Kenju zankoku monogatari (Cruel Gun Story) (1964) - Takumi Furukawa



http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1446089/

Fresh out of the slammer, Togawa (Branded to Kill’s rough-and-ready Joe Shishido) has no chance to go straight because he is immediately coerced by a wealthy mob boss into organizing a heist on an armored car carrying racetrack receipts. After assembling a ragtag bunch to carry out the robbery, Togawa learns that all is not what it seems in Takumi Furukawa’s thriller. Cue the double (and triple) crosses!

The year before had been a momentous one: 1963. Seijun Suzuki had finally broken through as Nikkatsu’s supreme B-level stylist with Youth of the Beast, while Shohei Imamura scrambled to the top of level A with his socio-entomological triumph The Insect Woman. Over at Toho, Akira Kurosawa released his final modern-dress masterpiece, High and Low, and in December, Yasujiro Ozu, who’d been making films for Shochiku since 1927, quietly passed away.

By 1964, Yujiro Ishihara had made close to fifty films for Nikkatsu, and had lately been mellowing into the melodrama-heavy “mood action” niche the studio was happy to tailor for him. Akira Kobayashi had risen to a stature almost equal to Ishihara’s, even as the mukokuseki films themselves were beginning to fade. And while the studio’s Diamond Line still shone brightly, increasingly it was the least likely of those mighty guys, Joe Shishido, who began to turn up in one stylistically distinguished “hard action” potboiler after another—regardless of whether the director was a known comic-nihilist aesthete like Suzuki or a little-sung studio workhorse like Buichi Saito, who catered to Shishido’s surreal (and surgically altered) side in master-of-disguises mysteries like Kaito X: The Man Without a Face.

In director Takumi Furukawa, Shishido also seemed to sense a kindred soul, and their 1964 collaboration resulted in one of the hardest-boiled heist flicks Nikkatsu would ever produce: Cruel Gun Story, a seething denunciation of postwar American influence in Japan disguised as a tough-as–1930s Warner Bros. variation on Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing, complete with a carefully designed (and easily fouled) plan to rob millions in horse-racing receipts, a crippled innocent in a wheelchair, and squadrons of Air Force fighter jets screaming overhead. Opening on a close-up of Shishido’s dour countenance, tightly framed behind a mesh of barbed wire, the tale of greed and betrayal that follows—set largely in an abandoned, litter-strewn U.S. Army party town—takes a page from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and a tip from Anton Chekhov: if Shishido finds himself brooding over past injustices next to an oil-fueled heater in the first act, it’s a cinch he’ll be having an even hotter time in old Yamato by the film’s incendiary act 3.

Furukawa’s debut feature had been Season of the Sun (1956), the taiyozoku scorcher that started it all, and he’d make another film with Ishihara before the year was through. But soon, management decided to pair young Yu-chan primarily with directors closer to his own age, and Furukawa, some twenty years the actor’s senior, didn’t fit the bill. (Neither did Suzuki, who never worked with Nikkatsu’s number one star.) Furukawa remained at Nikkatsu for over a decade, working often with the other Diamond Line stars, before following Umetsugu Inoue and Crazed Fruit director Ko Nakahira, in 1967, to Hong Kong’s Shaw Brothers Studio, which was willing to pay handsomely to import higher quality Japanese production standards. Once there, he changed his screen moniker to Tai Kao-mei, and promptly cranked out two glossy, gadget-laden espionage capers in the highest mukokuseki style, The Black Falcon and Kiss and Kill. Shaw’s own top directors quickly began to follow suit. Internationalized in essence and from inception, mukokuseki action, just as its embers were dimming at Nikkatsu, had once again gone global.

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