Cruel Gun Story (拳銃残酷物語) is a pretty straightforward Nokkatsu noir with great photography and Joe Shishido. The film's ending, with its double and triple crosses, works just fine from a plot standpoint, but from an audience standpoint, Cruel Gun Story's end is deeply unsatisfying. It has an American-style moral ending in which everyone has to die, including the innocents who are attempting to help our guilty hero. I dislike endings like this, and it feels like by 1964 we would have been done with this kind of morality. An ending like this completely betrays the melodramatic premise of the rest of the film.
Definitely the one innocent who dies is the bar owner, Takizawa, and possibly Haruhiko is an innocent too. Everybody else was involved with criminal enterprises in some way (Shirai and Keiko), or double crosses somebody (the other two "partners" and the mafia heads). Rie is the only one left.
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