agrees to take on a tough crew. However, things don't go right, and there is betrayal and a chance for vengeance awaiting him.Although the heist is well performed, I found the sheer violence, from beginning to end to be almost a parody of the form. Shishido starts by beating up his potential crewmates in order to establish... that this is one of the Nikkatsu crime thrillers, I suppose, and those are about tough guys committing crimes with plenty of bloodshed. That it does, but it offers little to the genre but Shishido in his typecast screen role, doing more of the same.... an excess rather than an advance and foreshadowing the logical end point of the dramatic form.

Viewed on DVD. Restoration = ten (10) stars; subtitles = five (5) stars. Director Takumi Furukawa seems bent on breaking the Guinness Word Record for gun shots fired in a single movie! Just about every scene ends in gun fire (and many also start off with it). Intra- and inter-gang warfare provides the back drop. It looks like every available character actor was rounded up to maximize the body count. Paybacks piled atop paybacks leaves no survivors (which provides quite a nice savings to taxpayers footing the bill for incarcerations!). Acting is okay (lead actor is chubby-cheeked Jou Shishido (who under went plastic surgery to inflate his mouth to look tougher, but, at least to me, just makes him appear as an undisciplined trumpet player!)). Cinematography (wide screen, black and white), scene lighting, editing, body makeup, sound dubbing, and score are all very good. Subtitles are pretty much mandatory due to the heavy use of Kansai Ben line readings and contemporary slang. Unfortunately, translations leave much to be desired. They need a good grammatical scrub (perhaps the translator was an intern not proficient in Western dialects?) to reduce their length so as to increase their time on the screen. Good shoot-em-up ganger film. WILLIAM FLANIGAN, PhD.