Cruel Gun Story

Cruel Gun Story (Takami Furukama – 1964) would be totally forgettable except for tough guy Joe Shishido”s cheeks. Shishido was a contract player for Nikkatsu, the Japanese studio most notable for producing a series of stylish film noir pictures in the late fifties and sixties. Shishido was said to have “blandly handsome features.” Distressed by this faint praise, Shishido had his face remodeled via cheek augmentation surgery. A few thought that the surgery made Shishido look “ruggedly handsome,” most were appalled by the results. Shishido looks like a demented chipmunk with his maw stuffed with acorns. His face is grotesque, like something out of a Dick Tracy cartoon – it looks like he’s barely recovered from some severe beating. Shishido plays a con, sprung from prison to helm an armed car robbery. The picture is prosaic and predictable. Shishido, working for a sinister Mr. Big, assembles a crew to undertake the heist – all the ordinary suspects are involved: a lady’s man, psychopath, a brain-damaged ex-pug for “muscle”, etc. The criminals rob the armored car, murdering a bunch of guards in the process. Then, they betray one another over the two cases of yen, 120 million in receipts from a race-track. In the last thirty minutes of the film, the bad guys, who have assembled platoons of accomplices massacre one another – the movie is relentlessly and ridiculously violent. Shishido has agreed to the heist to finance surgery for his crippled sister. But crime doesn’t pay. He gets roasted alive, clutching his sister’s rosary – a baroque effect of the kind that Japanese enjoy (they use Christian imagery for an exotic frisson). The movie has some effective bit players and the setting, an abandoned GI strip near a US Airbase (African-Americans are featured in several shots to signify “GI”– clearly another exotic element to the Japanese audiences) is appropriately seedy and dismal. But the film, despite its numbing level of violence, is unimaginatively shot and, even, a bit dull.